The Lost Generation Problem

In this minisode of Most Writers Are Fans, Terry steps back from writing craft to dig into something that's been on his mind as a lifelong comics fan: a phenomenon he's calling the Lost Generation Problem.

It starts personally. Terry came to comics in college through Geoff Johns' Teen Titans — Tim Drake, Conner Kent, Cassie Sandsmark — and fell in love with the energy of younger heroes still figuring out who they want to be. But over time, he noticed something troubling: those characters tend to vanish. A creative team wraps up, priorities shift, and a character with real momentum simply stops appearing. When they resurface, it's usually under a new writer with a rebooted status quo, and everything that came before has been quietly erased.

Cassie Sandsmark is the episode's through-line. After strong pre-New 52 characterization, she was reimagined under Scott Lobdell's New 52 run as a much darker figure — thorn-covered lasso, a suit that caused her constant pain — then disappeared entirely when Lobdell left. When Bendis brought her back in Young Justice, she was rebooted again, with the prior era treated as though it never happened. Both DC and Marvel repeat this pattern constantly. X-Men titles introduce new classes of young mutants with every creative era; when the run ends, most of them quietly fade. Jenny Hex, introduced in Bendis's Young Justice with genuine promise, hasn't been seen since.

The counterexamples are instructive. Miles Morales and Kamala Khan avoided this fate because Marvel decided they were priorities — pushed across games, animation, and team books. Magik has remained relevant since her debut because someone always champions her editorially. The difference isn't which characters are more interesting; it's whether anyone in power keeps fighting for them.

This is where the Lost Generation Problem becomes a Lost Generation Opportunity. Terry pitches a 12-issue Cassie Sandsmark miniseries built around her identity as Zeus's daughter: a Hercules-style trials arc culminating in a choice between ascending to godhood or staying on Earth with the life she's built. It's a story that maps directly onto something real for young readers. the pull between an extraordinary opportunity and the roots you've already put down.

The episode closes with Terry naming the real emotional cost of the Lost Generation Problem: the anxiety that sets in every time you invest in a new character. He loves what Eve Ewing is doing with young mutants in her X-Men run and is following Gail Simone's Outliers closely, but he's already bracing for the possibility that when those writers move on, those characters disappear too. His ask to Marvel and DC is simple: stop treating the end of a creative run as the end of a character's story.

Topics Covered:

• [0:00] Cold open
• [0:30] Terry's comics origin story: the Bruce Timm animated universe and Geoff Johns' Teen Titans
• [1:49] The New 52 and Scott Lobdell's reimagining of Cassie Sandsmark / Wonder Girl
• [3:08] Brian Michael Bendis's Young Justice and the erasure of prior continuity
• [4:19] Defining the Lost Generation Problem
• [5:23] The X-Men's recurring new class problem — and Chamber as a case study
• [6:26] Miles Morales, Kamala Khan, and Magik as examples of characters who escaped the cycle
• [8:11] Jaime Reyes / Blue Beetle as a prime Lost Generation example
• [9:45] The untapped story potential of sidelined characters
• [10:15] Terry's pitch: a 12-issue Cassie Sandsmark trials miniseries
• [13:56] The Lost Generation Problem as a Lost Generation Opportunity for publishers
• [14:45] Current anxiety: Eve Ewing's X-Men and Gail Simone's Outliers
• [16:01] What Terry actually wants: continuity, not resets

Tyranny of the Fey is now available in hardcover and paperback, eBook, and audiobook. Read my stories now on terrybartley.com. Send requests to be a guest or comments about the episode to press@starlightkingpress.com.