Avatar: The Last Airbender is often considered to be television at its finest. With the sequel series The Legend of Korra failing to achieve quite the same level of popularity and the Netflix live-action adaptation undergoing a troubling production, some Avatar fans may look back and wonder why a fourth season to the hit series never materialized. Instead the story continued on in the comics -- and that may actually be for the better.

After briefly hinting at the mystery all series, Avatar closed out with something of a cliffhanger, when Zuko asked his father about the fate of his mother, Ursa. The intention was for the story to pick up in either a fourth season or a spinoff show focusing on Zuko as the main character.

His search for his mother was instead presented in the comic Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Search. Although it wasn't what fans were expecting, it was the best way to honor the series' legacy.

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TV shows tend to be remembered for the legacy they leave behind and taken as a whole, and it's far from a rare occurrence for a once-beloved show to sour its reputation with viewers after running too long. Factors like overexposure and creative burnout serve as limiters against the idea that you can't have too much of a good thing. Given its sterling reputation, it would be a shame to see Avatar tarnish itself with such problems.

More specifically to Avatar, there's a question of thematic completion that would have been difficult to settle in terms of a fourth season. The entire arc of  the show involved Aang learning to master the elements so he could defeat the Fire Lord, end the Hundred Years War and restore balance to the world. After doing just that in the Season 3 finale, a fourth season would have felt artificial and patched-on, compared to the complete, matching set of the show's first three seasons.

Given the comics fans got out of the deal, there's certainly nothing lost in terms of watching the world and characters continue to grow. Rather than jumping immediately into Zuko's search for his mother, the comic continuations started with The Promise, which focused on the fallout of the war and the process of repairing the damage done to the relations between the Four Nations. In particular, the comics dealt with the Fire Nation's colonization of the Earth Kingdom.

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Aang smiles on the cover of Avatar the Last Airbender Comics

The mystery of Ursa did come in The Search and all the comics since show how many ambitious storytelling ideas the Avatar creative team had up its collective sleeve. Free from focusing on any one "main" character, the comics instead expand the story of the entire cast in a way the show never could have.

With upcoming fixtures like Katara and the Pirate's Silver and Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy, there will even be a chance to focus wholly on characters who were only supporting cast in the show.

Creatively, the comics offer much freer reign than a fourth season of Avatar would have, without suffering from much of the pressure and classic pitfalls that long-running TV shows so often do. For fans of the show who have never read a comic before, the transition can be a little jarring, but it's more than worth it to anyone with a strong desire to follow the story as it was meant to be continued.

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