Question: Who's the Longest-Running Fictional Character Ever?

by Glen Weldon

"Longest running" is open to interpretation, so let's define our terms:

In any medium, what character has been consistently featured in continuous new adventures over the longest stretch of time?

Got that? Just the three criteria, here:

Consistent:

Makes regularly scheduled appearances — no yawning gaps between adventures.

Continuous:

The character's adventures form a central narrative that builds on what has gone before. (Read: Katzenjammer Kids, I know you've been around a long time, but you're a gag strip, not an ongoing narrative. Thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts.)

New:

The constant churning out of fresh content, not simply adaptations, retellings or reprints.

So: Guesses?

After the jump: We review the top contenders, provide The Answer, and explain why The Neverending Story should really have been a horror film.

Some candidates:

Jack: Major figure of English folklore, goes by various surnames: Sprat; Be-Nimble; Horner; And-the-Beanstalk. Interesting, but not really what we're after, here: Again, we're looking for a clearly defined character who's part of an ongoing, regularly produced story.

Yahweh will no doubt be suggested by an insolent few. And, true, the Almighty seems to fit some of the above criteria: His two-fisted tales of high adventure (or, more accurately, His Mysterious Works, great and terrible to behold) first appeared in a series of collectible, limited-edition volumes that were written over a span of some 2000 years.

It should be noted, however, that those who would proffer the cheeky suggestion that Our Father Who Art in Heaven is a fictional character are godless heathens and/or Theology majors. Anyway: Troublemakers. Let us pay them no heed.

In fact, let's just exempt all gods/demigods/religious figures from the running, if we may. Save us all some headaches, to say nothing of the flames of perdition.

Sherlock Holmes: We're getting closer, but no. You can't deny the guy made a good run of it: Conan Doyle churned out new Holmes adventures on a regular basis for an impressive 40 years. But since 1927's The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, it's been mostly adaptations and inspired-bys. Next.

Mickey Mouse: Ah, we're on to something here. But again: No. Simply being around a long time (81 years) doesn't cut this particular mustard, which, once again, is: Regularly appearing new adventures that build on what's gone before. A narrative that develops with time.

But this is an instructive guess, because it illustrates what turns out to be a key point: To get the mix of longevity and regularity we're after here, you need more than an individual creator. You need a giant, faceless corporation.

Because creators die off, but intellectual property rights are forever. [Stipulating that FOREVER shall be defined herein as the latter of a) expiration of copyright protection under United States federal law and other applicable international conventions, or b) time existing until an Act of God occurs, including, but not limited to, a franchise-destroying Joel Schumacher film.]

Popeye: First appearance: 1928. But nope. Even if you widen out to include his comic book, movie, and television cartoon incarnations, the Monocular One just doesn't clear the "continuously produced" bar.

Tintin: First appearance: 1929. Probably the strongest contender so far, but the malaise of the 1970s hit him pretty hard, and he hung up his cowlick for a while. In the end, the gap between 1976's Tintin and the Picaros and his more recent iterations is just too big to ignore.

Nancy Hughes: "Who, now?" you ask, in all your NPR-osity. Why, only the town matriarch of Oakdale, is all. Who's been played by Helen Wagner on As The World Turns since 1956, people.

So okay, she's clearly hardcore, and she almost ... almost gets the prize. If it weren't for that gap — that pesky five-year gap between 1981 and 1986, when Wagner left the show...

James Bond: The guy's been around, in some form or another, since 1953. Regularly produced? Check. Continuous story? Well ssssorta. Fresh, new content? Again, a judgment call: The last two flicks were reinterpretations of earlier stories. But Bond's a strong contender, by any measure.

All right: Enough of the teasing. Here's the answer:

Superman. The Man of Steel. First appearance: 1938. (He'll turn a spry — a really remarkably spry — 71 years old next month.)

Think about this: Every single month for the past 70 years, a new adventure of Superman has been produced. And a tremendous lot of those monthly adventures have added some element to his continually developing story: A new villain, a new supporting character, a new power.

Which is, of course, exactly the problem. Because Superman's is an open-ended story — a Never-Ending Battle, you might say.

When you first heard that phrase — "Never-Ending Battle," it sounded sort of valiant and stirring, didn't it? In the same way that the notion of The Neverending Story sounds sort of hopeful and magical, at first.

But if you really let the concept sink in, you just want to crawl into bed with a cold compress. And here's why: The very notion of an open-ended story is a basic corruption of what a story is for.

When someone says, "Tell me a story," they're not just asking you to vamp for seven years until suddenly, out of precisely nowhere, there's this whole 'NOTHER group of people that no one's ever never heard of, who give Buffy some kind of crazily convenient, Deus Ex Machina super-scythe that somehow hasn't been MENTIONED —.

(Cleansing breath.)

No — "Tell me a story" means, I want a discrete, self-contained packet of information that includes a conclusion.

That conclusion is more than important, it's necessary. Narrative — and I mean ANY form of narrative, from a sequence of Taster's Choice commercials to serialized Dickens — exerts a pull on us that's tough to resist. (There's a reason we talk about avoiding a new TV show as not wanting to get "sucked in.")

But what superhero comic books, soap operas, serialized dramas and even some sitcoms have in common is a refusal to acknowledge that stories are built to end.

Instead, these forms of media are perfectly willing to trade on a given narrative's pull, but deny the payoff in perpetuity.

And that's dangerous, because characters, like consumer electronics, have a planned obsolescence. They exist to grow and change; when they stop changing, the story's supposed to end.

When stories go on indefinitely — when change can't or won't occur — some bad, crazy stuff happens instead. The accumulated wear and tear stretches characters out, makes them do and say things that don't jibe with what's gone before.

In the meantime, years of continuity — of mundane background detail — continue to mount.

Which is why sharks get jumped, reboots get booted, "Everything you think you know is wrong!"; why superhero multiverses experience repeated reality-altering crises, and why amnesia keeps tearing through the entire population of Oakdale like outbreaks of cholera.

Superman has gone through a lot over the years — too much to even summarize here — only to see years of backstory get periodically wiped from existence by editorial fiat.

And because his battle is a never-ending one, and his story can never, will never reach its conclusion, the guy's forever stuck in a narrative limbo; he's basically Erica Kane without the shoulder pads.

P.S.: I'm prepared to entertain the possibility that I stacked the "longest-running" deck in favor of Supes, in order to pontificate about narrative. But if you've got ideas about a character who fits the criteria better than the big blue Boy Scout, let's hear about 'em.

UPDATE: Hokay. As many, many folk have rightfully pointed out (although Leigh Bingham got there first), I forgot about the Gasoline Alley strip, which started out in 1918 and, unbefrigginknownst to me, is still getting churned out. Also, Little Orphan Annie, in all her unholy zombie-eyed glory (1924, thanks Jon Bourgault) and, well, a few other ongoing newspaper strips which, against all laws of God and man, still go on.

I sit corrected. Cough.

Lots of other strong cases get made in the comments, but I'd just note again that characters like Dracula, Santa Claus, Tarzan, etc., while certainly iconic and all, don't appear with the sort of steady regularity I'm talking about, and don't quite meet the continuing and continuous criteria. Arbitrary though said critera may be.