Canon Discontinuity/Comic Books

It's always a Doombot.

Examples of Canon Discontinuity in Comic Books include:

DC Comics

Many fans rejected the Character Derailment of Dr. Leslie Thompkins, ultra-pacifist doctor and well-loved member of Batman's supporting cast, and decided that she absolutely did not allow a teenage girl to die an agonizing death in order to teach Bruce some sort of lesson about the dangers of vigilantism. It was later retconned out of existence with the revelation that Stephanie Brown didn't actually die. Leslie just lied about it and smuggled her out of the country.
- Not sure if that really qualifies as an author's saving throw, as it's still pretty far removed from how the character has behaved at any point in time prior to that story arc.
- One of the writers of the above events snapped at fans and told them that "You're going to buy the comics anyway!" Probably true, but it increased their disgust.
Many Hellblazer fans—including, it's becomingly increasingly clear, several of its writers—reject much of Brian Azzarello's run. Constantine was not removed completely from his usual setting simply because Azzarello couldn't be bothered to research that setting. There were no story arcs largely revolving around Prison Rape, no underground redneck pornography rings, and no sadomasochistic gay revenge fantasies designed simply to shock. And that bit with the dog during Azzarello's run didn't happen, either.
Lampshaded in the Grant Morrison run on Animal Man - Animal Man meets the previous version of himself from another continuity during a peyote trip. The same storyline has him meet Grant Morrison later in the series, at which point Morrison explains that the continuity differences come from different writers writing the same character for different comics. It also features a character - Psycho Pirate - who remembers all the alternate continuities that have ever existed, and goes crazy as a result.
In the finale of The New Titans, Starfire is revealed to be pregnant. It's never mentioned again.
A storyline in Justice League Europe revealed that Doctor Light's Ice Queen behavior was the result of chemicals in a popular soda she enjoyed drinking, leading to the character becoming more personable once she kicked her habit. This was completely ignored by later writers, who brought back her rude, condescending personality with no real explanation.
The 2006 series of The Warlord has been largely ignored in The DCU continuity. With the 2009 series continuing the original series, it seems the 2006 series has slipt completely into the realm of Canon Discontinuity.
- And Mike Grell's 1992 mini-series off-handedly dismissed the death of Tara which occurred in issues after Grell left the original series.
- And the new series seems to ignore Mariah's decision to willingly partner herself with a man who physically abused her. Grell has restored her to her original Action Girl Adventurer Archaeologist persona.
Countdown to Final Crisis was almost discontinuity. Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers led into Final Crisis but Countdown did not. However, Morrison (who also wrote Final Crisis) was forced to cave in and acknowledge Countdown via a time loop scenario: Darkseid wasn't killed at the end of Countdown but thrown backwards in time and possessed the mobster who would become Boss Dark Seid, resurrecting his minions in human bodies and consolidating his power base while waiting for his "death" so that he could kill his son and bring the corrupted-by-regular-Darkseid Mary Marvel into his inner circle.
- Alternatively, Darkseid fell backwards through time after the events of Jim Starlin's Death of the New Gods... but Morrison has stated that the true final war of the New Gods was fought on a higher plane than mere mortals could comprehend, and that both Countdown and DoTNG were merely the mortal characters'/writers'/artists' hopelessly limited, three-dimensional perception of what really happened.
Years before the Continuity Snarl of Hawkman, there was a story, in the original Silver Age 1960s Hawkman series, which threatened to reveal Carter Hall's identity as Hawkman. He ended up protecting his identity but publicly revealing that he's a space alien. Needless to say, this was ignored later.
An odd example is Sovereign Seven, a team of humanoid aliens created by Chris Claremont for DC Comics. They were part of the Genesis Crisis Crossover, and at one point Power Girl became a member of the team. And then, in the final issue, it turned out they were entirely fictional within the DCU. This appears to have been for the opposite reason to most Canon Discontinuity; Claremont wanted to separate his (creator-owned) characters from The Verse once his book was cancelled.
The 1990s Metal Men miniseries reveals that they are actually human minds in robot bodies and has Will Magnus become Veridium, a Metal Man based on a fictional metal. This change was not well received and quietely dropped from continuity, along with the Metal Men themselves. When Magnus appears as one of the main characters of 52 he refers to the '90's series as hallucinations resulting from a psychotic break, and now takes regular anti-depressants to help keep his mind in one piece.
DC Comics has a series of books entitled The Greatest Stories Ever Told, each featuring one character or theme. A Batman volume came out in the late 80s, followed by a volume 2 in the early 90s. V2 was released opposite Batman Returns, and features all Catwoman and Penguin stories. Decades later, DC revived its Greatest Stories series, reprinting the first Batman volume ... and produced an entirely new Greatest Batman Stories Volume 2, shoving the previous V2 into no-man's land. (By amusing coincidence, the first volume of Batman stories was the second Greatest Stories volume overall (after Superman), and thus had Greatest Stories Volume Two on the spine. So, at a casual glance, all three different books appear to be "Volume Two" of the same series.)
DC ran an event called Origins & Omens, which had each book featuring an ominous short story hinting at future plots. The Teen Titans story featured several major revealtions, such as Blue Beetle kissing Wonder Girl, Sun Girl becoming pregnant with Inertia's child, and Kid Devil being turned into a withered husk. With the exception of Static joining the team, literally all of these plot points were ignored.

Marvel Comics

Submitted for your consideration: The Crossing, The Avengers crossover where Iron Man is revealed to be a sleeper agent working for Kang, commits cold blooded murder and attacks his fellow Avengers. The Avengers desperate to stop their rampaging teammate recruit a teenage Tony Stark from an alternate universe to help them defeat his older, more experienced counterpart. This teenager then takes over the role of Iron Man and fights crime as the new Iron Man. Kurt Busiek tried applying Canon Discontinuity in Avengers Forever to wipe away this stain on The Avengers mythos, but it was totally unnecessary. Nobody at Marvel will ever admit to remembering teen Tony.
This seems to happen to Spider-Man often:
- One series written out of continuity was Spider-Man: Chapter One, which ineptly updated several bits of Spider-Man's origin; for instance, the Sandman and Norman Osborn were now related, as a way to explain their similar-looking hair.
- In the one-shot The Osborn Journal, Norman Osborn claimed in his private journal to have had nothing to do with Aunt May's death in Amazing Spider-Man #400. Two years later, it's revealed he kidnapped her and had an actress fake her death, with no mention of his earlier claim otherwise. Marvel's Spider Girl comic, however, sticks to the Journal's perspective rather soundly, and the real May Parker is said to have been the one who died in Issue 400.
- Marvel's vague statements either took Trouble out of continuity or implied that it never was in continuity. This series depicted Peter's Aunt May as an unwed teenager and implied she was really his mother.

I hope that Marvel readers will be proud to call Trouble the origin of Spider-Man.

- Mark Millar ultimately tried to salvage Trouble as canon in the last issue, trying to establish it as taking place in the Ultimate Marvel Universe via having reference be made to the Ultimate Marvel version of Bucky Barnes (who survived the war and became a famous writer). However, no one else has bothered to pick up on it and it's still pretty much a stand-alone story.
- Either way, Trouble puts itself out of continuity through Writers Cannot Do Math: if May was a teenager when Peter was born, how is it that she's in her sixties (616 Universe) or fifties (Ultimate Universe) fifteen years later?
In the rebooted series The Hulk, an angry response to writer/artist John Byrne's reboot of the title character, particularly his "Man of Steeling" of the Hulk in Annual #1, was responded to in the title's letters page by something along the lines of, "When you not like what happen, do what Hulk do: Pretend it never happened." Thus, the six issues and an annual were simply removed out of existence.
- During Peter David's "Tempest Fugit" storyline, one line discontinuitized the entirety of previous writer Bruce Jones' 42 issue run.
A particularly brutal version happened in the first issue of the ClanDestine/X-Men mini-series. In one line of dialog, Alan Davis (ClanDestine's creator and artist/writer on the original Clan mini) rendered the entire second half of the original mini (i.e. The Issues He Didn't Write) as All Just a Dream.
New Avengers: Illuminati #3 has been treated as such, due to the sheer level of Critical Research Failure on the part of Bendis regarding the original Secret Wars series and Beyonder.
Orson Scott Card's Ultimate Iron Man revamps Tony Stark in a way that was ignored by every other comic featuring Ultimate Iron Man, creating Continuity Snarl. Mark Millar explained it as that Ultimate Iron Man is a Show Within a Show in the Ultimate Universe.
At one point in X Men, the lineup at the time were killed and resurrected, making them invisible to cameras, and this is treated treated almost as a second mutant power in the next few dozen issues. When Chris Claremont left, however, this was completely forgotten, and the lineup at the time - which includes Wolverine, of all people - are seen on camera without comment from then on. His run in 2000 makes a brief mention of this fact with Rogue, but this only serves to muddy the waters further - where it's been mentioned at all, it's explained as a side effect of the Siege Perilous, except that Wolverine and Longshot never went through it, and Rogue did.
Nextwave is probably the oddest example of this trope ever made. Officially, it is Canon Discontinuity, but most fans (and quite a few writers!) treats the act of making it discontinuity as a discontinuity in and by itself. This has caused some of the lunacy contained within the series (mainly the parts containing Aaron Stack and the other team members) to spill into the Marvel mainstream.
Secret Invasion ignored the X-Statix Presents: Dead Girl mini-series, where the Avengers member Mockingbird appeared in the afterlife. Invasion established that Mockingbird had never really died in the first place, making the series moot. However, the series' artist Nick Dragotta did later imply the events of the series were somehow still canon when discussing the new Miss America he created for the Vengeance mini-series, making the Dead Girl's canonicity difficult to determine.

Other publishers

The Gargoyles comic, written by the series' original head writer and officially promoted by Disney, ignores the third season, save for the first episode, which it largely retells with the first two issues.
The writers of the Disney Adventure Power Rangers SPD comic conveniently Retcon the reasons behind A-Squad's defection, turning it into Mind Control instead of a voluntary Face Heel Turn.
The infamous "25 Years Later" arc of the Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog series depicted two different alternate futures for Mobius, one of which was ironically created as a result of attempts to change the other. Neither one was mentioned again after the arc ended. Even more egregiously, the character of Lara-Su, Knuckles' and Julie-Su's future daughter and a major player in the arc, vanished along with it, even though her character was introduced in yet another alternate future story written before "25 Years Later".
- The "X Years Later" timeline was revisited in a Sonic Universe story, while a later one featured the alternate version of Lara-Su (who was a separate person from the one who appeared in "25 Years Later".
Jon Sable Freelance: Creator Mike Grell's later uses of Jon Sable have ignored the 27 issues of Sable written by Marv Wolfman.
The third volume of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book, published by Image Comics as the official continuation to the Mirage-produced series, was completely ignored when TMNT co-creator Peter Laird returned to write volume 4.
The "Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" story in Strontium Dog has explicitly relegated all of Peter Hogan's stories to the realm of In-Universe Fanfic. Garth Ennis' contributions seem to have actually happened.
Devil's Due Publishing's entire seven-year run of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (including numerous side titles), intended to be a continuation of the original Marvel storyline, was segregated to its own continuity after IDW Publishing took away the comic book rights from DDP. IDW now publishes its own continuation of the Marvel run (penned by its original writer Larry Hama), reprinting the Devil's Due run under the title of G.I. Joe: Disavowed.

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