>>33534I'm only three years late to this post so allow me to shed some timely light because I thought this was an interesting question that I'm somewhat prepared to give an answer to. The more complex answer than just "psychedelics" is that 50s-70s comics artists were part of a much broader cultural shift that involved modernist art trends seeping into popular culture. Artists who reached their artistic maturation in this period were studying art in a world where cubism, futurism, abstractionism, etc. were no longer controversial new waves but well-established languages, and the new guys weren't just going on to become gallery painters but a lot of them became designers, commercial illustrators, etc. And then pop art did a lot to accelerate this shift. Those guys weren't necessarily the ones who became comic artists, but they helped diffuse these ideas into the mainstream. And this was also happening at a time where nuclear physics, computers, SETI, the space race, etc. created a real "wonders of science" zeitgeist that also begged for new ways to visualize it in a way that properly conveyed its power, strangeness and excitement. I think this is what makes Kirby a truly epochal artist: he more than the writers he worked with turned superhero comics into a reflection of this zeitgeist.
I'll also note that comic artists have always been on the lookout for formal ways to communicate movement and power on the page instead of just drawing things as they would "seem". For a long time this was the influence of cinema, and before that it was Art Nouveau. So the necessary pull towards "weird" non-literal visually challenging art was always part of the medium.
All of this
harmonizes very well with psychedelic culture and in Ditko's case there's the explicit influence of mysticism and such as well, but it's more of a shared heritage that was affecting everything, rather than direct influence of LSD. This is why the intuition that something must have been "in the water" was partly correct and the answers saying "they just imagined it duh" are kind of misleading. But I don't think any of the important 60s Marvel artists took psychedelics or cared about counterculture. Stan did later make an infamous attempt to cash in on underground comix, and the people who came after were a lot more hip to new trends and probably brought in some deliberate influence from psy
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