I think it’s a number of things. First off, I wold suggest you go back and actually look at the runs in the 80s–just about every title had fill-ins and artistic changes from time to time, it wasn’t quite as seamless as you make it out to be. But also, the level of performance that’s required by the audience today is greater, and that’s coupled with the fact that every page that an artist does now remains in print indefinitely. It was a lot easier for an artist to cut corners and rush a job to completion back in those days because the medium was a throwaway one–after the book came out, it effectively vanished into back issue bins. The change in the audience and the marketplace is also responsible for changes in the penciler/inker relationship that also make it more difficult to create the kinds of sustained runs that you’re talking about.
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