5 Comics Continuations Even Better Than The TV Shows They Come From

It’s an unfortunate truth about entertainment: television shows end. Sometimes, shows end because they’ve run their small-screen course. Other times, they’re cancelled too soon, leaving fans to wonder what comes next for the characters and storylines they’ve become invested in. For a great many of shows, the series finale is truly the end of the line. but every so often there’s more to be said and what should be the end is really merely a chapter and there’s much more story to tell.

For those shows, that sometimes means a continuation on the pages of comics. One of the most recent examples of this is The Expanse. The fan-favorite sci-fi series was cancelled by Amazon after six total seasons but with plenty more story to tell and last year, BOOM! Studios picked things up with The Expanse: A Little Death. But while the graphic novel didn’t necessarily live entirely up to expectations, there are some comics continuations of shows that are actually quite good — and almost better than the original shows themselves.

5) Batman: The Adventures Continue

Picking up from the end of the animated The New Batman Adventures (which was itself a continuation of Batman: The Animated Series), Batman: The Adventure Continues helped fill in some of the gaps from the original animated series while also incorporating characters that were never used in the animated series. On the whole, Batman: The Adventures Continue really helped not only continue the adventures, as its name suggests, but really fleshed out the overall mythos and world of the DCAU.

Part of what makes Batman: The Adventures Continue so good is that it’s done by the producers of the original animated series, Paul Dini and Alan Burnett as well as Ty Templeton, who worked on other comics inspired by Batman: The Animated Series. The result is a comics continuation that fits in seamlessly with the show fans already love.

4) Jericho

Jericho has a strange history. The CBS series debuted in 2006 and followed the residents of a fictional Kansas small town dealing with an unexpected nuclear war that has cut them off from the rest of the world. However, despite initial buzz, it was cancelled after one season, prompted a huge fan campaign that got it renewed for a second season, only to then be cancelled again with a lot of story left to tell. And that’s where comics stepped in.

Jericho got two more seasons on the pages of comics thanks to IDW in 2009 (Season 3) and 2012 (Season 4).  Season 3 picked up the show’s cliffhanger ending and pushes the story further, wrapping up the storylines from the series including revealing how the nuclear attacks in Season 1 came about, while Season 4 pulled things a bit further together while leaving some plot points for future stories to exist. It’s a rare case where the show creators and writers got to work out the ideas they had for the television series and is a great supplement for fans.

3) Angel: After the Fall

When Angel, a spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ended after five seasons on a cliffhanger it was frustrating for fans who would have liked some closure. Fortunately, they got it with Angel: After the Fall. The IDW series was written by Bryan Lynch and plotted with series creator Joss Whedon, making the events of the comic a true, canonical continuation.

What makes Angel: After the Fall so great is that it isn’t just a short series to wrap things up. While the series began as a 12-issue limited series, that expanded to 17 issues and then turned into a full-on ongoing series. It ultimately ran for 44 total issues and fully gave the series new life and depth. What is also interesting about Angel: The Fall is that it got its own spin-off comic: Spike.

2) Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight

Much like Angel: After the Fall is a canonical continuation of Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight is a canonical continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Published by Dark Horse, the series was created by Joss Whedon, who actually wrote some of the series along with a number of other writers.

The comic series was very faithful to the series and was able to get a little darker than the television series ever could, but that actually in some ways makes it almost better than the television show. The success of Season Eight saw more “seasons” arrive in comics form, including a reboot from BOOM! Studios that began in 2019.

1) Smallville: Season 11

When Smallville ended after 10 seasons, there was one thing that left fans just a little bit disappointed about the end of the long-running series: they didn’t really get to see Tom Welling’s Clark Kent really be Superman. Fortunately, comics came to the rescue. The DC Comics published series maintained the continuity of Smallville following its finale, picking up six months after he first suited up

The series finally gave fans a chance to see this particular take on Superman in action and even brought in other characters from the show, uniquely blending them with the more mainstream DC Comics versions. It made for a great way to continue the series as well as deliver to fans the one thing they really wanted making it the best of both worlds.

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