If you are going to be fair shaxper then you need to compare similar frames from the comics by the same pencil/ink (inking changes the look a lot if by brush or pen) team. Full pencils versus breakdown? Size of drawing paper also went through changes. Same size, same type of emphasis/action/intent. The 1st frame is meant to focus upon the fight/punch between 2 "monsters" of enormous strength with no distractions in the background. An "empty" frame without lines to take away from the power of the scene. The 2nd frame is a larger one, 10 years later meaning to emphasize the animals grandeur in human form. Different kind of intentions and times, as Kirby's style would have still been changing/growing/developing as he sought new ways to convey the story he "saw" in his mind. 

Also, Kirby was cranking out a comic a week where many where only doing one a month.  Kirby himself was always streamlining his pencils and I can bet his 1st day pencils might look a bit different from his last days pencils? Where others might labor out of love or keep changing a page or frame, Kirby was more likely to lay out a page and draw it and be done with it and moving forward to the next page and never looking back or rethinking what he had just drawn. Until the 70's comic books were meant for children's entertainment and enjoyment with more emphasis upon filling the pages and getting the job done. The 70's saw the "fans" becoming the new artists based upon what had come before and attempting to try and "improve" upon or outdoing the past.

I believe you are on the right track Shax. Where before the 60's comic books were "disposable" and had been asked for during WWII in paper drives due to shortages by the 60's and onward suddenly kids and teens and adults were actually "holding on" to issues they bought and reading again. Some of that may have come about from Marvel creating a "continuity" where past stories affected future stories where as before then, almost every comic ever printed was considered a "one and one" style of comic and all the publishers cared about was the next issue/sale and NOT worrying over the last issue being collected or saved or resold.  

Certainly the changing world of printing and paper consistency would be a logical part of the equation. I look at how crudely printed Charlton comics were in comparison to Marvel/DC at the time.

It's a generational thing, specifically the generation-and-a-half of comic book artists whose careers began in the late '30s or early '40s and extended into the '70s, '80s, and beyond. The arcs of their careers reflect the times in which they were lived.

A lot of Golden Age art was, to be blunt, hackwork because the industry at that time saw comic art as a product to be cranked out at as low a price per unit as possible. Dell, DC, and a handful of others either maintained an in-house bullpen or dealt directly with freelancers but most publishers sub-contracted their lines to packaging services like Eisner-Iger, Funnies, Inc, and Harry "A" Chesler, all of them claiming a percentage of the artist's page rate. There was no incentive for an artist to take his or her time, not if they wanted to eat that week. There was no incentive to work at what they were doing, ro get better at it, let alone worry about the aesthetics of the lookalike crime, western, romance, jungle, war, detective, funny animal, sci fi, and teen humor strips that were the bread-and-butter of scores of journeyman artists no one's ever heard of because they never drew a super-hero. The talents we remember and revere today--Barks, Kirby, Eisner, Montana, Kurtzman, Kelly, Stanley, Biro--were the rare few who understood their chosen medium on an instinctual level *and* could deliver material worth reading under deadline pressures that would put some of today's prima donnas in the hospital.

Kefauver, Wertham, and the advent of television had changed the landscape of the comics industry by the dawn of the Silver Age. Deadlines were still inexorable, but page rates had gone up sufficiently that you could support your family in the middle class lifestyle that was then supposedly the American ideal if you could produce two pages of pencils a day *every* day. Vets like Kirby, Swan, Everett, Ditko, Kubert, Heck, Sparling, Toth, Infantino, Wood, Spiegle, Buscema, Colan, Manning, Romita, Andru, Severin, and Cardy could and did maintain that pace and developed his own distinctive style in the process. Some of the most highly regarded Silver Age artists were learning on the job in the Golden Age. The early work of artists like Kubert, Irv Novick, Russ Heath, Infantino, Gil Kane, even Kurtzman is amateurish, even crude, as you would expect of artists fresh out of and occasionally still in high school (Heath sold his first art job to Fiction House at 14 via the Roche & Iger studio.) Most of them continued to get work into the Bronze Age. A few ageless wonders like Kubert and Sam Glanzman were still producing brilliant, relevant work in the Twenty-First Century, but most of their contemporaries stopped growing as artists and either settled into a comfortable stylistic rut, got lazy and simplified their styles to the point of caricature, or continued to draw after addiction, illness, or age had dulled their talent.

So, yeah: generational thing.

Cei-U!
Did I answer your question? Was there a question?

If you're judging from the original art or at least the original editions of early Marvel fair enough; inkers like Paul Reinman and others were definitely the far side of best quality... but if you're going by later reprint editions you are getting sometimes crap re-drawings, or scans from the first editions with the color removed which loses a lot of detail from even the cheapo newsprint printing! Also you might be getting something made from a small photostat from the period with the much larger original artwork long gone (dispersed or destroyed), or even a photostat that has grease pencil marks for the printer on it as a guide that someone then has had to white out. Also where comics that cared about their quality used to use metal plates for printing there were cheaper materials like plastic, and I've heard even cardboard, used by cheaper publishers. Marvel in the late '50s and early '60s was pretty close to the bottom. I have had a few very early '60s Marvel to judge from, '59-mid '63 monster and heroes, and they did seem to be using printing and paper that was very cheap, like Charlton, perhaps even presses formerly employed for cereal boxes. I think by the late 1963 issues they were looking better so possibly better plates being made, and then they finally got in at the big Sparta Illinois presses somewhere in the mid '60s, which I seem to remember them having to sue to be able to? Maybe someone else here knows a lot more about that?

Though I don't really agree with the premise either, it does seem as if Ditko (who I'm limiting my comments to simply because he's the only Marvel artist whose work I feel just qualified enough to discuss) benefited from a tremendous learning curve that shouldn't really have been there.  As already noted, it's not as if he was a novice artist when he started on Spider-Man and yet he goes from being a great artist to a legendary one over the span of what, about a couple dozen or so issues perhaps?  As for why, I'd guess there are a few things at play:

1.  For all the credit Stan Lee doesn't get for what he contributed to Marvel from some quarters - ie. the idea that he merely dialogued while Kirby and Ditko scripted, pencilled, planned, and did everything else from Day One - it should be remembered that Lee likely didn't hand control over to Kirby and Ditko until he was confident that Marvel had a product that could succeed without his input.  I don't know when exactly Lee reached this point of comfort whereby he felt that The Fantastic Four could get by with his "some issues I'll simply say to Jack 'The Fantastic Four fights Dr Doom this issue' and he does the rest" approach but I wonder if that upswing in the work of his artists corelates with Kirby, Ditko, et al being allowed to let loose.  "Here's a script with details about how I want everything to look, what I want to happen from page to page/panel to panel/etc" might produce artwork that doesn't look as exciting as "Here are a stack of blank pages - go crazy" will.  Now, I know just enough about how The Marvel Method worked to know that it's extremely doubtful that Lee was ever handing out scripts with "panel to panel/page to page" demands, but I think there might be something to Ditko's decision to no longer speak to Lee which emboldened the artist.

2.  POP art.  Much as I hate to give credit to Liechtenstein, the idea that comic art had artistic merit and wasn't simply disposable trash, might have encouraged a lot of artists to experiment in ways they hadn't before when Warhol, Liechtenstein, etc. hit it big.  I'm going to say something here that will completely diminish whatever (if any) respect some people here might have had for me before but... I don't really care for Jack Kirby's work though I do recognize that perhaps no one else in comics had his imaginative scope and storytelling ability - his designs, the way he could "draw 100 different alien ships and each one looked as if they came from its own unique universe" (sorry, I can't remember who I'm paraphrasing here but it's a great and apt quote), and the way his characters actually moved from panel to panel, are extraordinary products of a brilliant mind, BUT - if taken in isolation, say a single panel or even cover, his work doesn't really move me.  I'd frame and hang a Ditko Spider-Man on my wall, but not a Kirby Avengers/Fantastic Four/or whatever.  I wonder if POP art made artists think differently about their work.  Look at those incredible giant splash pages Ditko did in the first Spider-Man Annual with The Sinister six - here is an artist who understood that some readers wouldn't move in lock step time with the story - they would spend time poring over the details of a single panel.  Of course, I'm completely setting myself up for someone to post any number of those beautiful Simon and Kirby two-page splashes from early Captain America to counter my "I wouldn't hang a Kirby on my wall" statement, but, I don't know, I don't see really see a lot of that in early Silver Age Marvel from Kirby and it's only when he's working with Simon that his work really shines in my opinion.

3.  Maybe there was a learning curve after all.  Did Ditko have a lot of experience drawing superheroes before he took on Spider-Man?  I know he did Captain Atom, but wasn't the majority of his work horror stuff?  Perhaps 14 issues of "torn from the pages of real life!" Amazing Fantasy material (and Tales of Suspense and Strange Tales and...) got him used to drawing average looking, average built people in such a way that he had to get used to "muscular guy swinging somersaulting across the sky" stuff before he got in the swing of things himself in the same way that an artist who has spent five/ten years drawing say, Sherlock Holmes can't make an immediate leap to Superman or whoever.

To be honest, I'm just throwing these ideas out there in the hopes that someone out there with actual knowledge might comment on or even correct me on (honestly, I don't mind being told I'm way off base here if it means I get to learn something new).

That assessment could lead to two conclusions: one, that a leaning or "mission" to tell stories through symbolism...implication of a meaning, rather than the direct action associated with most superhero comics gave Ditko a break from the criticism one would reserve for Kirby. Or two, Ditko's work is not "protected", as being an non-traditional superhero artist, Ditko can be compared to the artists who were simply better trained or (in theory) more talented, and effectively handled both adventure and the superhero genres, such as Wood, Severin, or Everett, leading to the conclusion that rather than the wildly broad brush painting an entire era as suffering from allegedly "primitive" art, it was only certain artists who had a problem, or needed to make radical changes to their work as superhero art evolved, or took on other influences some had already employed (e.g., realism).



..and that's the central point: the idea of "most Golden & Silver age artwork" appearing "primitive" is false, as there's just too many examples of great art of the period in question (as in the examples I posted) that were already stellar at the time they were created, and stand the test of time (by any critical measure, or historical reference) sans the asterisk that they suffer from some period-specific weight of being insufficient.