Outlived Its Creator

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Maybe the dead guy has a better agent.
"You can try to write the 'last Batman story'. But the thing is, people have been writing Batman stories for longer than I've been alive. They will be writing Batman stories after I'm dead. Batman is actually more real than me."
—Grant Morrison

If a series becomes popular enough, not even an Author Existence Failure can stop it. If a series keeps going after its original creator has died, then it has Outlived Its Creator.

Series that continue on after Author Existence Failure are the ultimate Franchise Zombies. A deceased creator cannot complain about any changes to the casting, style or creative direction of the series.

A series which has outlived its creator can (and often is) put through retcons, Character Derailment, Executive Meddling, etc. Sometimes this is simply for financial reasons; other times, it's because the current series-runner is also Running the Asylum. It can even be accidental.

When a series outlives its creator, the fans usually watch whoever's continuing it like vultures, waiting to swoop down and proclaim They Changed It, Now It Sucks! On the other hand, if the original creator had Protection From Editors and was driving the series into the floor, the Author Existence Failure may be good for the franchise: there's a chance for the series to be turned around.

Examples of Outlived Its Creator include:

Works by a single creator

Anime and Manga


Comic Books

Literature

  • The Oz books: the official series consists of 40 books, of which over half were written by other authors after L. Frank Baum's death. Even the famous film adaptation was made about 20 years after he passed away.
  • Sherlock Holmes
  • V. C. Andrews' Dollganger series.
  • The Wheel of Time series, with the added benefit of having been unfinished when the Author Existence Failure struck.
  • Narnia - at least since the live-action movies raised its profile.
    • The works of C. S. Lewis in general: there have been Lewis books printed after his death, and some people have wondered whether he actually wrote all of those.
  • James Bond. Ian Fleming died while the third movie was in production. over 20 movies followed, not to mention books and video games (some with original plots).
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams had been working on the movie for a long time, however since a sixth book was published eight years after his death, it counts).
    • The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases of the radio series (based on the later books) also came after his death. It remains to be seen if And Another Thing... will become the Hexual Phase...
  • Jason Bourne.
  • The Little House books. Laura Ingalls Wilder's will stipulated that her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, would hold the rights until her death; after which, the rights were supposed to go to a local library in Missouri. Lane's heirs managed to get the rights back, and HarperCollins has resurrected the franchise with sequels, spinoffs and prequels.
  • Dune. Since Frank Herbert's death, Brian Herbert (Frank's son) and Kevin J. Anderson have written a number of prequels and sequels.
  • Three novels were added to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series by other authors and with permission from the Good Doctor's estate after he passed on to the Great Typewriter in the Sky.
  • Peter Pan had sequels produced after JM Barrie's Author Existence Failure, at least one of which was actually commissioned by his own estate.
  • The Boxcar Children series had only 19 books written by its original creator, Gertrude Chandler Warner. Then, over a decade after her death, Albert Whitman of Albert Whitman & Company resurrected the series, producing over 140 more books due to re-interest (including a kid-friendly cookbook). After Warner stopped writing them, continuity went right out the window and quality noticeably dropped.
  • The Godfather books.
  • The St. Clare's series by Enid Blyton. The St. Clare's series consisted of six novels that spanned the six years set in the school. Three books covered the first year, one for the second, one for the fourth, and one for the fifth. In 2000, Pamela Cox wrote two more St Clare's books, one set in the third year and one in the sixth; at least one was just a pastiche of previous plots with wildly out-of-character moments and anachronistic phrases.
    • Likewise, Pamela Cox wrote extra books for Blyton's Malory Towers series, even though the series was considered finished when Darrell Rivers, the main character, left the school in-story. The new books follow her younger sister, Felicity, and are again an Anachronism Stew, filled with modern phrases that would not have been used in The Fifties when the story was written.
  • Jody Lynn Nye is planning to continue Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures novels.
  • Even after Rex Stout's death, and what seemed to be Stout's final story in the series, Nero Wolfe picked up another author, Robert Goldsborough, who called it quits after writing seven additional stories.
  • Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser series has seen one new novel written by a different author after Leiber's death, although the new book is set between two of the original ones.
  • It's been almost forty years since J. R. R. Tolkien's death, and more of his works are still being sorted out and published, with profuse annotations, tweaks, and changes made by his son-cum-editor.
  • Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian is a prime example. Howard committed suicide at only thirty years and left a number of stories unfinished, leading first to posthumous collaborations and then later to full-blown original short stories and novels by other authors and an ongoing line of comic books.
  • Michael Kurland, a friend of Randall Garrett, wrote two novels about the Alternate History detective Lord Darcy and his sorcerous assistant after their creator's death.
  • The Mr. Men books were written by Roger Hargreaves until his death in 1988. His son took up writing them instead, but Roger's name continues to appear on all the covers, even of the new ones.
  • Bram Stoker passed away in 1912, Mary Shelley in 1851, yet Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster remain two of the most popular Public Domain Characters in modern fiction.

Live-Action TV


Music


Mythology

  • All of it.


Newspaper Comics

  • Dennis the Menace (the US one).
  • Blondie (which has been running since 1930)
    • Most of the older cartoon strips have outlived their original creators. Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and Krazy Kat are among the few exceptions. Peanuts is an especially notable aversion of this trope; the very last ever Peanuts strip ran one day before the death of the author, who specifically forbade anyone to continue the strip after his death.
    • On the other hand, the Peanuts TV specials continued after Charles Schulz's death. Bill Melendez, the director of nearly every Peanuts special since A Charlie Brown Christmas, was still in charge, but then he died too, which also failed to stop new Peanuts TV specials from being made.
  • The Comic Strip Doctor despises this trend in newspaper comics. He believes that keeping boring comics around long after their creators have moved on and the premise has run its course is what makes it next to impossible for talented newcomers to get into the business.
  • The two comic strips drawn by Jeff MacNelly, Shoe and Pluggers, are both examples of this. Jeff started the former in 1977, but handed Pluggers over to artist Gary Brookins only four years after starting it in 1993. When Jeff died in 2000, Brookins took over on Shoe, as well as many of the side jobs that Jeff had previously done (mainly political comic strips and the drawings in Dave Barry columns).
  • BC Johnny Hart's daughter and grandson continued the strip after he died.
  • Similarly, after The Family Circus creator Bill Keane died in November 2011, his son Jeff (who started inking and coloring the strip in the 2000s) continued to work on it.
  • Little Orphan Annie was continued by various other hands after Harold Gray's death in 1968, most successfully by Leonard Starr, who wrote and drew the strip from 1979 to 2000. In the hands of Starr's successor, Jay Maeder, the strip's popularity faltered, and it was cancelled in 2010, over forty years after its creator's death.
  • Popeye was created by E. C. Segar, who passed away in 1938; his creation is still popular nearly a century after his first appearance in a 1929 installment of Thimble Theatre.

Theater

  • The Ziegfeld Follies were kept going for two and a half decades after the death of famed producer Florenz Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld Follies The Movie gave a nod to this by having a prologue showing Ziegfeld in Fluffy Cloud Heaven.


Western Animation

  • Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and the rest of the gang, to the point where U.S. Copyright laws are being rewritten to prevent the original shorts becoming public domain.
    • In general, the entire Disney brand has outlived Walt Disney by quite a lot.
  • Looney Tunes. All of the original creators have since passed on, the last major one, Chuck Jones, having passed away in 2002. The original shorts are rarely played on TV today, but they live on through DVD collections, new shorts, and direct-to-DVD movies.
    • Looney Tunes is an interesting case: originally, these were comedic shorts preceding feature films on theaters—filler, in other words. The films are long forgotten, yet the shorts live on.
  • Hanna-Barbera characters have not only outlived the people who created them, but also the company which created them.
  • Alvin and The Chipmunks, well outlived their original creator, Ross "David Seville" Bagdasarian Sr., who passed away in 1972, and look likely to outlive his successor, son Ross Bagdasarian Jr. (born 1949).


Honorable Mentions

Works created by more than one author which have outlived at least one:

Anime and Manga

  • Doraemon was created by two cartoonists, Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko, who worked together under the pen-name Fujiko Fujio. Fujimoto died in 1996 and while the manga ended with his death, the anime still airs as of this day with more than 2,000 episodes made.
  • The Pokémon anime has managed to outlive Takeshi Shudo, the head writer of the original series (Kanto, Orange Islands, and Johto); he departed after Johto concluded and died in October 2010 while the anime was airing its fourth series.


Comic Books

  • Asterix (Written by Rene Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo, Uderzo taking over the writing as well after Goscinny's death)
    • And by extension, anything by "Goscinny and X". Goscinny worked as a writer for many artists.
  • Jack Kirby's dead, but the New Gods live on. Stan Lee's still alive and kicking. Steve Ditko might die, but we'd probably never know 'till years later.


Tabletop Games


Video Games

  • Metroid outlasted Gunpei Yokoi the producer of the first three games. The director of the original Metroid, Yoshio Sakamoto, is still alive and has been involved all of the recent games in some form or another.
  • The Wolfenstein franchise has outlived Silas Warner, the creator of the original DOS game Castle Wolfenstein. Although he wasn't involved with further games, he endorsed the use of the name.
  • Most anything to do with SNK, following its bankruptcy and acquisition by Playmore.
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