Daily Inspiration Quote by Jack Kirby

“Perfectionists are their own devils” lands like a bruised little prayer from someone who spent his life turning deadlines into mythology. Jack Kirby wasn’t just any cartoonist; he was the engine room of American comics, a working-class imagination asked to manufacture wonder on command. In that light, the line isn’t a self-help aphorism. It’s shop-floor theology.

Kirby frames perfectionism as self-inflicted torment, not noble rigor. The devil here isn’t a flamboyant external villain; it’s the voice that keeps moving the finish line, the private heckler that calls every panel “not quite there” while the printer waits. That inversion matters. Most artists are taught to fear critics, editors, the market. Kirby suggests the most dangerous antagonist is internal: the demand to be flawless becomes a moralizing force, punishing the maker for being human, for working, for finishing.

There’s also a sly edge in the plural. “Perfectionists” are a type, almost a cautionary species, and Kirby knew the breed in a medium obsessed with craft minutiae and fan scrutiny. Comics are collaborative, iterative, made under constraint; treating them like marble sculpture is a recipe for misery and paralysis. Kirby’s own career, full of speed, invention, and occasionally rough-hewn execution, argues for momentum over immaculate polish.

Subtext: the real virtue is production, not purity. Make the thing, ship the thing, live to draw another day. Perfectionism doesn’t protect art; it devours the artist.