[HowardC]

I really hate this kind of crap because as a casual comic book reader it makes it completely impossible for me to get into any series I want to read! Comic books, at least as an actual comic book (marvel and dc make all their money off of tv/movies and merchandising now days) are dying a slow death, never becoming fully main-stream like other mediums and the reason imho is this sort of crap. I have no problems with writers making long compaigns of universe altering arcs and crazy visits to alternate universes, but perhaps it's time for comic books to take a page from the more popular mediums and implement the "saturday morning cartoon" laws.

1. All characters shall remain in the same clothes, drawn exactly the same way forever!
If for some reason any of the character's costumes need to be changed, the series must end in leu of a new series starring the same characters.

2. Any problems or journeys involving parallel worlds or crossovers with other series are fine, but they must be COMPLETELY RESOLVED by the end of the story arc. By "resolved" I mean anything that happened must be wrapped up in such a way that anyone who missed the arc would never know it or could be filled in in a few seconds.

3. Main characters never age or die. If they do age or die, then the series must END!

I think a perfect example of how to properly do a strange, universe-altering story-arc is the recent "Angel: After the fall" I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but basically the way it is wrapped up, we are right back where we started when the tv series went off the air and the story-line doens't interfere with the ongoing buffy comic one bit.

In other words, the way to properly do a universe-altering comic is to not really alter the universe!