It's always a Doombot.
Fanon Discontinuity happens a lot in comic books, due to the many different writers that end up making stories for them, but there are just certain things that don't gel with their audiences to be considered canon.
Note 1: If you're going to list the events from a specific run on a certain comic, please list the events that you are ignoring, not the actual person writing for it, which would be ignoring real life events.
Note 2: Do not add personal examples. Examples should only be of groups of fandom.
Series with their own pages:
Examples:
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Other Comics
Titan Books
- Numerous Star Trek fans invert this trope and accept the comic "Countdown" (a prequel comic to the 2009 Star Trek) as canon. While it has been touted as the "official movie prequel" it should be noted that Roberto Orci (one of the writers of the film) has stated that it is not canon, and Paramount's studio policy only takes the television series and films as canon. Reasons for this, apart from the false impression that it's canon, include explanation of Nero's backstory and motivations, and a retcon of Data's death in the previous film Star Trek: Nemesis.
- Many fans of Image Comics like to pretend that most of the early stuff was never written, and that the characters were never Nineties Anti Heroes. Quite understandable.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
- Typically, you can break the Sonic The Hedgehog comics into three distinct eras: the Ken Penders era, the Karl Bollers era, and the Ian Flynn era. Fans of the first pretend the latter two don't exist; fans of the last pretend the former two don't exist; there are no fans of the middle era.
- Oh, and now there is the new continuity following Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Collide. To wit, following Ken Penders' lawsuit with Archie Comics & SEGA, a great deal of legal headaches and misplaced paperwork wound up revealing that characters created by writers prior to Ian Flynn did NOT belong to SEGA, meaning that the company would not want to deal in paying royalties for characters that should have belonged to them. So to save the comic, the entire continuity was scrapped and one which is more faithful to the video games was devised, leading to the expulsion of many characters, some well loved. To say that many fans weren't happy is a bit of an understatement...
- Spanning from this are some of the redesigns of the Freedom Fighters. Some are happy that the SatAm characters finally have designs to better fit the SEGA style after so long, others are decrying them. Sally's especially has a few diehard fans raging that she was given shorts of all things and has covered up significantly.
- Asterix: Most fans prefer to pretend Asterix and the Falling Sky never was (made easier by how everyone on Earth has their memory of the events erased in the end), and skip straight to Asterix and the Picts, made by the successor team. Other fans prefer to think that the series died with Goscinny, and ignore all the Uderzo-only books (the ones from Asterix and the Great Divide onwards).
- Fans of The Adventures of Tintin prefer to not talk about Tintin in the Congo, due to its racist and colonialist tone as well as animal cruelty, and to a lesser extent because Tintin's characterization in it doesn't fit with the later stories. Even Hergé himself was embarrassed by it. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is usually ignored by both fans and publishers due to being anti-communist propaganda and being drawn in monochrome. Tintin in America is sometimes but less often discounted largely because, in common with the previous two, it has a very disjointed plot than leaps from one place to the next with no guiding theme. Cigars of the Pharaoh or The Blue Lotus would then be the "real" start of the series. It helps that the early albums are not referenced much in later stories. And that these stories lack the series' fan-favorite supporting characters, since Herge retooled the series to include an extensive cast of close friends for his initially lonesome protagonist.
- A lot of Spirou & Fantasio fans like to pretend that Morvan and Munuera's run never happened. Doesn't help that it's probably been made so that it never happened canonically.
- Ever since Mélusine co-creator left, the series has been rocked with controversies and fans prefer to ignore any work made by the remaining creator. The major points of contentious are:
- Changing the format from a one-page gag to a full album-length story.
- Less focus on comedy and more on stories.
- Mélusine losing her magical powers and needed to have sex to regain them.
- Cancrelune committing suicide and ending-up in Hell.
Other Comics
- Sonic the Comic fans do this to comics that are just considered Mind Screw's or otherwise poor. Amy's Secret Past, which is extremely inconsistent with canon (and the "She's not naturally pink" thing pissed off some fans), and Bravehog (which is also extremely inconsistent and had horrible artwork) come to mind. There's also a select few fans who ignore the Sonic Adventure arc, or at least Johnny's death.
- There are also fans of the Sonic the Comic – Online! fanon continuation title who don't count Sonic's recent framing and status as a wanted fugitive hated and distrusted by most of his friends (except Tails), who all ought to know better by this point, having experianced situations before where Sonic was wrongfully blamed for things.
- You'd be hard-pressed to find a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan that will accept that April has always really been a living drawing, instead of their most normal ally or that Rat King was a thug that was endowed with magical powers by a tribunal of like beings (Bat King, Wolf Queen, etc.), instead of an insane homeless guy.
- On the inverse of this, while some fans agree with Peter Laird's decision to make them Canon Discontinuity, some fans will say of vol. 3 (also known as Urban Legends) that they absolutely could still be canon in at least Broad Strokes. The fact that both a fanmade ending and the much later official ending make efforts to tie it back to vol. 4 only helps with this.
- How many people treat the Sixth Doctor strip "The World Shapers" from Doctor Who Magazine, for its explanation of the Cybermen's origins (especially when compared to the Big Finish audio story Spare Parts, considered the definitive Cybermen origin story). Some fans also dismiss the same story because of the rather sad (albeit heroic) fate it depicts for Jamie. In the finale of the 2017 series of the programme, it was heavily implied the events of the World Shapers were also canon to the television series. Of course this is the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, with a canon that is very Broad Strokes.
- About any Vampirella fan who is old enough to have still read the Warren run (admittedly, they weren't defender of continuity either) will claim the Harris (now Dynamite) Vampirella is a person who just happens to have the same name, and the true Vampirella is still a space alien and not <insert yearly retcon here>.
- Firefly fans are split on the Boom! Studios comics. The Titan books and Dark Horse comics had some cross acknowledgements and are fairly well liked, but when Boom got the license, they didn’t make as much of an effort to make sure their books complied with things established by Dark Horse and sometimes even with things shown onscreen. This makes some treat Boom as an alternate continuity or just ignore them altogether. And then there are some who just ignore all the comics along with the end of Serenity where Wash died.
