Well, I'm becoming more and more a pre-code (and pre Silver Age fan) but other than that I can agree to disagree.

And I am totally a fan of, say, the early '80s X-men, I just don't get as much out of it as I do stuff written by older dudes with more life experience. (And I'm also a ways outside the adolescent target audience for that stuff, too. Just because it doesn't 100% work for me as an adult doesn't mean it wasn't the perfect book for the 16 year olds it was really trying to reach.)

Yeah, that was a little harsh.  I think "soap-operatic" is fair, but the daytime soap opera stuff was (fittingly!) overrought and poor phrasing on my part.  I'll agree that he did have a really good (possibly un-prededently good!) sense of relationship dynamics in his cast.  

And I generally quite *enjoy* the first 100 or so issues of the Claremont X-men, despite the fact that it is so, so, so far away from the comics I generally enjoy.  Basically I think the tone is repetetive and boring.  Claremont has two settings "Overwrought emotional intensity turned up to 11" or"kinda cute."   Conversely Stan could always deftly mix humor (like actual funny humor) and pathos at the same time, on the same page, in the same panel which makes his stuff far more readable to me.

Buuuut the Dark Phoenix Saga (especially) is so deftly executed and effectively paced that I can't help but enjoy it.  And the level of craft was good-to-great for years.

Although... I never really got much depth from Claremont's work -  It was ALL ABOUT characterization, to the point that there really wasn't any *room* for theme.  He'd try a God Loves/Man Kills type story occasionally but that never went much deeper than PREJUDICE IS BAD.. and it really became about how events affected the characters more than the theme.  

(Although I'd agree that Stan's stuff never had any *more* thematic depth than Claremont's.  Kirby solo, sure, absolutely -  but Lee and Kirby ... yeah, nuh-uh.)  

Side-note:  This was why Grant Morrison's X-men stuff was so revelatory to me.   It was actually *about* something (the sociological integration of minority culture into the mainstream) and for all it's hiccups in writing and art it kept on theme pretty well... Until the last arc which I don't even understand.   

Now a lot of this is just personal taste  -  I do think Claremont's X-Men (what I've read!) is really a quite good run of comics.  And I'm basically a formalist as a reader -  I'm a lot more interested in theme and tone (particularly divergence of tone) and structure than character, so for me to even call a run of books that are laser-focused on characterization above all else "good" is saying something.  

ALSO:  I am working up a piece on Stan Lee as post-modern pop-art genius in the "Making Enemies" thread.  But I'm not quite there yet.  I really think Stan is under-rated as a writer and not only do most fans not quite get how good he was... I've never seen evidence that any writers after, say, 1975 or so have figured out how to use his bag of tricks.