You read vampirella..I must 10 or 15 issues of it and I don't know that i read more than a few stories...
I bought it for the sexy Gonzalez pictures... I was a naughty 6 year old...
There are 2 types of long dragged out stories...
there is the subtext story that is a plot running behind the main storyline plot... Sandman, X-Men, Starman and JSA are just a few of the books that used this tool..they advance a greater "overall" storyline agenda while the main stories can still be arcs or even standalone issues...
Then there is what I affectionately call "Bendis" padding. Yes, Bend us over for more money so that you can tell a 2 issue tale in 6-8 issues...
Your Vampirella analogy is less Bendis padding or subtext padding than lets throw in some repro work and some cheap Filipino art back-up stories to save some money.. That was always a problem with anthology titles. You have more of an anthology title problem. And Vampirella was an anthology title most of the time. When they started carrying over stories into the next issue rather than wrapping them up in 8 pages. People eventually got sick of it and we no longer have more than a handful of anthology titles...
