Fanon Discontinuity/Newspaper Comics

Unlike other media, Newspaper Comics are generally intended to run six to 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.

Examples of Fanon Discontinuity/Newspaper Comics include:

Fanon Discontinuity

• Most fans of For Better or For Worse pretend that Liz never married Anthony.
• A lot of fans tend to totally ignore the earliest years of Peanuts, 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 five 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 strips hallmarks. The strip morphs into canon somewhere during the mid- to late '50s.
  • Another set of Peanuts fans are fine with the earliest strips, but consider the last few years of the strip (when nearly all characters but Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Linus have disappeared and they take a backseat to Snoopy 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 of at the relative happy ending of the birth of her and her husband Les' child, Summer, in 2005.