Look at Mark Gruenwald's Captain America multi-parters "The Bloodstone Hunt" and "Streets of Poison". A 6 part and a 7 part story arc respectively, but at least things moved and progressed with every issue. You never got the feeling there was any stalling for time for the sake of making it a longer story.

I bought a house during the Great Recession, I got married and my dad died.  Pretty much within two years.  After the tumult (much of it happy chaos), I had to take stock of what I was spending my money on and if it was all worth it. I looked in the MattCave and there were literal stacks of unread comics, many of them purchased long before the chaos of that time.  In the past when I’ve been exceptionally busy, I always used to find time to dig in and finish them all before the next week’s releases.  Not so any longer.  I decided that I was buying out of habit rather than enjoyment, feeling that I couldn’t dare miss an issue, instead of that feeling that I couldn’t wait to find out how the story ended.  I drifted away very quickly after that realization, never to return.  

Now when I walk into a comic shop, which I did just this past week because there’s one next to a theatre and I needed to kill some time, I find there’s just no interest.  I see covers that are 80% pinups by artists unaffiliated with the interiors and do nothing to tell me what’s inside.  I see characters that feel like they’re cosplaying the characters I loved.  I see familiar titles featuring groupings of characters that are unrecognizable.  I roll my eyes at the numbering, the constant advertising of reboots and can see the ever shifting hands of what editorial there is left seemingly throwing the pasta at the wall to see what sticks. Some of this had always been there over the time I habitually bought them, but never to this degree and magnitude.  

I don’t feel I outgrew mainstream comics, but rather that they made the choice to cut out a reader like me.  And I’m OK with that.  I don’t feel angry, upset or aggrieved.  I just feel…sad.  But I don’t think about it often because of the decision I made to not pay for things that were unable to give me the same kind of joy I had as a kid buying a new comic off a spinner rack at my local grocery store or 7-11 some 40 years prior.   I only have one form of entertainment that still gives me that same visceral thrill decade over decade, from the ‘70s to the ‘20s, and that’s video games.  See?  I’m still a kid at heart!  

Fast forward to 2014 and finding this site and the Commission threads. Boy those JB splashes reignited that old feeling and had me searching out what I missed from my favorite creator. They weren't technically new comics but they were to me, some 30 years of catching up. It's been a blast!

Comics to me are a medium.Like any, especially pop media, there's always a whole lot of crap, but then there are some exceptional diamonds and pearls that save it.