24 days in to this year’s Jack Kirby Tribute Month (curated by Howard Simpson), and the theme all this month has been the Fantastic Four and related characters. Today’s prompt is the Mad Thinker!
The Mad Thinker first shows up in FF #15. He has an amazing ability (assisted by computers) to predict virtually every angle, all the odds, and to work them in his favor when putting together his plans. In his first appearance, he had the FF basically beaten, but for one small detail he could not have foreseen (…and no, I’m not going to tell you what it is, if you haven’t read that story!).
The Thinker shows up six times during Jack and Stan’s regular run of the FF, plus in three Annuals.
Over the course of his appearances in the book, like other Kirby characters, he underwent some changes. He started off with his hair only slightly longish for the day in his first appearance (1963), but it got longer, wilder and bushier by the time of his last appearance during Jack and Stan’s FF run.
In some ways, the Thinker’s look kind of plays against the standard visual you’d expect when you think of a “mad scientist” type of character. Instead of some skinny, long-faced balding type, the Thinker is more burly and hirsute, prone to wearing coveralls blue collar worker style. However, there was a thing you heard sometimes back then about academics being called “longhairs.”
I kind of wonder what Kirby had in mind, whether there was some thought of the Thinker tying in somehow as originally being from behind the Iron Curtain? His visual fits in pretty well with other Marvel characters of the time who they connected more directly to that as part of their back story. Like the Red Ghost.
And as a bonus, I also threw in the Thinker’s Awesome Android. Though it’s really kind of a simple design, the visual has always grabbed me, from the moment I first came across it back when I was a kid. Something about that faceless strangely-shaped head, and his malleability/adaptability.
That’s it for these guys. Come by and see who shows up next tomorrow!
One of my favorite story arcs is from FF #68 to 71. While the original android looked strange and different, the powerhouse android to me was the most formidable. Joe Sinnott, in his introduction to the FF Masterworks, acknowledged that his favorite FF cover was issue 69. One of the issues in that story arc. Your illustration brings back some fond memories!
That’s kind of the benefit on my end too of doing this stuff: being forced to go back and remember all these great characters, this great material. While the other android is also cool, I just went with the original one, which sort of burned itself into my brain the first time I saw it. It was both really cool, and a little weird and lightly disturbing (because of that head!). But yeah; there’s no scarcity of cool characters, tech, or ideas in that initial FF run.
The Thinker was the original what we now refer to as a “tech bro” in so many ways. In fact Jack was highlighting the dangers of that brood for many years. Dropping the droid in the art was a great idea. It really accentuates his querical expression. Good one.
Glad you like this. The Thinker doesn’t really have the casual way about him of a Tech Bro (the “bro” part of the equation), but he does have that sort of blinkered pursuit of knowledge as part of his character.
An even better example of that might be Jack’s later character, Metron of the New Gods. Unlike most of the characters in that saga, Metron was hard to categorize as either good or evil, because he was willing to do whatever he had to in his thirst for more and more knowledge. He’s even shown at one point in a flashback negotiating with Darkseid, in order to get what he needed to continue his pursuits.