Continuity Lock Out / Comic Books

• The first Animorphs graphic novel never establishes that Jake and Rachel are cousins, leading to some jokes by fans about how the new readers it's trying to reach might start shipping them only to later find out they're related.
• The DCU:
  • This was the reason given for DC Comics' first Cosmic Retcon, Crisis on Infinite Earths, back in 1985: that things were getting too confusing for the fans (in actuality, it was getting too confusing for the writers but they didn't want to admit it).
  • When that failed to solve anything, DC wrote its second Cosmic Retcon, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!. And when that failed to solve anything, DC wrote its third Cosmic Retcon, Infinite Crisis. And that also failed to solve anything.
  • Infinite Crisis: To fully understand what was going on, one had to have read at least almost every comic event DC had put out in the past twenty years, Crisis on Infinite Earths, the five mini-series lead-ins to Infinite Crisis, the comics that introduced elements of those mini-series, and Justice League International.
  • Superman:
    • According to Jeph Loeb, this is the major reason why the 90's Supergirl, was benched and the original Silver Age Supergirl was brought back in "The Supergirl from Krypton (2004)". His argument was that Linda's origin was far too confusing and tenuously-tied to the Superman mythos to make sense to casual fans, which is hard to argue. After all, "Kara Zor-El is Superman's teenage cousin who survived the destruction of Krypton while in stasis" is a far more coherent origin story than "Linda Danvers is a teenage Satanist who merged with a protoplasmic creature from another dimension to become the new Supergirl, as well as an Earth-born Angel of fire".
    • Inaccesible continuity was not an issue during the first twenty-five years of the Superman's history, since both Superman and Supergirl's books kept a loose continuity, and status quo's alterations usually consisted in the introduction of some new character or concept. Any new reader could pick any issue and understand what was going on. However, DC became gradually a stickler for continuity through the 1960s, publishing longer multi-part stories -"The Unknown Supergirl" was eight-issue-long-, introducing new developments (such like Lex Luthor getting married, Supergirl getting adopted and graduating high-school or Clark Kent becoming a newscaster), demanding that Superman's writers sticked to the already existing backstory, ensuring that previous stories counted, and then publishing continuity-heavy mini-series like The Krypton Chronicles and World of Krypton. By the early 1980s, DC decided that Superman's long and storied continuity were hindering sales and drawing away readers.
    • The 1986 reboot was meant to provide a clean slate, but it made everything worse. Not only had three continuities -Golden Age, Silver/Bronze Age and Post Crisis- now to keep track of, but also DC published four monthly Superman books and a quaterly one during the 90s. Those solo books actually worked as a single weekly book telling a continuous story. No matter what issue you bought, you were dropped right in the middle of an ongoing story, and you needed to buy at least two more books to figure out both the beginning and ending.
  • The Gail Simone run on Wonder Woman was pretty continuity-heavy and sales fell sharply during it, with the writer herself later lamenting that her run might have been confusing to new readers. DC hired J. Michael Straczynski to replace Simone and bring in new readers with a highly-publicized storyline that took place in a more accessible Alternate Continuity. Then the New 52 Continuity Reboot happened, which led to Brian Azzarello being given a complete blank slate for his run. In interviews, Azzarello even stated that he deliberately avoided bringing up too much of the past continuity to avoid confusing potential new readers.
  • The New 52 continuity that served as a Continuity Reboot of the DCU after the Flashpoint event had this happen to many of the writers, who have talked in interviews about the lack of consistency on the editorial staff while it started up, with no creator able to learn about other books' upcoming plotlines, yet still having to work interactions between them in each month's Crisis Crossover. It happened in record time, too, and it's a particularly bad example because the stated purpose of the New 52 relaunch was to prevent Continuity Lock-out.
  • DC Rebirth: Knowledge of Flashpoint, Watchmen, the Jamie Reyes "Reach invasion" arc of Blue Beetle, and so on are required for anything to make sense. God help you if you are a casual comic reader who's heard of this major DC Comics un-reboot and is trying to use this as an introduction to the DCU.
  • Doomsday Clock, a maxiseries serving to wrap up the DC Rebirth event and restore continuity to how it was prior to Flashpoint (albeit with some characters and elements from the New 52 era retained), requires familiarity with Watchmen, The Button, Superman: Secret Origin, Superman Reborn, The Oz Effect, Charlton Comics and several arcs of DC Rebirth to truly understand.
• X-Men: Chris Claremont took this to eleven with his out-of-continuity miniseries X-Men: The End, which tries to bring every subplot of 30 years to a conclusion.
• Gold Digger has a high degree of impenetribility despite having only existed since the early '90s and consisting only of one main title, a short-lived spinoff, and a few early crossovers with Ninja High School. Miss a few issues and you're likely to be met with a completely different set of cast members some of whom haven't shown up for a few years, sometimes not even mentioning the main characters.
• Ultimate Marvel was created starting with Ultimate Spiderman in 2000 to avert this very trope offering a clean slate for new readers who otherwise couldn't be bothered to dig through decades of continuity in the regular universe to get the gist of certain characters and stories. Nonetheless however, the Ultimate Universe eventually fell victim to this trope despite a few efforts to relaunch it in its later years following the much reviled Ultimatum (which curiously was its own attempt to provide a clean slate for the Ultimate Universe). Namely why certain characters were dead and why the Reed Richards of this universe went crazy and became an outright villain known as "The Maker".
• Untold Tales of Spider-Man came about in particular, because at the time (1995) the Spider-Man books were in a state of continuity lock with the Spider-Clone Saga and Marvel wanted a book for fans who wanted a Spider-Man book that did not require buying EVERY Spider-Man book being published, in order to understand what was going on.
• Uncanny Avengers: Unless you have read Uncanny X-Force, don't expect to know what's happening beyond the introductory arc. The villains themselves are the result of a story arc from Uncanny X-Force and Wolverine's son is reintroduced with no explanation for who he is or his history for new readers, as are his associates. Unsurprisingly both Uncanny Avengers and Uncanny X-Force have the same writer.
• Archie Comics was forced to do this to Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) thanks to the Screwed by the Lawyers that lead to the Cosmic Retcon. However, Ian Flynn has said that while the first 251 issues have happened (and issues 248-251, part of Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Collide, will happen as it's part of the future) they have no bearing on the comic after #252. Just a few years later, the comic went into indefinite hiatus and was ultimately canceled entirely.
• The Boom Kids comics based on the old Disney Afternoon shows. Due to massive Continuity Porn, they'll only make total sense to people who've seen the shows — which Disney has barely aired at all in the past decade and not at all since 2006. If you're under 20, chances are you'll be confused from Issue One. Though, the 2019 launch of Disney+ has alleviated about 90% of the problem.
• One of the possible reasons Patriot has been Exiled from Continuity while the rest of the Young Avengers have thrived is because Eli's origins are closely tied to The Truth: Red, White & Black and The Crew, two lesser-known miniseries that have been out of print for over a decade, whereas almost all the other Young Avengers have much vaguer ties to the rest of the Marvel Universe.
• Runaways has long been prevented from experiencing a proper revival until Runaways (Rainbow Rowell) due to its format being such that it's very hard to explain the team's history in only a few sentences, especially when its members include the descendant of an ancient clan of dark wizards, the half-human son of Ultron, and a possible demigoddess from 19th-century Switzerland.
• Vampirella: Happened with the Brandon Jerwa run of Vampirella in Dynamite. Ben introduced many characters from the old Warren and Harris comics which Dynamite fans would not have been familiar with as well as a cosmic conflict between Order and Chaos that involves science fiction elements as well as time travel. This resulted in the Gainax Ending of the first Dynamite series and a complete continuity reboot.
• Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash rather blatantly gives the impression of expecting readers to have seen all of the Evil Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th films that had been released at that point. This is especially made apparent in the follow-up miniseries Nightmare Warriors, where several characters from the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies are brought back, but have their experiences with and connections to Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees given brief mentions at the most.
• Ever since 2020, Italian Disney comics decided to introduce a very serrated conrinuity between multiple stories. This often results into story arcs that are sequels of eachother, often laden with footnotes reminding to anything published in the last 4-5 years... except for a few exceptions (usually found in stories by author Marco Gervasio, mostly featuring Paperinik), which feature recurring Callbacks that require a perfect knowledge of stories from the late 60's-early 70's (in particular the first 10 appearances of Paperinik).

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