"I have to agree with John Wyatt.  Take whatever favorite character you may have and drop him or her into today's modern comics world, and you have a lamb in an abattoir.  There isn't really a character I had more fondness for than the Roy Lincoln Human Bomb.  Growing up, I "got" the loneliness and isolation of the character and his plight, and I liked that he had a team to hang out with in spite of it all.  The character had history, having debuted in the same issue of Police Comics with Plastic Man. He used to pal around with a guy named Hustace Throckmorton who had explosive feet! He wasn't overexposed. I liked his low-tech costume and appearance.  His existance on an alternate earth. Everything.  I liked everything about the guy.  And I never once pined for his reappearance in a modern comic, because I knew what I would get.  I would get what I got when he and the rest of the Freedom Fighters showed up in Infinite Crisis.  A death scene.  A fairly clever one, one that was not badly written, taken on its own terms, but a death scene.  Because Bizarro, and Black Hand, and Grodd, and every bad guy you ever met is a mass murderer today, and any character with the slightest notion of nostalgia clinging to him or her is marked for immediate death or "reimagining."  There is a Human Bomb in the DC Universe today, some sort of paramilitary badass with a high-tech armored suit and a history of criminal wrongdoing, if memory of the one issue I've read concerning the new team serves me correctly.  But I don't care.  I'm not railing from the rooftops or conducting a private boycott regarding the matter.  It is what it is.  I'm certain the new guy has his fans."

I don't know if that was JB's intention with this thread but that pretty much sums up the problem with creative side in comics today. Well said, Brian. I could not agree more with you.

Thanks, Scott.  I've been enjoying reading your posts as well!

"Man Of Steel by Byrne! Perfect! If only they stuck with the plan,
it Could've been what it Should've been.

1985 should get another chance."

Actually, the fact that JB's reboot lasted as long as it did is pretty amazing considering the flakeyness of editorial integrity of the comics industry.

I'd say tweak a couple of things about the DC animated Universe Timm and Dini came up with and make THAT the DC universe.

As for Marvel....I dunno. Rewinding to about 1979 sounds about right.

Cut down on the crossovers and shock crap and NEVER EVER have a story jump from book to book.

1986, I was just getting into comics as a kid.

DC:  Right after the Crisis -- but done right.  Someone work out all the math and have everything add up, have Wonder Woman not be a new addition to continuity, don't mess with the Silver Age Hawkman and Hawkwoman, let Superboy continue, etc.  It could be some giant slingshot effect created by the collapse of the multi-verse.

Marvel:  Seconds before the death of Phoenix.  Turns out the Marvel Universe had been shunted into a parallel universe all living within the all-powerful Phoenix Force.  Jean Grey is Phoenix and all stories since then have been constructs of that reality.

In re Marvel...

Right before Gwen Stacy dies -- very tempting. Either that, or a short time later, just to get the new X-Men debuted. Love the characters.

So, for me: 1975.

As much as I loved the books from the 80's I don't feel like the wheels fell off the wagon until 1996 when the Liefeld Avengers and Jim Lee Fantastic Four were published.

When Marvel decided to throw continuity completely out the window I hung on for a few months before throwing in the towel for several years. 

I miss the times when character crossovers were special, covers didn't have three different versions, stories could be told in one issue and the Marvel and DC universes had a cohesive feel.