I miss when super-hero comic series could actually tell their own stories in peace without continual interruptions from sprawling multi-title "events" and unwanted editorially-mandated crossovers.
I completely agree. In my opinion, comics work best when taking advantage of the serialized format. As others have noted, Chris Claremont's Uncanny X-Men run really perfected the form, with stories being mostly self-contained and still progressing the overall story arcs (I believe Joss Whedon has mentioned Claremont as an inspiration for how the plots worked on Buffy) in a soap-like fashion. It's no accident that Jay Edidin and Miles Stokes of the X-plain the X-Men podcast describe X-Men as "comics' greatest superhero soap opera".
But now, you both have stories being decompressed to the point where anything worthwhile takes three to six issues to do, and then you have invasive mega-events once per year where another six issues get spent on the event plus cleanup. There's no room for the comic's
own plot. You also have creative teams with shorter tenures, and shorter runs overall of the comics. So you have a new book, where someone decides there needs to be a team to do A Thing, and recruits some characters to do That Thing. Then they go do A Thing, have some interactions, and then an Event happens. After that, there's the aftermath of the Event, they go on to do a variant of That Thing, and then the book gets canceled.
For example, I've seen a lot of praise for the Krakoa era. But while I acknowledge that it was a fairly brave shake-up of the status quo, and that most of the stuff is done in a competent way, it doesn't speak to me. If I had to put my finger on why, I'd say it's the increasing task force-ification of the X-teams. This is not a new thing in the Krakoa era (I don't know if it was brought in by Morrison or if it was there earlier), but it feels more artificial there. It used to be that the X-Men were a "found family" super-team, where the soap opera shenanigans were as important as the punching. But now, they are (or were – I'm still a bit behind on the Krakoa stuff, but I understand things kind of ended, and did so badly)
elected by the population of Krakoa to be the Big Damn Heroes representing them in the larger world. You also have Excalibur being a hand-picked team to deal with magic and Otherworld, instead of survivors who believe the X-Men are dead and are now joining up with Captain Britain and his girlfriend to have weird British and extradimensional adventures. There's also X-Force being the black ops team instead of the evolution of the New Mutants, and X-Factor being a CSI team, though those were "directed" teams long before. Team-mates are now co-workers rather than friends and family, and it all feels soul-less. It is as if the characters are there to fulfill plot requirements rather than the plots flowing from the characters in organic fashions.
I miss Kitty telling child-Ilyana about the Dark Phoenix in the guise of a fairy-tale story (with a much happier ending, and with bamfs). I miss Logan reading Piotr the riot act about how he treated Kitty when they returned from Battleworld, and then tricking him into starting a bar fight with Juggernaut. I miss Scott being in the Savage Land without shaving gear, and seeing his reflection in a pond and realizing that with a mustache he looks a lot like that space pirate he met a while ago. I miss super-powered baseball.
