The premise of the show is set. The characters are all in place and well-defined. At that point, you can tell almost any story you want.

When numbing, tedious, soul-ravening Continuity comes into play, however, each and every one of those stories that once flowed so freely must now be crammed and stuffed into a supposedly-seamless linear progression of events that must, Must, NO, LISTEN TO ME, GODAMMIT, MUST be perfect in every respect, well, everything worthwhile is lost.

The only thing worse than Continuity we've learned is Retroactive Continuity in which we are told that what happened somewhere along the line was WRONG!! At that point, everything crashes to a dead stop as the comic and all its stories are taken back into the shop and endlessly, tediously reworked until they are CORRECT. Then we get to- (ya-a-awww-nn) explore every mind-deadening aspect of how those changes have effected other changes, and how those in turn, have... Zzzzzz....

Premise, folks. It's what works! Batman can discover that there was an "Original Batman" who pre-dated his tenure and meet the guy, who turns out to be an old, washed-up costumed wrestler. He can then a few years later find out his dad was the "Original Batman" at a costume party in which he forever earns the enmity of a mob boss. Years later, he can discover that the Native Americans had an "Original Batman" all their own, an ancestral legacy handed down from father to son to defend the world against a living Bat-God. And it's all okay. 

We never have to deal with the asinine prospect of some wunderkind putting them all together into one time-lost team to go battle Nekron and the Mortality Mitten or somesuch... We never have to hear Batman tediously recount how many predecessors have patrolled the night before he came along and follow along as their "legacy" replacements all take up the mantle and join the Titans and Young Justice and the Outsiders and the... Whatevers. 

Best of all, we never have to have the bookmobile carrying all these stories grind to a brake-squealing stop, and back... up... over all of them (making that godawful maddening "beep-beep-beep..." sound the whole time) as someone tries to "fix" the "problem" of there being simply Too Many Earlier Batmen. 

"No, no, the wrestler fought under a different name, you understand. The, um, Big Bad Cat. Yes, that's nice. And the Native American was dressed as a... um, wolf. Yes, that's it. A wolf. Because the Demon-God manifested itself as a wolf. Not a bat. So, the wrestler's daughter then becomes Ms. Big Bad Cat, and her criminal brother who also feels he's entitled to the family name is Bad Big Cat... You're all making these corrections in your back issues as I tell you this, aren't you? You're not? Oh, never mind, we'll write it all down for you in new comics and you can buy those, all right? Good. Now, the Native American's great-great-grandson who's currently fighting alongside the Legion is now, and all has been, called Wolf-Lad, or no, wait, their codename system changed last month... He's always been called Ravenus, the Blood-Stalker. Yes...."

None of that happens if you simply apply Premise and set aside Continuity.

Right. Translation: THE SIMPSONS are deliberately drawn in an unrealistic style, while Marvel and DC superhero comics are drawn in a more-or-less realistic style; hence, the latter are "more realistic."

I guess one could add: THE SIMPSONS is a comedy series, so no rules apply except being funny; Marvel and DC superhero comics are dramatic, action-adventure series, so they're inherently "more realistic."

Arguable. 

TV shows, like comicooks used to be, were all generally pretty casual about the passage of time. Not just in, for example, "M*A*S*H," where it was a necessary fiction that the Korean War be only as long as it was and all other characters had to fit and re-fit and re-re-fit as the series lasted well over a decade. Seems to me that most shows, even where its "time" passed in real time, didn't much bother to acknowledge that. NOW is really the only important time, and everything else was just vaguely before. Did "Seinfeld" make a big fuss over time passing? Did "E.R."? Did -- keeping with NBC, I guess -- even "Friends," which featured changes in relationships over the series, and certainly could be easily marked by changes in fashion and hairstyles, bother with marking time? Fundamentally a New York City show, it still to my thinking wisely resisted the sentiment to openly discuss 9/11. 

Was "The Honeymooners" time-conscious? Was "I Love Lucy"? Was this, that, the other? Sure, some series, in the long history of television were keyed into time. But for most it was: there was a before, but please, viewers, pay attention to NOW NOW NOW. 

And still with that modus, the characters were THE SAME, essentially.