So in the case of John Buscema, he could certainly draw the human figure finer than Jack Kirby but there was just no valid intensity to what he was doing. It was just pap. And now, just recently I heard that Buscema has retired. It took me a few seconds to understand that ... How does an “artist” retire? One turns sixty-five years of age and one says to the wife ‘Well, dear, time to hang up the ol’ pencil sharpener. My time is done.” How can a real artist retire from being an artist? I understand John Romita retiring because he was the art director at Marvel: It’s a job you do and you get to a certain age and you leave that job and go fishing or something. But Buscema is an alleged artist and you can’t retire from art. So maybe John is retiring from drawing comics, is that it? Then, if that’s the case, John’s comics weren’t art. Is John now going to pursue “real art” in his latter life? Does John confuse painting at an easel with brushes and oils with the act of creating art? Buscema has been turning out comic books for 30 or more years ... Why didn’t he make them art? Look at his work, even the Silver Surfer books that were among his most facile and pretty, and you won’t find art; you’ll find a journeyman talent wasted on a field that prefers his kind to my kind.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I never saw Jimi Hendrix play, I never saw Jack Kirby draw, and these are two great losses — but I would have loved to have been near Jack Kirby physically. Not if he was doing a convention drawing, as in “Oh Jack, do me a drawing!,” but at the real times when he was really creating I’d love to have been present when he invented the Silver Surfer and when he created Galactus. He’s saying, “OK, I’m going to have this big guy who goes around eating planets.”

GROTH: Yeah, just watch him compose pages.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, and feel... I’d literally be a fly on the wall because I know he was supposed to be a very outgoing man, but I doubt very much that when he was on that level of creativity, that people were around him, or could watch him. It had to happen in private. It’s too fucking energetic. It’s too... It’s close to genius is what it is. Inside our field, it’s as close as we’re going to get for a bloody long time it seems. And I would love to have just been able to suck in, feel the energy, the spirit coming out of him. God, talk about being bathed by God’s light or something. This is back to what you were saying about the palpable and the non-palpable when it comes to art — I as a person wouldn’t have been able to understand and translate his power, because it’s entirely his own meta-energy. But it’s like you don’t have to understand what the sun is and how it works in order to get suntanned. I would have liked to have gotten a slight brush, metaphorically, of the heat that must have come out of Jack Kirby when his mind was really, really roaring. And to think he could translate it onto paper, with a stubby bleedin’ pencil to me is just one of the all-time gases of this world. And we are very lucky that we were around and at an impressionable age when that stuff was coming out.

Boy, if you ever want to read two guys patting themselves on the back until they're sore for how smart and profound and insightful they are, you couldn't do a ton better than this BWS interview by Gary Groth. I found this amusing --



Uh, John's drawn more than 40 or 50 comics in his life. He probably worked 12 hour days, six days a week. That's what he's retiring from, LOL.

If Barry Smith put in that kind of time, I'd sure love to see the fruits of that labor.

http://www.tcj.com/the-barry-windsor-smith-interview/