It's so hard to decide. The 70's is when I started to buy comics . The 60's is when Marvel came to life and released all their long standing characters. The 80's I was in full swing and buying many titles that were just flat out Great.( Swamp Thing, Byrne Superman, Bryne FF,Watchmen, DKR, Iron Man, Spider-man). I also feel the 2000's are an underrated era.

1.1980s: I'm pleasantly surprised to see this decade getting so much love. For me, it's the sweet spot in comic history where the industry had learned to consistently write for a more mature fanbase without yet fully understanding how to manipulate that same fanbase and feed it hype and tripe. Characterization is always what matters to me most in stories, and I think you found solid complex characterization most consistently in '80s books.

2. 1970s: Much for the same reason.

3. 1950s: If you can't have strong characterization and dense writing, then you might as well fly in the opposite direction with some of the best light-hearted stuff ever produced in comics. While I wouldn't read much from DC or Atlas in this time period, Dell, Fawcett, and E.C. were putting out some amazingly fun content, and Weisenger's Superman was fun when read in small doses.

4. 1960s: While Silver Age Marvel is generally too campy for my tastes, it definitely has its moments. Gold Key is pretty great too, but forget DC in this era.

5. 1930s: The height of the pulps, which pretty much laid the groundwork for the rise of comic books. Howard and Lovecraft, in particular, make this an era to remember.

6. 1940s: A great era for Dell publishing (and especially Carl Barks), plus it's fun to read the early superhero stuff in small doses (but man do they get old quick!).

7. 1990s: Really just for the tail ends of Sandman and Cerebus, and the rise of Warren Ellis' The Authority and Planetary. Oh, and Valiant Comics.


And if there'd never been a 2000s or 2010s, I think I probably would have been okay with that.

If it does your heart any good, tolworthy, the 60's are steadily gaining on the 80's as my favorite decade. I have a similar distaste for most grim and gritty superhero comics* and prefer idealism when it comes to the genre.

*It's interesting that Watchmen and DKR's are the only "grim and gritty" superhero comics that I like outside a select few Punisher stories. They're both stories that are basically the last word and final act on superheroes (with Watchmen) and Batman specifically. This take simply doesn't sustain itself for me over the long-haul. 

Sandman only had 12 issues in the 80s. The 90s hardly saw the "tail-end" of the book, but rather the vast majority.

I'm still a little dubious that you've read that much 1960s Batman. The "Batman fights aliens" stories and the "Batman fights giant fish" were mostly a thing of the late 1950s (though there were a few in the early 1960s) but that stopped entirely in 1964 and that era was long gone by the time Neal Adams drew his first Batman story in 1970.

And besides, there is more to the 1960s than Batman.

Meanwhile, the New 52 Joker is running around without his face, and that totally makes sense and isn't a dumb plot contrivance at all. Supposedly. (And I liked the Joker with his face cut off. I'm just pointing out that there's a lot of dumb stuff in the comics, and it's amusing to see some readers making fun of storylines from the 1960s when modern comics are full of stupid material. The big difference is that in modern comics, the dumbest stuff becomes the focus of the story for four issues because it's being written for the trade. Not to mention how the fans and the writers take themselves so seriously and defend the most ridiculous rubbish.)