Luckily we have a mechanism for resolving the nagging existence of "bad ideas" and seemingly out-of-continuity stories --the concept of the multiverse. Who's to say that the whiz kid stories did not take place on an alternate Earth-TRS80?
Speaking of Kirby, TELLE, a while ago we had a conversation about writer artists and I made a pretty darn bold statement, which was that without a writer to guide pacing, Kirby's art got "lazier and more simplified." You called me on this, and I wasn't certain what to say, as something like the complexity and business of art is a subjective choice. Perhaps one possible way of determining whether Kirby's art is "busier" come FOURTH WORLD is by panel count than when he was working with a writer.
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Perhaps I'm working from the premise that brevity is better, and the less brevity, the less impressive the art is. And further, the function of art in a comic is to advanced the story and not for its own sake. Perhaps you don't share this belief. However, that's the criteria I judged Kirby by.
re: Kirby
2 of the great themes of superhero comics are escape and transformation, and no one embodies these ideas better than Jack Kirby. Kirby doesn't just work through these grand narratives in terms of plot and character but through his drawing --the foundation of comics as a visual narrative art. To tell you the truth, these days I'm less concerned with the writerly, literary mechanics of the story at hand than I am with the texture and weight of the art and how it is balanced with hand-lettered text (also art). So whether Kirby's cartooning advances the nominal plot or character, it still tells a story. And what I usually take away from his comics has to do with the visual --although many times it is a perfect combination of words and pictures: I find myself recalling the sequence from Jimmy Olsen where the Guardian is introduced as a sort of mantra during times of personal crisis ("I am strong --let me out! I sense trouble! My mission is to defend --to protect! You face disaster!"). One of the most beautiful sequences in any art form.
I realize that in the service of a commercial dramatic medium, intended largely for children and teenagers, with fairly rigid requirements in terms of closure and clarity, Kirby can seem self-indulgent and even narratively illogical (I might even say charmingly clueless --although his pictures are never confusing). And in no one does that behaviour seem more inexcusable than in Kirby, an experienced veteran and businessman who ran his own production shop and was a mentor and inspiration to many other artists. However, it seems that more is going on in later-period Kirby than a slow drift into lazy self-indulgence, although he was getting older.
In the first place, Kirby is working on a different scale and with a more long-term plan, at least in the New Gods stuff: his stories and art are spread out. Secondly, I like to see his cartooning as operating metaphorically to embody the themes I mentioned above, consciously or not. Many of Kirby's characters are encased or imprisoned in some way. Their costumes and situations are awkward shells from which they struggle to escape, lumbering about Frankenstein-monster-style, eyes bugging out. More and more in his cartooning, regular panel size and pacing reflect these concerns.
Third, I think that despite the epic scope of much of his later work, Kirby was exercising a lighter touch --more humour, more goofiness, less concern with genre conventions. His ideas about the meaning of his work, his audience and the nature of the medium seem to have changed quite a bit. Also, in many ways he seems to be operating almost as a folk artist, channelling the bric-a-brac of pop culture through his work, all the while embracing a more overtly science-fictional world view (without strict genre trappings) of an incrementally transformative humanity, entusiastically heralding "The World that is Coming!"
That being said, there are some later examples (in his 70s Captain America, say) where his plotting seems tighter, and the art more servile!
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