Oh yes, I loved, loved, loved the 80's era Handbooks, with the detailed writeups and often multiple different artists interpretations of popular characters!
The later books, with the ugly little power bars like the back of a game card, and everybody's info squeezed into a tiny blurb so they could fit multiple entries per page, was just awful.
Plus the earlier books seemed useful as a form of 'story bible' for the writers, so they could have fast reference to various characters and their past (oh, those two have met before? Good to know before I wrote them as not knowing each other!) and their abilities (oh, Eternals are mostly unkillable, so much that it took their hated enemies thousands of years to create a special machine that could, in time, if one was strapped to it, actually kill just one? Huh, I've been writing them dropping like flies...).