Who’s the biggest offender, DC or Marvel? My money is on DC. The constant retcons is what largely kept me away from their comics for a long while.
When this topic comes to mind, the most lame/annoying retcon has got to be Superboy Prime bringing back Jason Todd… by punching a reality barrier. Say what? That has got to be the gayest crap I’ve ever heard of. Even worse than “Aunt May isn’t dead! Some actress posed as her died!” Ugh.
There are more but this is the stupidest one I can think of and I’m sleepy as I type this.
I’d say DC, but that’s probably because I’m more knowledgeable about DC.
Nobody can seem to decide whether they want Joe Chill alive, dead, in custody, still at large, or whatever. I find that particularly annoying. Personally, I prefer that he just vanishes and never gets caught, since it lends meaning to Batman’s quest, but fuck it. They need to pick one to stick with from here on out.
Oh yeah, and Byrne’s entire Superman retcon. The whole thing.
Everybody comes up with retcons, but I also agree that DC’s are a lot lamer. Just the fact that they keep trying to retcon their various Earths into a supposed streamlined continuity is pretty insulting to me. It’s like saying that their readers are not smart enough to figure things out and accept there has to be leeway in continuity in their 60+ year old and expansive universe.
At least when Marvel does retcons, they make for some cool stories. Heck, Captain America was possibly the first notable retcon. There was never a comic where he was thrown into the water and trapped in ice. Stan Lee made that up for the Avengers. They’ve done stupid things as well, though, such as trying to explain Morrison’s Magneto as an IMPOSTER. The Clone Saga is deeply offensive as evidenced by that other thread.
But all in all, I don’t think retcons really bother me. Some people feel like retconning something invalidates previous stories, but I don’t agree with that mindset. The old good comic will always be there and nothing that comes after it can blemish it. Planet X doesn’t become a weak story just because Claremont or Marvel decided an IMPOSTER would explain Magneto’s behavior better than Morrison on LSD.
The problem with retcons is that it just feels cheap when they do it, and also that it’s the only way they can do something that doesn’t gel with continuity. Otherwise, a bunch of fat dorks with coke bottle glasses will write letters to them with their chubby Cheeto-stained fingers, threatening to stop reading the book, or–worse yet–threatening to write more angry letters.
How’d they screw him up? Sorry, I’m really out of the loop. DC has done so many frickin’ retcons that its hard for me to keep up.
Oh a good note of things not being retconned, Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacy are still dead. Some fag writer said he wouldn’t writer for Amazing Spider-Man unless he was able to bring Gwen back. Guess he isn’t gonna be writing ASM.
DC. Marvel’s retcons usually tend to be soft and they go unnoticed by most people. I know way more about Marvel than DC since that’s kind of where my comic book collecting began. DC, outside of people related to Batman somehow I probably don’t know much and even still much less than any true DC head.
Marvel retconed Iron Man’s origin to get him out of the war otherwise he would be too old.
X-Men / Fantastic Four, the first one had Reed Richards reveal that he ill sheilded the spaceship on purpose so they could get powers because he saw that there were lots of super powered people coming. Originally it was a race to “Beat the commies.” Again, this is something that makes the characters way too old, sometimes when they reprint FF #1 the commie statement is left out because it’s not PC. The space race ended a long time ago so that may be part of it. Not that it matters nowadays because neither the commies or Reed ill sheilding the spaceship ever comes up.
When Punisher stopped being a warrior angel in the comics it was settled with one line by Punisher in comics, “I tried the heavenly route and it didn’t work for me.” If you read his Marvel Universe Bio there was a big explanation on how Heaven gave him back his life and asked him if he wanted to fight for them and he said no, he wanted to go back to Earth to punish criminals. The Marvel Universe books are pretty cool because they fill in blanks like that and a lot of the time they ask the creative teams behind the characters to come up with explanations. Not too sure if this ever came up in a comic but I really doubt it due to no one caring about warrior angel Punisher…
Marvel did try to retcon Spider-Man’s entire origin with John Byrne’s Spider-Man Chapter One. It was one of those stories that wasn’t popular and never stuck, but they did attempt it. It sold fairly well, but fans never accepted it. So for all intents and purposes it never happened in 616, Marvel’s mainstream continuity.
A few years ago Marvel kind of sort of tried to get rid of continuity. They wanted each book to exist within its own universe. At the same time Magneto(Xorn???) destroyed New York, Asgard was floating above the sky in Thor’s comic and in Spider-Man and Fantastic Four NY was perfectly fine. Joe Quesada felt that all the years of continuity really spoiled people, back in the day there were only 20 books to keep straight and now there are 100s and that continuity was preventing people from telling good stories. Was he right or wrong? That is a very tough call. This time period had lots of stuff going on that made no sense in terms of continuity and at the same time Marvel really let blatant mistakes go by. Toxin’s origin is still a very tough fit, Austen retold Sabretooth and Mystique’s meeting not aware they already met and lots of things like this happened. Of course if you could care less about continuity this probably didn’t matter to you at at all. Eventually things went back the way they were because most people still want some sense of continuity and the more important reason is that multibook crossover events make lots of money. House of M, Civil War, World War Hulk, money money money.
In all fairness I think perfect continuity with Marvel and DC is next to impossible. The character is always different when another writer picks them up and writes for them, Kane’s Batman isn’t Miller’s, or O’Neil’s, or Morrison’s, or Dini’s and so on. Not every storyline can be referenced and there are things that will be forgotten about or just never mentioned again like Flash Thompson going to Viet Nam (it would date him, now they say he served overseas) or Spider-Man and Mary Jane’s baby no one wants to mention. Or the child Wolverine had on Savage Land because now he has yet another child. Even editors who try to keep a lot of this stuff straight mess up because they are only human. With the best case scenario continuity in Marvel and DC comics is still retroactive.
At the very least DC seems to be sticking to their guns with what their continuity is after the last Crisis. Final Crisis, the title scares me but I doubt they will reset everything back again. Arguably DC has always needed way more retcons than Marvel. Maybe not as many as they wound up doing, but still… All those Superman being a jerk covers, (see the Superman is a Dick site) Batman putting his hands up in the air whenever he saw a gun, him arresting aliens and gorillas, there’s just no way you can keep all of that straight in the same universe with 60 or so years of stories. The times change, our world changes and the characters change, that’s just how it is.
I really don’t believe that all those comics across history need to be considered as having continuity, and the fact that modern readers insist otherwise is the cause of a lot of problems.
Know how Superman forcing Jimmy Olsen to marry a gorilla ever got written in the first place? A. They thought it was a funny story idea, and B. they had absolutely no intention of it having any long-term impact on the mythology of Superman at all. I don’t know who was first responsible for saying, “Hey, guys, let’s say that all of these stories are actually interconnected episodes in one long timeline!” but it fucked a lot of things up, and that’s why DC had to start messing with this shit in the first place.
I don’t even want to think about how many times a writer has turned in a fantastic treatment for a new story, only to have it turned down by the continuity cops because it doesn’t gel with another, vastly inferior story that was written 20 years ago. Even worse, I don’t know how many times that treatment has been accepted, with the proviso that it be rewritten so that it REALLY occurs on Earth #246, which will come back around and wind up a part of continuity all over again in the Ultimate Super Really Infinite Final Crisis This Time We Promise.
Fuck. Just come up with new titles and set them in their own independent universes, like All Star Superman. For the people who actually still enjoy the nauseating massive multi-character crossovers that people are obsessed with these days, have a separate title to dump that shit into. It’s crap. Everything in modern mainstream comics is crap. Everybody is an idiot. Fuck off.
Yeah, but that only makes the new comic that contains the poorly written retcon look stupid, not the comic with the story events it is reversing. When was the last time angry letters from fat, four-eyed dorks with cheesy fingers affected anything? The stupid thing about fat, four-eyed, cheesy-fingered dorks is that even if a comic pisses them off, they will still buy it to complete their collection of an uninterrupted run. Those guys need to stop buying those comics and use their money on buying something they need, like new glasses, diet pills, or prostitutes.
They screwed him up by making him go insane, making him kill his own comrades, and then replacing him with a crab-masked pretender. DC had Geoff Johns fix him, though. So he’s all better now.
Hahaha, where you at, Taichi?!
Yeah, that is the sort of retcon that works. Sometimes they just have to modernize characters a bit to bring them into the 21st century, especially because the characters don’t truly age much in physical terms.
And with the Punisher, when something really stupid like that happens to a great character, you don’t even really need to address that. You can just start over and pretend it never happened, and only fat, four-eyed, Cheetos-eating dorks will get upset that there wasn’t an issue where Punisher rescinded his heavenly powers.
Yeah, I remember we had this exact conversation a couple years ago, if I remember my SRK continuity correctly. I liked it when they told stories like that. As long as you don’t think too hard about the official chronology, it’s all good.
Do people* complain when Wolverine, in a single month, is simultaneously on the moon, fighting alongside the X-Men in NY, out searching for his past in Alaska, and in Hackensack, NJ with the Avengers? They may complain with their mouths and keyboards but not with their dollars, no sirreebob.
Note: * denotes fat, four-eyed, Cheetos-smearing dorks; technically, they are not people
Are we talking the current Sinestro Corp story arc or something else? Sorry, I have zilcho when it comes to GL history.
Oh, mercy, the Spider-Man Chapter One thing… I didn’t read it but I read about it. Just the mention of it makes me cringe. Spidey’s origin story is perfectly fine and is still one of the best stories in comics to this day. Heck, despite some adding on here and there, Batman’s origin story is still pretty much the same. Just let the killer of Bruce’s parents be left unknown. I think its better off that way.
I have no problem with reading stories like Kingom Come, Superman For All Seasons, Dark Knight Returns or Spider-Man Reign. In fact, reading stories that aren’t cannon are some of my fav stories to read. Since they aren’t bound to continuity, writers probably feel free to do more.
Back to Spider-Man, I really didn’t have much of a problem with Peter getting organic webbing. It didn’t even bother me in the flicks. I even like the added 5 ton strength increase they gave him. But being able to communicate with spiders and other insects? Um, gay. Can’t even really think of a way that this power would be useful.
Aunt May having a fight with Uncle Ben and him leaving and coming back moments before he was killed, that didn’t really bother me either. At the end of the day, Peter is still at fault for letting the criminal run pass him. It doesn’t take away from him being Spider-Man in the least.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read Crisis on Infinite Earths, 52, or Infinite Crisis without my head exploding due to all the freaking changes each one of these series impliments. I don’t have much of a beef with Spidey doing one thing in his comic and another in a Hulk or X-Men comic in the same month. They all live in the same universe so they are bound to meet/team up. But when stupid stuff like wall punches bring back dead people, then we’re talking some bat-effing-loco material.
