But then I’m a bit of a Legion fanatic, so maybe I’m biased.

Another one worth mentioning is Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America, a comic that never really had a particularly great story after issue #350 resolved the “replacement Cap” arc. There were some halfway fun bits, like the Bloodstone Hunt and such, but nothin remotely as interesting in terms fo playing with the comic’s basic concept.

This isn’t new to Cap, of course: look at the way in which Steve Engelhart lost steam rapidly after the Watergate storyline. (Though really, Cap giving up the suit can only go in one direction — backwards.) The difference is that Engelhart got off the book fairly soon afterwards and turned his energies fully to his work with the Avengers series.

Also, I must respectfully disagree regarding the Bendis Daredevil — I’d argue that it completely ran out of plot momentum (though not visual force) after “Hardcore.” Matt declared himself the Kingpin, sure…and then proceeded to do virtually nothing of import except be manipulated and thrown in jail. In the interim, we got a one-year gap during whose major change (the marriage) was undone before we’d gotten to see what the new status quo was really like, a Black Widow arc built around a gaping plot hole and a pointless resurrection, ALex Maleev getting to flex his pencil-muscles while Bendis meandered about undoing Frank Miller’s development of the Gladiator character, a weird anthology multi-parter that ended horribly (a baby demon?), and then finally a non-resolution to Matt’s problems in the Murdock Papers arc.

I suspect many here will disagree with that last one.

As far as Michilinie’s Iron Man Alcoholism saga, I skimmed through the recent trade to see what the big deal was. It was as terribly written as everything else I’ve read by Michilinie, I think it gets by because of the novelty of the protaganist in a superhero book being alcoholic. But it’s wrapped up too quickly and oversimplified like an afterschool special. Denny O’Neil handled it much better.

You can have good big events if you simply think of where you are going AFTER the big event. Japanese comics like Dragonball Z and Naruto are basically nothing but a series of big events but they work because they are done with a specific story purpose in mind, a jumping off point to an even bigger story.

MAX went a whole other direction, to great success.

I always think of James Robinson’s Starman as the perfect template (although I think I’d give up my pinky finger if I could have had Tony Harris draw the entire run). He started with a big, dynamic action packed adventure in order to attract attention, then he told more personal character oriented stories. Every once in a while, he’d throw in something big, but it was never forced.

Bendis also did a great job avoiding the big event in Daredevil. The “outting” of Daredevil wasn’t an event. It was a sustained plot development that was allowed to progress naturally. With so many short term writers, we see a lot of events and virtually no development.

As an aside, the killing of Phoenix is undoubtedly one of the finest examples of good editorial interference. If Claremont had let Jean Grey commit genocide and then return to the X-Men to just mope around for a couple dozen issues in super-angst mode, I don’t think anyone would care nearly as much about the Dark Phoenix Saga; it would just be a neat but flawed story with a horribly anticlimactic ending.