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on a guide to Captain America: There's nothing especially recent that I know of beyond the last HC of the Marvel Handbook, but in the mid-1990s you had the Captain America: The Legend one-shot...

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from reading and/or discussing the series; I just hate that sort of "but you're wrong because I like it!" sort of thing.

I didn't read past the first six...

Whoops! Double post.

Two points:

1. I was reviewing volume one, then in isolation. I stand by my assessment of that volume, when read entirely in isolation.
2. If you're going to respond to a detailed critique, it...

Outside of John Constantine I'm struggling to think of a notable Alan Moore character who he actually created rather than using a existing character or (as in the case of Watchmen) adapted from an...

This is shaping up into something quite compelling indeed. I find myself feeling for <SPOILER REDACTED> while wondering if I should feel for <SPOILER REDACTED>.

As to <SPOILER REDACTED>, this...

Part III: It Didn't Add Much of Lasting Value

Leaving aside the new totem-villains, it's also quite hard to connect the totems to any of the other animal-themed villains' origins or motivations....

Part II: It Wasn't Thought Through

The Totem storyline is a good case study in a retcon doomed by its poor follow-through and by the way it was used to introduce and tout the virtues of several...

Part I: It Wasn't a Story, It Was a Writer's Quirk

The totem story wasn't a bad idea necessarily, but based on the execution it was probably never going to be a significant or lasting addition to...

That is an extremely interesting way to use Elise's POV.

Most examples I can think of eventually got a retool, like the original version of Nova, where Peter Parker without the interesting supporting cast and motivation gets Green Lantern's origin but ends...

A slight correction re: Buffy.

Spike was supposed to be killed off in the mid-season two-parter "What's My Line" that restored Drusilla to full strength. She was then to take over his role until...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/jan/19/fox-battle-batman-superman-dc-comics?INTCMP=SRCH

It's worth remembering that the Marvel and DC universes weren't initially both big and shared. Marvel was a shared universe, but its expansion was gradual; DC was big, but only started using the full...

Maybe, but there's still a difference in that the tarnished icons -- with the exception of the Guardians, who've been getting tarnished since the 1970s -- tend to recover and move on at DC, even to...

It's worth noting that DC likes to do parallel Earths with diffeent "rules" or entirely different people behind familiar masks, while Marvel likes to do alternate futures and parallel timelines where...

The idea of adding all the most popular heroes to the same team is very much what DC traditionally does with the JLA, but the stories and tone are by and large distinctly Marvel. The heroes are...

Roy Thomas is at least as much of an example of DC-ifying Marvel as of Marvelizing DC. He started out as a huge Jusice Society fan, and he's said many times that he took the Avengers because it was...

As far as I'm concerned, the story itself was unnecessary.

Ah, drollery.

I think your concept works fine if one applies both parts of the two-part test you suggested from the start: 1) It's a retcon of something no one but the writer and a handful of people cared about;...

Ah, ok. See, I read it as retcons unnecessary to the story being told, or to the long-term plot. By that standard, Johns's retcon was utterly necessary to the stories he wanted to tell about...

Returning to the original purpose of this topic, here are some examples of *unnecessary* retcons. (These will also help serve as examples of the distinction between *bad* and *unnecessary*):

--...

My favorite retcon is the one that happened in this thread, which started out being about retcons of insignificant things, things that didn't matter to the story or the character. Somewhere, this was...

Whatever side you were on before regarding Matt Fraction's brilliant but often deeply frustrating run on Invincible Iron Man, I don't think the last couple of issues have worked all that well....

-- Maybe because of Gomer Pyle, people seem to know vaguely of the Shazam! hero Captain Marvel. Of course, thanbks to tradmark issues with Marvel Comics, most non-comics readers think the Big Red...