Whatever Happened to Ongoing Comics?

Something disconcerting has happened to superhero comics.

It’s hard to identify the shift unless you’ve read a lot of comics—and especially comics from more than about 10 years ago. After all, Superman is still faster than a speeding bullet. Spider-Man still does whatever a spider can. Absolutely nothing good happens to the X-Men.

But increasingly rapidly, we seem to be losing a couple of elements of superhero comics that are just as crucial to the genre as secret identities and underwear worn on the outside: continuity and melodrama.

What do I mean by that? Well, take the Flash, for example. Mark Waid’s ’90s run on the Flash is rightfully legendary, and it is widely considered the character’s best storytelling, ever. Personally, I think Waid’s Flash is best read as the second half of a one-two punch with William Messner-Loebs’s run, which immediately preceded it. Over the course of these two runs, Wally West grows from an immature, self-involved, grief-ridden boy terrified of stepping into his predecessor’s boots, into a confident, responsible hero. He discovers and masters the Speed Force, the source of his powers. He meets and eventually marries the love of his life and becomes the focal point of a sprawling Flash Family made up of both new characters and old ones pulled out of obscurity. It’s tremendous.

It also took time. The issues I’m talking about are Flash #15 (August 1988) to #162 (July 2000). That’s 12 years. Waid’s legendary run was a whopping eight.

Meanwhile, in this decade—you know, the one that’s only six years old—we’ve already had three writers handling Wally’s ongoing adventures: Jeremy Adams got two years, Si Spurrier got two, and Ryan North took over back in March. Unlike Waid, who built on the groundwork Messner-Loebs had laid out, all three of this decade’s runs have been wildly tonally different. Every new writer functionally means a reset to Wally’s story, literally in the case of Spurrier, whose run launched with a new #1. They have all written interesting, creative, ambitious stories—but they’ve also written almost totally disconnected stories.

Oh, and while this was happening, we also got a Flash/Aquaman miniseries, Voidsong, about a completely different Flash (Barry Allen) that was impossible to place into continuity.

This is happening across the board. Writers are allowed to stay on a title for a year or two or maybe just an arc. Status quos are constantly being reset. Even when there are changes to the status quo, they’ll be published alongside miniseries that harken back to a different, more familiar status quo. I can’t count the number of comics that Batman’s butler Alfred has appeared in this decade… even though he’s been dead since 2019.

This lack of sustained storytelling means that the focus is exclusively on shock and spectacle. Which, yes, I know sounds like a silly accusation to fling at a genre where the heroes regularly fight talking gorillas. But while superhero comics occupy several overlapping genres—crime (obviously), mystery, noir, fantasy, sci-fi, comedy, horror, and more—the most important of these is soap opera. It’s not a coincidence that Lois Lane is exactly as old as Superman, nor is it a coincidence that Marvel exploded in popularity when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby popularized ongoing storylines featuring messy heroes with terrible personal lives. A striking cover may get a reader to pick up a comic once. Interpersonal drama (especially romance), character growth and devolution, teams falling apart and reforming, kid sidekicks coming into their own: that’s what keeps readers coming back month after month.

In this action-only, scattershot approach to storytelling, the supporting cast falls by the wayside. Recently, I dipped into Superman comics from the late ’80s and early ’90s, and found myself totally hooked by the continuing subplots: Lois and Jimmy, sure, but also the rest of the Daily Planet staff, the Smallville cast, even characters as obscure and marginal as Perry White’s terrible son, Jerry. Nowadays, I can’t remember the last time we’ve seen Jimmy Olsen, at least in the main continuity.

Worse, I don’t know what’s going on with Superman’s actual family. Does anyone remember how Lois and Clark adopted two little kids from space in 2023? Where are they? For that matter, their other kid, Jon Kent, has until recently been shown living in Smallville with his grandparents…but his, uh, clone-brother/uncle(?) Conner Kent was supposedly living in Smallville the last we heard. Did they simply never encounter each other while living in the same house? How big is the Kent Farm??

For that matter, why were we told in 2023 that Conner is somehow still in high school, even though one of his best friends, Tim Drake (Robin), is at least adult enough to live on his own, while his other best friend, Bart Allen (Impulse), appears to be Benjamin Buttoning downwards through his rare, once-a-year-if-we’re-lucky appearances? Can anyone at DC tell me with any confidence how old any of their characters are???

Look, I confess to being that second-worst of comic book fan types, a continuity pedant. (Worst is power-scaler.) It doesn’t actually matter how old Conner Kent is, but it does matter that Superman can’t seem to keep track of the number and location of his children. Without continuity, without a coherent, trackable supporting cast, superheroes float in a contextless void: a costume, a motto, and not much more. Without a sense that these heroes exist in relation to anything or anyone else, no character growth is possible—in any direction. Wally West’s climb towards mature heroism isn’t possible now, but neither is Jean Grey’s gradual descent into the Dark Phoenix—not incidentally, another one of the medium’s most legendary stories.

It also keeps the focus on the same dozen or so white guys we always see starring in comics. With no opportunity to develop characters and relationships, publishers rely on their headliners. Disconnected miniseries about Batman or Spider-Man will always sell, but you need ongoing reader investment to get readers to care about the far more diverse B and C lists.

I understand why all this happens. You can only keep a writer on a book for eight years if that book is selling, and the industry is financially reliant on these constant resets to #1. And comics are by no means the only medium that has fallen victim to shrinking attention spans. Look at television, where we’ve traded shows with 20+ episodes a season that run for years for six-episode seasons that drop all at once and are forgotten almost as quickly. Look at short-form video, songs without bridges, movies designed to be comprehensible to people who are scrolling on their phones the whole time.

But I hope the trend is reversible. DC and Marvel are in a unique position as nearly 90-year-old universes with dozens of ongoing installments every single month. They can tell stories in a way and at a scale that no one else can. It would be a shame to forgo that in favor of chasing eyeballs that would rather be on TikTok to begin with.