What makes you think they do?

Exactly. I think that many of the people who make comments of that kind just aren't used to reading much of anything outside their very narrow comfort zone.

When I hear someone dismissing the Silver Age or the Bronze Age and using any critical phrase like dated, I wonder how some of today's classics are going to look in a few decades. I can't imagine how something like "The Long Halloween" is going to look after the nostalgia has worn off, and it's being judged on its own merits. It has so many holes, so many things that don't make sense, and then there's a number of just-plain-bad characterizations, starting with how inept the Batman is that he can't solve the murders.

And then there's the problem of the extreme decompression. So many average (at best) stories are dragged to 4, 5 or 6 issues for no other reason than to fill out a trade, and sometimes these stories just fall apart at the seams when examined critically. It may not be an issue to the young people who have grown up with it, but it is not going to age well, even if the art is as slick as most of the art is today. (My problem with most of today's comic artists is how they kind of all look the same. I don't think that's going to help either.)

Death of the Family is an example of a story that was actually pretty good for the current state of comics. It was much better than the Court of the Owls. But Death of the Family wasn't really that great. Bill Finger probably wrote forty or fifty Joker stories that are better than Death of the Family.

Sounds like a good read! I have a TPB of the Alan Moore and own the New Mutants/ X-men annuals & Captain America issues included, but there's a lot of material in there I'm not familiar with. I guess I hadn't realized Chris Claremont's role despite knowing about his involvement with Xcaliber. Also, I'm more familiar with Jamie Delano's work on vertigo stuff so it would be interesting to see how he handles Captain Britain. And of course you can't go wrong with alan davis!

I've been making my way thru the Fabulous Furry Freak Omnibus I bought awhile back. Great stuff altho I find it better in small doses so I'm just reading a few pages now and then... a little goes a long way!! I do wish the book was oversized as the small print can muddle both art and text, particularly for the Fat Freddy's cat strips in the margins. Still, its nice to have the material collected in one fairly sturdy volume, as opposed to the old beat-up reprint issues I've had since college (they got handed around quite a bit back then - it was the early 90s but I guess this material doesn't go out of style, at least among college kids!). I do find the earlier material more enjoyable than recent tales like "the idiots abroad". 

The latest "story" has the hirsute trio evicted (again) and going their separate ways: Phineas moves back in with his parents, and of course his dad is the head of the local John Birch Society chapter... Fat Freddy also tries to heads for his folks, ends up meeting a hot chick who turns out to be his sister (kind of reminiscent of Theon in GoT, altho I'm guessing the "hot babe turns out to be my sister" trope goes back a lot further than FFFB)... and Freewheelin Franklin hitches a ride with a suburban looking dude who happens to have 150 kilos in the truck's trailer!

Reading the big Titan book collecting the start of Burne Hogarth's Tarzan Sunday pages has made my early mornings a much happier time nowadays. Great stuff, and it just keeps going and going.

Titan books is doing a great job, what with this and Jack Katz' First Kingdom hardcovers.

I've been reading back issues of the '90s Eclipso series that I found in a quarter bin. I mostly picked them up because I saw that #8 was illustrated by Ted McKeever, one of my favorite creators. It's an interesting book, more in line with the stuff that Karen Berger was overseeing than the rest of the DCU at the time. I'm not surprised that it didn't catch on-- Giffen would have a run of bad luck with books throughout the '90s-- but I am surprised that there's almost no discussion of the book at all. There's a lot of psychological horror and examination of the roots of violent behavior. Again, more interesting than good, but thought-provoking enough that I can't believe it doesn't have the cult status of even something like John Smith's Scarab or Ann Nocenti's Kid Eternity.

By the late 70's, Kirby was dealing with a degenerative eye condition. That's what caused the distortion in his later art.