But Stan Lee's writing, which used to flow through me and I thought was exciting, invigorating, stylish, any number of things.. But today I cannot read a single balloon of it. And yet, the staging, the drawing, the drama, the natural intellect of Kirby really hasn't diminished, in my perception.. Even though these are impossible heroes in blue tights. You look past that nonsense.. There's a reason for the extraction and the abstraction and the process of thought. Kirby still holds up! That fucking wonderful guy still holds up. (BWS from 1996 interview in TCJ)
To have this disparity is somewhat baffling, but one possible reason might be that the zeitgeist - the thing that was happening and flowing in the world of the 60s - is no longer there. Lee, for all his slickness, could follow the zeitgeist, and the mix between social realism and fantasy was adroitly handled.
The fact that BWS is so unflattering about most of the latter mainstream artists might have something to do with the lack of flow of the 60s zeitgeist which Kirby's work was immersed in. The rebellion against the conventions of authoritarianism that lead to war and dehumanisation.
Kirby's early 70s News Gods and particularly Forever People embellished these idealisms of spiritual quality over numbers and war - Big Bear, Beautiful Dreamer. When the zeitgeist fades, disillusion and outright depression follow. In a way, the super-science that Kirby depicts is completely the opposite of what in fact seems to develop.Instead of spiritual gadgets like the Mother Box that combines human energies in harmonies, we get humans that more and more resemble numbers, or algorithms.
One way to look at it is, if the universe is harmonic - see prev - then math is a mere subset of this. Harmonies are origins for the analytic breakdown into numbers and logic.
However, the origin of modern society is the exact opposite. The origin is inductive reason, which is the pure logic of light and perspective. The origin of our societies is therefore not the origin of an imaginative universe, and imaginative artists are caught on the horns of that dilemma.
The 60s was an era of musical and spiritual rebellion that the comics - particularly Marvel, natch - rode. After all, it's quite difficult for an artist to create something out of whole cloth in a spiritual vacuum.
The BWS disdain for the Jim Lee/Leifeld types may have something to do with the times we live in. It's very hard to go against the flow, and once the future-parables of Robert Heinlein have been proven "false" all one can do is sing the same song over and over.
Paul Kantner, as a fan of Heinlein, did this his entire career! Not only are our societies numerical, but the mirror of illusions - electromagnetism - harbours the profane dragon of corrupt rhythms (prev.) The more we advance into a numerical future, the more profanity we encounter in the expressive algorithm, "clean meat", the mainstream campaign against animal-husbandry and pelts and fertilizing pasture.
The reason is that the numerical illusion professes to be sterile while harboring rhythmic profanities. The rhythms of nature cannot be denied and are simply corrupted into profane areas.
This future is like a great exercise in rubbish-removal, as opposed to the fertile Elysium that Man has left. For the same reason, Silicon Valley resembles a giant, pondering ass. If this is the background against which mainstream comics are promulgating future fantasies, it's not surprising they come across as ridiculous.
It's not simply that Kirby's vision (Apollonian) has become attenuated to the nth degree, it's that his vision in the 60s didn't jar with the reality.
It's all very well to dis Smith for being depressive, it's quite possible the reasons are not limited to the comics genre, but have something to do with the increasing disparity between future fantasy and future reality.
Origins are everything - not just in comics - and if Kirby is one origin, so is Newton's light-box and the corrupt rhythms it unleashed.
The creative mind is fertile and needs a fertile world. This world has visceral downsides and dark corners and is rough and raw. It's not "kind to animals" in the Carrie Symonds mode, but is strong, virile, feminine and on the side of the liberty of physical reality as opposed to the authority of humans as numbers.
The Big Tech Dragon is the future of number devoid of harmony, a story told by sterile minds inside a sterile illusion.