Best Retcon

[Brian Cronin]

You always hear about retcons, and how annoying they are, but rarely do you hear people talk about all the GOOD retcons out there.

So, in this thread, please tell me your favorite retcons.

Specifically, your favorite contradictory retcon (you thought it went like THAT, but really, it went like THIS) and your favorite insertion retcon (oh, you never heard of my old girlfriend/sister/brother?).

Just offhand, my favorite contradictory retcon is Alan Moore's Swamp Thing retcon (Alec Holland died, and the plants just THINK they're Alec Holland).

My favorite insertion retcon is Elektra. Elektra rules.

-Brian

[TheTen-EyedMan]

Wonder Woman back into the JLA history.

Best thing about JLA #0

[Gingold]

My favorite insertation retcon was Claremont giving Xavier and Magneto a shared backstory that predated the original X-Men stories. (Making Magneto Wanda and Pietro's father was a good idea too).

Other than the Swamp Thing reveal that Cronin mentioned, I've never been too fond of contradiction retcons. I guess the revelation that Captain Britan got his powers due to his father being from Otherworld wasn't bad.

[estee]

Punisher coming back from the dead.

Ennis dumped that lame plot about working with angels with one short statement..."So I quit"

Brilliant.

[Sean Whitmore]

Favorite contradictory retcon: Hmm...it's way too easy to pick a continuity fix (or a re-retcon) like saying, "No, Tony Stark wasn't a spy for Kang."

So I'll go with Alfred being with the Wayne family before they died. MUCH cooler than him showing up after Bruce and Dick were already Batman and Robin.

Favorite insertion retcon: Magneto was a Holocaust survivor.


SEAN

[Sean Whitmore]

Punisher coming back from the dead.

Ennis dumped that lame plot about working with angels with one short statement..."So I quit"

Brilliant.


That's not really a retcon though, is it? That's just the continuation of the story that we didn't see.


SEAN

[Hombre]

Favorite contradictory retcon: Hmm...it's way too easy to pick a continuity fix (or a re-retcon) like saying, "No, Tony Stark wasn't a spy for Kang."



Thank you Kurt and Roger for that, anyway.

[estee]

That's not really a retcon though, is it? That's just the continuation of the story that we didn't see.


SEAN

Oh sure ruin my point with logic.

Thanks a lot.

:D

[stealthwise]

What Moore did to Miracleman. God, that concept's brilliant, even if you don't like the "grim and gritty" stuff.

[swinebread]

What Alan Moore did for Supreme, He took a sucky Superman rip-off and created the greatest homage ever. Plus it starts out with Supreme meeting previous retcons that had been wiped-out of existence.

[Reptisaurus!]

The Liberty Legion? Does that count? (I never think about stuff like this.)

[Omega Alpha]

Magneto having some history with Xavier and being a Holocaust survivor.

[Patient Boy]

What Alan Moore did for Supreme, He took a sucky Superman rip-off and created the greatest homage ever. Plus it starts out with Supreme meeting previous retcons that had been wiped-out of existence.

I read this recently, and it's great. I wish more comics would embrace the idea of multiple continuities on this level.

[rick]

You always hear about retcons, and how annoying they are, but rarely do you hear people talk about all the GOOD retcons out there.

So, in this thread, please tell me your favorite retcons.

Specifically, your favorite contradictory retcon (you thought it went like THAT, but really, it went like THIS) and your favorite insertion retcon (oh, you never heard of my old girlfriend/sister/brother?).

Just offhand, my favorite contradictory retcon is Alan Moore's Swamp Thing retcon (Alec Holland died, and the plants just THINK they're Alec Holland).

My favorite insertion retcon is Elektra. Elektra rules.

-Brian



I have nowhere to go in this post since Brian started out the post naming the two I would have picked.

[swinebread]

I read this recently, and it's great. I wish more comics would embrace the idea of multiple continuities on this level.

There is a little of this in one of the Earth X series of books, but it's not as well done as Moore's Supreme. It's more of a gimmick to explain Marvel's sliding continuity.

Alan Moore's Promethia is good as well as different versions of the character are important to the story,

[StrikeForce Albert]

Johns fixing Hawkman

well, as best as someone could fix him

someon also brought up Moore's Swamp Thing. That was cool aswell

[RAB]

It might be useful to draw a distinction between two different varieties of "retcon" here.

One would be the "what you saw never happened" variety. This would include both the kind of change somehow acknowledged or rationalized in the story ("Wonder Woman was in the JLA from the start...no, she wasn't...yes she was!") and the more common kind where past events are simply ignored. No one liked the lame idea of revealing the Metal Men as dead people in robot bodies, so everyone tacitly agrees that miniseries never happened without drawing attention to it. Or by the same token, DC totally ignoring Morrison's Doom Patrol so that Byrne could make it what he thought it was in his childhood.

The other, in my opinion finer and more subtle, is the "you saw it, but you didn't see the whole thing" variety. (I'm sure someone can come up with better names than these!) Avengers Forever is an elaborate demonstration of this principle: past stories happened as we saw them, and no statement is entirely thrown out...but new revelations cast unwieldy prior stories in a different light, rationalizing contradictions into a more coherent form. Having a character say "When I said that thing before, I was lying" can be a legitimate tactic -- provided the story justifies why that character would have lied about a given point. This is also the basis of Alan Moore's approach: in Swamp Thing the lead character genuinely thought he was Alec Holland, just as the readers did, and new evidence to the contrary doesn't invalidate any previous issues; in Supreme, the previous issues all "happened" to the character, but then he discovers that the nature of his existence was different from what he had previously supposed.

[Gilda Dent]

The Golden Age Wonder Woman was Hippolyta. This allowed Diana to be a neophyte with the reintroduction, yet still keep the Golden Age Justice Society stories in continuity.

Gilda

[Babylon23]

Definitely agree with Moore's Swamp Thing, Miracleman and Supreme. All excellent retcons.

Magneto as a holocaust survivor added incredible depth to the character.

The Invaders at Marvel and the All-Star Squadron at DC. I love the Golden Age characters, and these series helped to highlight these great characters.

Ted Knight Starman being involved with the Manhattan Project, and suffering years of torment for it.

Avengers Forever. Pretty much all of it. Tying together all of Avengers history, and making sense of the more contradictory elements.

Geoff Johns repair work on Hawkman.

[Sean Whitmore]

Has anyone mentioned Johns explaining away Hal Jordan's gray hairs yet?

Awesome and completely necessary.


SEAN

[Sanagi]

Has anyone mentioned Johns explaining away Hal Jordan's gray hairs yet?

Awesome and completely necessary.


SEAN
I bet a malevolent alien influence was what caused Captain Kirk to need a girdle.

[del gorky]

I liked the Hawkworld retcon by Ostrander as well. Though many saw it as opening up huge cans of worms that had already been settled. The Hawkworld mini and series though were the best Hawkman stuff I've read and sadly after it all got pushed aside with Zero Hour (largely to assuage Dan Jurgen's ego) the character has never been as good since. Certainly, Jurgens' Hawk Avatar idea didn't work; even he couldn't write it for very many issues. He just left as a toy he had broken and had lost interest in. Even the Geoff Johns series wasn't as interesting.

I really loved the Moore Swamp Thing work too. Also loved the Moore overhaul of the Demon in Swamp Thing that everyone loved and followed except for of course, John Byrne.

The worst retcon is the ignoring of Elektra Lives Again by Marvel and letting her continue to run around and do ridiculous stuff like join a dance group, take charge of the hand, romance Wolverine; take your pick. All of Miller's Daredevil work has been considered canon except this and I'm sure the reasons are purely commercial. God knows nothing coming close to art has been done with the character in 15 years.

[pennywisdom]

I see so many people who dislike Geoff Johns' Green Lantern: Rebirth. I loved it. Hal going nuts made so little sense... don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Kyle and I liked a new GL being introduced, but Hal becoming a bad guy in the way that he did didn't really strike me as logical. Johns' explanation "fixed" a lot of what was "broken" in my opinion, and did it in what I felt to be a creative way. Am I a moron for liking that story?

I agree with Cronin's original post: Elektra is awesome. Now we actually care about Matt Murdock's past. That first storyline was great, too. It introduced that element of Shakespearean tragedy that is now synonymous with Daredevil... he loves the girl, but she's his enemy. And then she dies. Pathos!

A question: Does a retcon only pertain to a single character element, or can you retcon an entire mythology? John Byrne retconned the hell out of Superman when he did that post-COIE Superman book. And Batman's origin has had a few retcons as well. God only knows if they ever made a concrete decision on whether or not Joe Chill was the killer.

[Matthew E]

I support RAB's distinction between the two kinds of retcons.

And in my mind, the king of retcons is the original one, the one that gave us the word (I think)... the existence of the All-Star Squadron.

[Gilda Dent]

I see so many people who dislike Geoff Johns' Green Lantern: Rebirth. I loved it. Hal going nuts made so little sense... don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Kyle and I liked a new GL being introduced, but Hal becoming a bad guy in the way that he did didn't really strike me as logical. Johns' explanation "fixed" a lot of what was "broken" in my opinion, and did it in what I felt to be a creative way. Am I a moron for liking that story?

I agree with Cronin's original post: Elektra is awesome. Now we actually care about Matt Murdock's past. That first storyline was great, too. It introduced that element of Shakespearean tragedy that is now synonymous with Daredevil... he loves the girl, but she's his enemy. And then she dies. Pathos!

A question: Does a retcon only pertain to a single character element, or can you retcon an entire mythology? John Byrne retconned the hell out of Superman when he did that post-COIE Superman book. And Batman's origin has had a few retcons as well. God only knows if they ever made a concrete decision on whether or not Joe Chill was the killer.

That's a reboot, restarting from the beginning. I wouldn't count it, as it doesn't change elements of current continuity so much as throw all old continuity out.

Gilda

[Dan Apodaca]

I really liked Grant Morrison's retcon of Weapon X being Weapon Ten. It made perfect sense to me, and I couldn't believe that no one had thought of it before! The whole Weapon Plus subplot was very cool.

[captain_unimpressive]

I liked the way they dealt with Spider-Woman's past with the High Evolutionary.
And there are certain situations when an extra-dimensional wall joke will never go out of style.

[yo go re]

Magneto as Holocaust survivor, yes. Magneto as the father of Wanda and Pietro, no. That seemed like a Monarch Solution to me - there was the big set-up that they were the children of Golden Age Heroes, and that made sense. Then someone swept in and said, "no, let's spring them from the loins of this otherwise unrelated character."

"Hippolyta as the Golden Age WW" is not only one of the best things to come out of Byrne's Wonder Woman, it may be my favorite retcon ever.

Marvels, of course, is a great example of the "you didn't see it all" side of things. Or at least, you didn't see this side of it"...