Whoops! Forgot a couple of runs in the team-book entry:
Avengers 343-375: This really shouldn’t have worked for me at all. Bob Harras writing? My least favorite B-list Avengers in the spotlight? (Black Knight and Hercules, neither of whom behaved anything like they had previously, which might have been the trick that made them work.) Crystal and Sersi? But the Gatherers plot was genuinely creepy and suspenseful, and I loved that a fairly simple love triangle practically turned into a dodecahedron. The Steve Epting art was a treat, too.
X-Factor (the Peter David years): I can’t credit Giffen’s Justice League with bringing comedy to a stuffy franchise without noting David’s accomplishments with X-Factor. At the time, there wasn’t a more humorless super-hero franchise to be found than the mutant scene. David brought in a new cast (consisting of some of my favorite B-mutants, Havok, Polaris, Madrox, and Quicksilver) and radically revised the tone, poking gentle holes in the pervasive angst of the X-universe. The humor didn’t keep the stories from functioning prefectly well as super-heroic fiction, either.