See before Secret Wars, you could read an entire year of, say Avengers, and it might have a big epic storyline and you might get a panel of oh the Bxter Building is empty because the FF is away so the Avengers a have to deal with it and a panel of a split face Peter Parker/Spider-Man shot with spider-sense going off to tell you it was a big deal felt across the MU and a note that Thor was unavailable because he was on some quest in Asgard, but everything you needed for the story was in Avengers, and if you didn't read Thor, FF and Spidey it didn't detract from your enjoyment of Avengers and if those 2 panels and notes were absent it wouldn't have affected the story at all. You could then read Spider-Man and get another epic storyline and not need to read the other Marvel books to enjoy it, but you might get little nods (Spidey looking to the Baxter Building or some such) to the shared universe but it was about the Spider-Man story in the Spider-Man book. You could then read X-Men and get yet another major epic stoyline independent of the others with maybe a nod to other stuff (say a paenl of Beast trying to contact the Avengers and Jarvis saying they are busy dealing with blah blah blah, but it didn't impact the story being told. Once in a while you might get a cross-ver 2 parter or a guest star appearance, but it was about the book it was being told in, not about something else. Spidey might run into Daredevil tracking down a street level criminal in his attempt to find the plan of the super-villain he was fighting, and they team up for an issue, but it moved the SPider-Man story alonfg and didn't interrupt the story being told in Daredevil.

The events of the story led to the signs connectivity and the ideas of a shared universe enriched the stories being told, but the focus was on the story being told in each book. Spider-Man creators worried about telling Spider-Man stories. X-Men writers worried about telling X-Men stories. Avengers teams Avengers stories etc. So you had lots of good, organic stories being told, each was a thread in the tapestry, sure, but the focus was on telling good stories about the characters in each title and letting the stories go where they will, finding points of connectivity where you can.

With Secret Wars and it ensuing effects, that was no more. It became about telling stories about the shared connectivity and fitting in stories about the characters where they could be crammed in. If that X-Men story (which would be a great X-Men story) doesn't fit what editorial wants to do with Spider-Man or Avengers or Thor or what have you, then there is no chance it will be told. Connectivity trumped storytelling and the characters. It became about the world, not the individual stories in the world. Yes we all love big stories, they were something special, and Secret Wars may have felt special because it was out of the ordinary at the time, but then it became the norm, and if it was the norm, there was no longer room for the types of individual stories featuring the characters and their big epic stories that had defined the Marvel line before Secret Wars and made it the House of Ideas people had come to know and love. It was no longer about telling great SPider-Man epics and X-Men epics and Avengers epics, and Thor epics but about telling one single narrative that fit all those pieces but was really about none of them, it was about the sum, not the parts any more, but then the parts become interchangeable and unimportant. And that was the beginning of the end for me, the company didn't want me to care about each book, or to find parts of the line I really dug, it wanted me to buy into these big broad brushstrokes that swept the entire thing into one single whole that I had to follow all of or couldn't follow any of. By the 90s every book was getting interrupted by the Infinity event of the year, and the annuals were no longer about the title characters but big sweeping stories about the universe, and an X-Men story was a mutant universe story that could tie into other books in the Marvel line (things like Fall of the Mutants crossed into Daredevil I think), and a Spider-Man story involved 5 or 6 different books not one book telling a Spidey story (or 2 or 3 different books telling their own Spidey stories like MTU, ASM and Spectacular as had been), and Avengers stories had to encompass the solo books for all the members (and things like Galactic Storm had even further reach) then we started getting specials and one shots to stat and end stories that would then cross over through swaths of books (Age of Apocalypse, Maximum Clonage, The Crossing, Timeslide, then it became special mini-series to tell these big stories and the individual books would tell spin-off stories (House of M, Civil War, AvX, etc.) until we got to the point where the Avengers book was not about telling Avengers stories but was a ancillary thing to tell Marvel stories, and the X-Men comic wasn't about telling X-Men stories but about mutant stories and how they fit into the Marvel story, and Spider-Man...

Until we got to the point (Secret Wars) where every story, every book, was about telling stories about the Marvel World (or universe) not about the wonderful characters who make up the world, not about the interesting stories about those characters creators might have, but about the worldbuilding and the inter-connectivity of it all.

Marvel had lost what made Marvel, Marvel. It wasn't the universe and connectivity, it was the stories featuring the great characters of the Marvel stable, yes at times crossing over, but standing on their own and having great stories told about them. Look at the books that are resonating (not selling well, but resonating with those who read them) today-books like Ms. Marvel and such. They are going back to the things that made Marvel great int he Silver and Bronze age-telling stories about a character, showing their trials and tribulations, not throwing as many costumes and powers into a fight to see if you can top sales charts.

But hey, that's just me and my take. If the universe is more important to you than the characters and their stories, if you enjoy what I consider soulless event stories with interchangeable parts wearing gaudy costumes and acting "out of character" to fit the needs of the ridiculous marketing driven plots, more power to you. Enjoy. I'll go back and read the stuff I like, and that's mostly pre-Shooter Secret Wars.

-M

In my opinion, Alan Moore's best superhero work was done between 1982 and 1984, in Captain Britain and in Warrior's Marvelman.

I'd go slightly later and say it's when he first arrived at DC. V for Vendetta didn't come jaw-droppingly amazing until he wrote those final chapters at DC, and I'll never forget what he did for Clayface III/Preston Payne in Batman Annual #11.

What hurt him, in contrast, was getting too much acclaim for works that weren't his best effort just a short while later. The Killing Joke is a shocking story to be sure, but the best or definitive Joker story? Even Moore didn't think it was all that great. And while Watchmen is a damn fine work, it gets overrated as well. When a creator gets too much acclaim too quickly for too little, it can't help but cloud their judgment of their own work. Moore was never quite as good after that period.

The only comic deserving of a 10 ...