I'm with Pacrappa. Obviously there are and always will be exceptions when dealing with such large swaths of artists working in something as broad as eras (for example All-Star Superman and more recently Mike Allred and Dan Slott's Silver Surfer are some of the best work the medium has ever produced), but by and large anything Marvel or DC put out after around 1985 pales in comparison to what came before. But I think this is entirely a function of the majority of consumers of pop media disdaining the picaresque model more than anything, and it's certainly not limited to comics, look at Star Trek for example.
I have a friend who had a comics shop who once told me "As much as everyone wants to claim to want one-shots, the fact is they do them and they don't sell. Look at Dini's run on Detective Comics...". He 's more in touch with what people want then I am. But for me, it seems like a single issue needs to offer at least some satisfaction on its own. When you compare a single issue of Colan's Dr. Strange with Infinity Gauntlet Dr. Strange, or pretty much any Gold Key comic (which all seem to be such dense events as to take multiple sessions to read) or an issue of Savage Sword of Conan you realize why there's no good reason not to tell the people who swindled Jack Kirby to eat a dick with their 52 Infinite Civil Wars shit.
Several years ago I was at a cafe where they had comics strewn amongst the reading material, and I read an issue of X-men maybe a hundred or two issues removed from the last one I read. Almost two decades later they're still referring to Dark Phoenix and I realized I haven't missed out on anything.
Last edited by Vasteel; 09 Jun 2016 at 04:19 AM.
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