Yeah I also loved Vertigo and specifically Hellblazer and Shade, The Changing Man. Shade was just so... fucking weird. But it made a certain sense, kind of, in the end. Hellblazer was classic. Sandman also good but I find Gaiman is a kind of love or hate type of writer. I started reading The Boys after reading a post on these forums about it, it is an excellent book and I am so glad that they are getting things worked out so publication can continue.
The reason I could never get into mainstream comics is because they are just plain badly written. For instance X-men, they have this amazing, awesome storyline full of badassness (the coming human/mutant war, Sentinels, all that shit) and they dick around with bullshit shock or side stories for literally HUNDREDS of issues. When they aren't completing avoiding the part of the story that makes it just ungodly cool, they are hopelessly convoluting it, introducing so many alternate timelines that even the writers can't keep up, characters freely traveling in time, it's just so bad. They did the same thing with Spiderman. I want to see the continuation of the Carnage storyline but first I have to wade through 50 issues of Spiderman fighting legendary enemies like The Scorpion. What the shit is that? Too many mainstream comics stand on their own, you take the issues and read them out of order and it makes no difference. The exception would be introduction of new characters, deaths, or storyline arcs. The whole damn comic series should be a story arc, that should not be the exception. The better written comics (imo) follow a clear storyline throughout the series, and while there are different arcs, they underlying story is there and is affected by these events. Nothing happens in a vaccuum, unlike many more mainstream comics. Probably a holdover from older days of comics, where there was no real story other than that issue, pick up issue 5 or 50 of Captain America and he's still holding strong, fighting Nazis. As long as the major publishers, ie Marvel and DC, refuse to treat it as an art form, it will not be an art form. At least it won't be what it could be. Imagine if you cleaned up X-Men the kind of awesome that comic could be. But instead, try and name the current lineup of the X-Men
I'd say Stan Lee probably cries at night, but if he does, it's on a giant bed of money. So probably not. The only hope is for more and more independant studios to come into actual competition with the numbers that Marvel and DC are putting out, and do that by putting out a quality product, as much as I like Garth, not by shocking the fuck out of the audience. I don't know much about the modern state of the industry but back in the late 90s it was basically 90% Marvel dominated, I'm sure it hasn't changed so much.
