Jack Kirby – a Fantasy Prone Personality?

If you research Jack Kirby then you’ll eventually read about his, to many, uncanny ability to draw a page without blocking it out first. He seemed to start at the top left corner and work his way across and down till the page was filled. Try to find Carmine Infantano’s world-weary description of this process if you can, together with his declaration that “Never in my life could I do this, never”. This next is Roy Thomas, quoted in The Jack Kirby Collector, issue 18 January 1998, “The thing about Jack is, he had seen the thing already in his mind before he drew it. To him, drawing was almost like photographing the strange, realistic world that he saw inside, which was his genius, his talent”.

So, we got this guy Kirby, and everyone agrees he draws like a genius of some kind but no-one can understand how it was, what gift it was that he had, could make him do it.

Me neither.

Then, in a book about X-Philey-type stuff called “The New Unofficial X-Files Companion Volume Two” by N. E. Genge, in a review/commentary on the X-Files Episode called “Pusher”, I read the following about Fantasy Prone Personalities; “FPPs… extraordinary achievers… have unusually acute memories… an ability to manipulate mental images that is in itself a form of genius… capable of using mental imagery in the same fashion that an architect uses models… Frank Lloyd Wright, one such FPP, could build cathedrals in his mind before ever setting pen to paper to record the images he had created… sculptors who ‘chip away everything that isn’t whale’ to reveal the whale they see in a block of stone are also likely to be Fantasy Prone Personalities”.

Phew! Sound like anyone we know? There was more but I’m probably breaking enough copyrights to hang me for one day.

Anyhoo, I heard all over that no-one could figure out how Kirby did what he did. I reckon there’s the answer for you. I never read this anywhere else but quite possibly no-one else has stumbled over it. So, there you go. Jack Kirby, FPP. Fits, doesn’t it? That’s my work here done for the day.

But wait – it’s around a year later now and I just found something else very relevant. I’m reading Will Eisner’s book Shop Talk in which he interviews, among other luminaries, Kirby. They talk about being young in the ghetto, and Jack says,”… it gave me a fierce drive to get out of it. It made me so fearful of it that, in an immature way, I fantasized a dream world more realistic than the reality around me”.

There you have it, I reckon. There’s the source of the anger that drove Jack, and an articulate fantasist (albeit it a very moral one) is what it drove him to be.

BB