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Originally Posted by ZodWallop
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Yes both that and the Dark Tower (which you reference in another post) are great examples.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen has a pretty mediocre first novel (Gardens of the Moon). When I recommend the series I suggest Midnight Tides since it takes place centuries before the main story and was written later on in the author's career. It gives a better sense of the style and tone of the series.
I almost never got into Neal Asher because Gridlinked (the first novel in the Agent Cormac series) is not that great. Not only did he greatly improve by his later novels, but his editor hacked the ending of Gridlinked into pieces. Her criticism was that it was a Scooby Doo ending where Cormac monologues how he figured everything out. Instead of having Asher thoroughly revise the entire novel to make the resolution more organic, she simply cut it out and published it as! Just terrible!
Just as with the Gap series, sometimes a writer develops a story and then decides to revisit that universe and only then comes up with a major arc. That happened in Peter F. Hamilton's Misspent Youth. Not a great novel but the followup was a very memorable epic called the Commonwealth Saga.
First novels are commonly poor examples of a series. If the writer is young and inexperienced there first effort will not reflect their mature writing style and tone. They can be too easily influenced by an equally inexperienced editor and produce something generic or poorly written. Sometimes the writer only becomes invested in that universe and characters later, after the first novel.