John Byrne thinks about his potential career best, back when he was the guy in charge of the Fantastic Four:

I don’t think my run on FF is nearly as good as many say it was. Yes, it was good. And compared to much of what was coming out alongside it, it wa very good. But I have trouble with the notion that it was “second only to Lee and Kirby” mostly because I don’t think anything can approach their run closely enough to be considered “second”. It’s as if we need some kind of imaginary stopgap between the Lee/Kirby FF (and, indeed, the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man) and everything else… What’s “wrong” with the post-Lee/Kirby runs — and this includes Lee/Romita and Lee/Buscema — is that they are none of them nearly as iconic as the original. They are, in many ways, too self-aware, too burdened with the weight of what has gone before.

Think about it. In the span of just 50 issues, Lee and Kirby gave us Doctor Doom, the Sub-Mariner, the Skrulls, the Firghtful Four, the Inhumans, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, the Watcher — basical a foundation which would be mined (most successfully by themselves) for the next forty years.

What, of equivalent significance, comes out of the post-Lee/Kirby years?

Yes, that’s right; humility and common sense from John Byrne! The world as you know it? All wrong.

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