The Batlord

That's a perfectly valid approach. If all we had was soap opera style long running series I'm sure I'd be begging for more self-contained stories. But not every writer necessarily has a great original concept in them, or not every idea they might have that could be applied to a long running series needs to be an original concept. And some writers might just have stories for long running series that they just really want to make. I mean there's nothing wrong with fanfiction. It's just that it has a bad reputation because it's generally associated with amateurs.

Sure. It might not be exactly what you're looking for or expecting and most writers probably aren't walking encyclopedias of continuity but some writers absolutely do expand on old stories.

I mean Grant Morrison's Batman heavily features Damian Wayne as a new Robin who is the child of Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul, daughter of R'as al Ghul. Damian is a character who featured in like one panel in exactly one story from 1987 almost 20 years earlier where Batman and Talia got married for like a week before the whole thing fell through and Talia gave birth to a child who was given up for adoption at the end of the comic and never mentioned again until Grant Morrison started writing for Batman and ran with the ****ing idea.

Or Under the Red Hood where in the 80s there was a second Robin after Dick Grayson gave up being Robin to become Nightwing but the second Robin was murdered by the Joker but twenty years later they brought back that Robin as a Punisher style vigilante trying to prove that he was a better Batman than Batman

Or just look at how Jean Grey's death in the Dark Pheonix Saga has been upended countless times in the comics in a cycle that continues to this day.

Superhero comics are always recycling old story lines in new ways. It's part of the medium.

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