Originally Posted by
DrNewGod
I've been reading since the 1970s, and it's clear that the audience has changed (or at least, who DC believes the audience is has changed). The complexity and sophistication of story have increased, but unfortunately, so has the sense of bleakness. The childishly naive notion that bashing our problems in the nose is a sensible answer persists, but the notion that we can meaningfully address human woes seems to have been left behind.
The motivations of characters doing something positive because it's right has faded away. In its place has arisen a notion that protagonists must react to something wrong, whether that's a tragedy they suffered or a failing they must redeem.
The art has changed. There has always been good and bad, but the modern trend seems to look more like movie storyboards than self-contained story-telling instruments. That's doubtlessly influenced by their role as mass media brands today. DC (and Marvel) comics have become minor components of larger Intellectual Property sales campaigns than entertainment media in their own right.
Others have mentioned the shift towards arc (that can be packaged as TPBs). With tht has come a a sense of story first, character, if convenient. Don't get me wrong, story has always mattered. That said, part of this medium has always been about following characters who were distinct in some form (Justice League somewhat lost that late in the Silver Age, it it came back strong in the Bronze Age thru Nu52). The TPB Novelization approach, however, has enabled writers to distort characters to ease execution of specific story points they want to make (Identity Crisis was probably the most drastic example, but there have been plenty of others, both before and since). This results in an inconsistency of both characterization, and world building, because each new writer tends to drop or ignore what came before.
ETA: Beginning with Crisis on Infinite Earths, comics have become increasingly event-centric. DC learned that they can get fans to buy more titles to have the complete story, and we haven't taught them differently yet. I suspect the TPB trend mentioned in the last two paragraphs has accelerated that. How intrusive those events got on the individual titles at DC waxed and waned over the years; in cases like Millenium, it got really heavy handed.
The various, and cumulative effects of those last two paragraphs have contributed to shrinking of the comics world. There was a sense in the older comics that heroes inhabited an environment full of characters. That's shifted toward them existing against a backdrop that seems somewhat more shallow.
One thing has changed for the better (IMO): comics are more widely accepted as a past time than once they were. For some of us, being a comics fan was something of a guilty pleasure we felt pressured to hide away. With big studios realizing there's gold in them-thar capes, comics in general, and superheroes in particular, are no longer something that's quite so niche.