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  • ️Sat Jul 13 2024

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ArcFatigue/ComicBooks

Arc Fatigue

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Arc Stall

Examples 

  • Batman:
    • The Knightfall story arc (including its two "sequels", KnightQuest and KnightsEnd) dragged on for about a year and a half — and that's not even counting the buildup that began months before the arc took off, with plenty of Early-Bird Cameos and Chekhov's Guns... or the aftermath, including the story arcs Prodigal and Troika, which took another year or more to wrap up quite a few loose ends. The story also crossed over into every Batman title. All told, the Knightfall saga cast its shadow over the Batman mythos from 1992 to 1996 and encompassed more than 200 individual comics. Worst of all, untold numbers of fans hated it.
    • This is one of the biggest criticisms of Tom King's run on Batman: it was originally supposed to last 100 issues, and the story arcs were seemingly stretched out to fit. Batman and Catwoman getting engaged got over a year of buildup, with the series dedicating itself to featuring their relationship and impending wedding for seventeen straight issues plus a "Prelude to the Wedding" tie-in miniseries, before finally ending at Issue #50 with Catwoman abandoning Batman at the altar and the status quo being restored. Later came "Knightmares", a five-month-long arc where Batman lies in a machine hallucinating his worst fears one at a time. The run was ultimately shortened to 85 issues, but even the final story arc "City of Bane" spent whole issues with Batman and Catwoman working out their relationship on a beach, as opposed to the fairly urgent main plot (Bane taking over Gotham City and controlling an army of villains).
  • Brian Michael Bendis's decompressed style of storytelling tends to turn any arc into this, primarily because it involves a lot of issues where... nothing happens, only to be resolved suddenly in the last issue. The end result is readers screaming "Get on with it!" even for relatively brief six-issue arcs:
  • Dark Reign. Hope you liked the patently ludicrous idea of America willingly giving Norman Osborn complete control, because every issue of every Marvel book in 2009 dealt with nothing but how Norman Osborn controls the world.
  • Crisis Crossover Forever Evil (2013) ended up falling into arc fatigue. The main reason was that Trinity War, an event DC had been shilling for over a year, turned out to merely be a lead-in to Forever Evil. Add in a generally sluggish pace magnified by the main series being delayed — the seventh issue came three months after the sixth — and you had readers making a lot of jokes about the title.
  • The "Thy Kingdom Come" arc in Justice Society of America. It's actually a rather well-written arc, but it's pretty padded out (the three specials towards the end could have easily been worked into the main issues). It took up almost all of (if not every) 2008 issue of the title.
  • Sláine:
    • The Time Killer arc, which represented a sudden Genre Shift into science fiction, ended up lasting three years when the series as a whole had only been running for one year at that point anmd had largely been episodic. Time Killer mostly consisted of Sláine and co. walking down dark corridors and fighting hordes of Mooks while being fed exposition about a confusing sci-fi cosmology that wasn't even consistent from issue to issue. Naturally, most events from this era were never referenced again, and when they were, they were retooled to better fit into the Celtic Mythology inspired fantasy setting that the series would eventually become known for. (eg. the Dev-Els and Ang-Els were changed from being extradimensional Starfish Aliens powered by strong emotions into more conventional fantasy Elves, and the Ever-Living Ones became reclusive immortal Druids instead of half-alien, time-travelling cosmic defenders of the Earth who wore weird hats).
    • The Brutannia Chronicles, the series' penultimate arc, began as a gorgeously illustrated character study of Sláine at his lowest, delving into aspects of his psyche that hadn't really been explored before. Most readers welcomed this as a refreshing change, as the stories preceding it had been critcised for being bog standard action romps without much new to offer. Unfortunately, the arc ended up overstaying its welcome, lasting a whopping four years, and by the end of it, Sláine came across as being unreasonably mopey and immature rather than tortured or troubled, being driven to Heroic BSoD territory by posthumous family drama that didn't actually effect him in the slightest.
  • There were a couple of these in Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
    • A plot of Tails being the Ancient Walker's The Chosen One was hinted at in the comic's early days, and then continued to drag on for years on end, with most stuff related to it merely being teased or hinted at. When the story was finally the focus of the 150th issue Milestone Celebration, the result (Tails joining forces with his counterparts from parallel universes to fight Mammouth Mogul) might have sounded cool on paper, but in execution, it turned into one of the comic's most infamous examples of Narm and was considered, at best, an underwhelming climax for a story that had been moving in slow motion for so long. It was hinted that would be even more to the storyline, but when Ian Flynn shortly thereafter took over as headwriter for the comic, he ended up putting an effective stop to it as a part of his extensive rework of the comic.
    • The "Iron Dominion" arc. A saga that lasted well over a year, encompassing 17 issues, and left even die-hard fans of the series and its writer screaming for it to end. Why? Two things are universal: it suffered from a grievous overabundance of pacing issues and Snap Backs, mostly through the heroes and villains taking turns holding the Idiot Ball.
    • There's also the "Mecha Sally Arc", which also encompassed 17 issues and last well over a year. Tragic thing, though, is that the Arc didn't get to actually end due to the book going through a major lawsuit that ultimately ended in a rather complicated settlement, forcing the comic to instigate a continuity reboot right when Mecha Sally finally got captured by the heroes.
    • Although the clear winner for this trope in Archie Sonic is the Shattered World Crisis, an incredibly loose adaptation of Sonic Unleashed that officially began in Issue 257 and then ended after 30 issues, taking up three entire years of the comic! Although this can be somewhat justified as the whole arc was meant to be a Framing Device for smaller stories that would provide quick Worldbuilding for the comic after the forced reboot erased the then established world-building. And things probably wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for Worlds Unite interrupting the story and Archie Comics delaying the release of the book for the entire winter of 2016, making the arc last even longer than it should've.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW)'s lead writer Ian Flynn freely admits to Writing for the Trade, so some of this may have been inevitable.
    • While the first arc more or less avoided this, the following Metal Virus storyline dragged on for over a year, which may not have been so bad if said arc didn't mostly involve the heroes constantly losing everything they have, lovable characters turning, being horrifically broken, or otherwise suffering, and the villains being borderline invincible. It was so dark that some readers found it hard to care what happened, and those fans who enjoyed the drama admitted it was starting to wear out its welcome after about eight full issues of it. The fact that the last few issues of the arc were subjected to mass Schedule Slip due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic didn't help matters. By the time the arc finally came to an end in late September 2020, it had lasted 21 issues (#13-32, plus the 2020 Annual one-off) — nearly two-thirds of the entire comic's run up to that point!
    • The very next arc, detailing the mystery of Belle the Tinkerer's origin, also suffered from arc fatigue. While it's much shorter, spanning eight issues in all, the Driving Question's answer was obvious from the start: Belle's creator is Dr. Eggman himself, specifically when he had amnesia earlier in the comic. Yet more Schedule Slip during the winter and spring of 2021 took its toll on the arc's pacing, and even after the "mystery" was solved, Belle's full Dark and Troubled Past still wasn't revealed until Issue 44 — almost a year after her debut ten issues prior. All this contributed to Belle's divisive status among fans, especially compared to other new characters such as Tangle and Whisper.
  • Spider-Man:
    • The Clone Saga was originally supposed to be a six-month arc, but after initial sales were good, Marvel's Marketing Department forcefully stretched out the story by nearly three years.
    • The Superior Spider-Man (2013) arc lasted nearly fifty issues, or a year and a half in real time. By the end, even people who had liked the premise were pretty tired of Spider-Man acting like a jerk and normally competent characters completely failing to notice Spidey was acting nothing like himself due to being possessed by Dr. Octopus.
    • And before all of them, there was the original Hobgoblin mystery, which suffered from endless fake-outs as well as changing writers with differing ideas about who should be under the mask until the readers and creators just wanted it to be over. Eventually, having killed off their only viable suspect, the creators revealed that it was the dead guy after all. And then almost twenty years later, a Retcon by the original writer resolved the whole thing rather more satisfactorily.
  • Superman:
    • The New Krypton arc unfortunately went down this path. The introduction of a wholly new population of Kryptonians was a strong and daring idea. The entire status quo of the Superman family was reworked and people were pleasantly surprised that writers had actually done something with the eternal MacGuffin that was the Bottle City of Kandor. But at some point along the way, it became apparent that the story was not going anywhere, that the entire World of New Krypton title was in a holding pattern while the associated titles (Superman, Action Comics, Supergirl, later Adventure Comics) were engaged in crossover storylines. In the end, most of the arc served as setup for successive event stories rather than a story in and of itself.
    • Superman was killed off because Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was in production and the executives wanted to have them marry at the same time in both media, leading to a stalled marriage arc. This led to The Death of Superman which, if you include the return, ran over a year, generating huge sales and leading the writers to run long event arcs for the remainder of the decade at which point the fans were finally tired of it.
  • Teen Titans:
    • Titans Hunt was a complex and long story. It began with their members being kidnapped and Deathstroke hired to rescue them. Then we get a new villain society, a cheap Wolverine expy, Golden Eagle dying out of nowhere, a flying sheet, an unneeded trip to Russia, Cyborg turned into a complete robot, a new team of Titans from the future trying to kill Troia, and so on, and so on…
    • The Culling in the New 52. The first eight issues (most of a year) of both Teen Titans (2011) and Superboy (2011) were built to get to this crossover with Legion Lost, and at the end, they don't even manage to defeat the bad guy.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW): While generally enjoyed, the Mutant Town arc was seen by some fans as dragging on after a while, since the series shifted into a quasi-Slice of Life format as the Turtles and their allies settled into their new situation, with no immediate movement for the Myth Arc in the meantime. What's more, nothing particularly significant even happened until the introduction of Dr. Barlow and Venus.
  • Transformers:
    • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye has had brushes with this on a few occasions:
      • The Elegant Chaos arc dragged a bit, not due to length or quality issues (it's only three issues long and has a lot of plot-important events) but because unexpected problems IDW encountered that resulted in issues suffering delays. This meant that there were massive gaps between issues and the plot-heavy nature of the arc meant that nothing could be skipped.
      • The Scavenger plotline sometimes gets accused of arc fatigue. The problem being that there are fairly large gaps between the Scavenger-focused arcs, so events and plot points set-up for them don't get paid off until about ten issues or so later.
      • The Transformers: Dark Cybertron crossover event isn't this for The Transformers: Robots in Disguise but it did cause fatigue for MTMTE. Whereas the crossover wrapped up a bunch of plotlines for RID, the events and characters in MTMTE don't really have any link to the crossover's driving force. Thus the crossover is a massive Plot Detour that just created a huge wait between Seasons 1 and 2 of MTMTE. By the end, the only things the crossover accomplished for MTMTE was the introduction of several important characters, only two of whom couldn't have just been introduced in a normal MTMTE arc.
    • The Nexus Prime storyline in Transformers: Timelines took a total of nine years to finish, thanks in no small part to Hasbro taking custody of the Thirteen for their future plans with the franchise, forcing Nexus Prime to be Exiled from Continuity for five years straight. This was eventually concluded with another arc that suffered this, the plot of Invasion, the comic story released in 2012 that saw the Classics universe being destroyed and its characters ending up in Shattered Glass, that didn't see proper continuation for a good three years.
  • Ultimate Spider-Man arcs tend to get accused of suffering from this due to Bendis' ridiculously slow pacing.
  • X-Men:
    • Many of the X-Men's outer space stories feel like this since they're always a departure from the book's mutant theme and are almost always economy-sized story arcs.
    • Many fans were hoping the Phoenix: Endsong miniseries would be the last Phoenix story after writers ran the concept into the ground. It wasn't.
    • Fall of X started in june of 2023 and ended in may of 2024. The problem was that the pacing was horrific, with very little happening in the first 8 months and then moving at a breakneck pace in the last 3.
  • The "Back From the Dead" arc from X-Statix, in which a generic celebrity (executive meddled from the planned Princess Diana) suddenly returns from the dead and, for no clear reason, takes over the team and forces them to do charity work, dragged on for months thanks to Marvel's Executive Meddling, and it seemed increasingly evident that Peter Milligan had no idea where to go with it. It almost singlehandedly killed the series (the move to the Marvel Knights line and the lackluster subsequent crossover with the Avengers finished the job).

Myth Stall

Examples 

  • Injustice: Gods Among Us is a tie-in prequel comic of the video game of the same name that has continued publication years after the game's release and has received general criticism from readers due to the Foregone Conclusion nature of the story and the overall feeling the story is loaded with Padding to fill the 5-year gap between the events that triggered the story and the beginning of the video game. For example, Year Three's climax is a stretched out fight between Trigon and Mr. Myxptlk that begins unraveling reality beginning on Issue #17 until the end, lasting longer than it has any right to according to readers and by the fact no matter what happens, the end result of that fight is moot since continuity demands everything will be back to normal.
  • XIII is infamous in Europe. The story is about an amnesiac man who's found on the beach and has the number XIII on his collarbone. The first book came out in 1984. XIII discovers his identity in the fourth that came out in 1988 but then the fourteenth reveals that this identity may not be actually the true one. It's not until the penultimate album (2007) that his true identity is revealed.
  • A common criticism of X-Men is that the mutants are no closer to their dream of normal/mutant equality than when they started. And whenever they do come close — say, the time in the early 2000s when an influx of mutants went public and the books started to explore what it actually means to be a minority — the Reset Button gets hit hard. They come close again after Avengers vs. X-Men, where they're getting a lot more support overall and Cyclops has been getting hero worship because of using the Phoenix to nearly solve world hunger, stabilize the climate, and force peace between warring nations. However, the Reset Button was hit yet again with the divisive Inhumans vs. X-Men. And the Krakoa Era (where they had their own island nation and even conquered Mars) ended just the same.