Unlike other media, Newspaper Comics are generally intended to run six or seven days a week for years or even decades, until the cartoonist either retires or dies, and possibly beyond that. As a result, this medium is particularly vulnerable to Canon Discontinuity for a variety of reasons. A previously entertaining comic may become a tiresome mouthpiece for the cartoonist's ideology. Cartoonists may grow bored with their creation yet continue under executive pressure or financial duress, leading to uninspired retreads of old ideas. Or the new cartoonist for an existing strip may pale in comparison to the original.
Note: Do not post examples of personal discontinuity. Examples should only be of groups of fandoms.
- Peanuts:
- A lot of fans tend to totally ignore the earliest years' material, on the grounds that it is absolutely nothing like the Peanuts that everyone knows about, especially character-wise (Lucy and Schroeder, and later Linus, being babies when Charlie Brown was about 5 is one example that is completely incompatible with the rest of the strip); but also because the tone was utterly different — much cheerier, with none of the strip's hallmarks. The strip morphs into canon somewhere during the second half of the 1950s.
- Another set of Peanuts fans are fine with the earliest strips, but consider the last decade of the strip (when nearly all characters but Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Franklin, Lucy and Linus had disappeared and they take a backseat to Spike, Andy and Olaf, and Rerun Van Pelt) to have never happened.
- One of Funky Winkerbean's longest ongoing storylines was Lisa Moore's struggle with breast cancer, something that she apparently emerged victorious from in 1999. The generally optimistic moral of the story, namely that breast cancer was an experience that could be fought against and won with the proper diagnosis, medicine, and the support of family and friends, filled with vibes of hope and good humor, was lauded by numerous doctors and breast cancer survival groups. Thus, then, it is of little surprise that so many fans of the strip do not accept the later 2006 sequel storyline, when the cancer came back in a much more serious form eventually leading to Lisa's death, complete with a much more Wangst-filled treatment of the condition and a general sense of depression hanging over the proceedings. As Lisa's death had a profound impact on the storyline, it seems that most draw the line at the relative happy ending of the birth of her and her husband Les' child, Summer, in 2005.
- For Better or for Worse:
- Fans of Garfield tend to ignore anything past the late 1990s, when there stopped being story lines and the strip became Strictly Formula.
- There are fans of Beetle Bailey who completely ignore the earliest years of the strip in which the title character was a college student rather than being in the military. His stint in the military was basically a side story that never ended, which is why the camp is more like eternal basic training than a real base.
