>>96899327Avoid Starlin and Byrne. Starlin is a terrible fit for FW stuff, as evidenced by Death Of The New Gods and Cosmic Odyssey. Cosmic Odyssey is held up only because of John Stewart's arc and Mignola's artwork. DOTNG is interesting ideas executed terribly.
Byrne did some cool things with his Tales Of The New Gods backup stories, but overall, his Fourth World run was garbage, and even his friend Walt Simonson ignored as much as he could sanely do from it when he did his Orion series. Byrne's Fourth World coincided with his terrible Genesis event, so if you know anything about that, you know that the promise the first few issues of Fourth World he wrote quickly shits the bed and goes into overwrought and overthought John Byrne-with-no-other-collaborator bullshit. The man always has to make his version "definitive" at the cost of anything else, even when he says that only the 70s had good comics.
As far as good FW by other writers, Orion by Simonson is pretty awesome. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, and it echoes his Thor in many ways, but Simonson truly feels more like Kirby in terms of execution of ideas than a lot of other writers who handled Kirby's creations. Simonson puts care and effort in, at least. DiDio and Giffen's New 52 OMAC (not FW, but still Kirby-derived) is worth a read, too. I haven't gotten to their Infinity Man and the Forever People yet, but if it's more of the same, it'd be non-Kirby FW stuff worth reading. I liked Giffen and DeMatteis' usage of Barda and Mister Miracle in JLI, as well, so there's that.
