Comic books
A recent article on ComicBookResources about "event books" sparked some thoughts that I'd like to share with you:
1) Way too many event books. An "event book" is one that is part of or ties into some big cross-title event. In the past few years, Marvel has gone from Avengers Disassembled to House Of M to Civil War to Secret Invasion to Dark Reign to Siege. That's way too many events in a fairly short span of time and I've probably missed a couple. Too many event books makes each event feel less special and so, less worth picking up.
2) Way too many event books, part 2: Splitting events across multiple books. Marvel is especially guilty of this one. In order to read the whole of Civil War, you have to buy about a dozen books, each of which collects maybe six issues. This is price-gouging, plain and simple. I have an old copy of X-Men: Inferno upstairs that spans four titles and collects upwards of twenty issues. There's no technical reason to limit books to six-to-eight issues other than to make more money off them and while that's good for the company in the short term, it's bad in the long term because it puts us off buying the damn things at all. If I have to invest upwards of a hundred bucks to read all of Civil War, I'm just going to skip it entirely.
3) Events that don't mean anything. Primary offender here is "events" like World War Hulk. A series where the Hulk declares war on the entire Marvel universe? Yeah, kick ass! What we actually got was an event that didn't affect anything in the long term. The upcoming Marvel Universe Vs. The Punisher looks like it'll be another. The idea of the entire Marvel Universe realising that one of them is, to all intents and purposes, a mass murderer and combining to take him down is a fantastic idea. Chances that it will actually change the status quo long-term? Nil.
4) They wasted a perfectly good plot. Best example here is the ongoing Curse Of The Mutants storyline. Marvel's vampire population declaring "fuck it" and attacking is a storyline that actually justifies a giant, company-wide event. Restricting it to teh X-books makes no sense. Make the event books rare (say, every five years or so) and actually mean something (i.e. actually significantly affect the status quo in that 'verse).
5) Not every book needs to be an ongoing. We need to break away from the idea that minis are the exception. Like it or not, certain characters are identified with certain creators. While a few books need to be ongoing to provide a backbone to their respective universes (Avengers, JLA) and a few characters are popular enough that everyone has some ideas for them (Batman, X-Men, maybe Superman), most don't need to be published every month. My favourite book right now is Secret Six and Gail Simone seems to have some good ideas about where she's going with it but if they transferred another writer onto the book, I'd probably drop it, I suspect most people would so there's nothing wrong with cancelling the book until Gail decides to do some more. If a writer has an idea for a good eight-to-twelve month story for, say, Thor, do it as a mini. There's nothing wrong with letting characters lie fallow until someone has a good idea for them.
6) Less Wolverine, less Spidey. Look, I like both characters but no character is interesting enough to be in five frickin' books every month.