Retconned Innocence, Retconned Guilt

[T Hedge Coke]

Retcons/reveals that establish someone wasn't guilty of what we thought they were! Retcons/reveals that establish someone has been guilty of X for a long time, but now we're just finding out!

Hal Jordan wasn't a murdery reality-changing drunk driving egomaniac, he had the yellow fear demon in him. Hawkman, et al, being happy to brainwash or magically de-competency anyone who puts them at risk, from Dr Light to Batman.

Which ones work? Which fall flat for you? Which, just piss you off?

[Desaad]

Hal seems to have undergone a series of retcons.

Rebirth retconned his fall from grace into Parallax.

Infinite Crisis retconned his drunk driving into...nothing.

Flashpoint SEEMS to have retconned the entire Emerald Twilight affair into nonexistence. I don't think it's gotten a single mention.


I'm honestly fine with any of them. It would have been difficult for them to do much with Hal going forward in the way they wanted to write the character with any of that guilt still staining the character, and frankly they made an effort at that and failed pretty miserably in DeMatteis' Spectre.

[Desaad]

Meanwhile I thought rapey Dr. Light, heretofore unknown, was an interesting "Elseworlds" but just a bit too exploitative for my tastes, and really destroyed any viability of that character going forward. No great loss, I suppose, but still.

[Prisoner 6655321]

This kinda retcon doesn't bother me at all, in fact I hardly consider it that at all. I tend to think of it like this; just because we didn't know something and once we did now doesn't really change the past just our perception of it. If your grandfather was always kind and you were always close to him he's still the same person who treated you well even if it turns out that he may have done some really terrible stuff. Nothing changed retroactively, other then your understanding. Maybe he turned his life around and spent the rest of his years regretting having done something terrible, maybe he just kept that part of his life to himself and kept on doing whatever.

I loved Identity Crisis, loved it. Obviously (I hope), I didn't love the terrible things that happened in the book but I think it was in a lot of ways a high mark for comic book quality that hasn't been touched (at least by dc and not marvel to my knowledge) since then. It's kinda sad to think but it's my current point of view that the overall quality of superhero comic books has been falling since then (though there certainly has been individual works which have been just as good, if not better than Identity Crisis).

[Den]

I loved the Retcon used by Johns to bring Hal Jordon back.

Hated the retcon of a rape on Sue Dibny. :(

And while I like a lot of what Winnick did in JL: Generation Lost, the retcon of Ice's origin he tried was its lowest point and a big mistake. There are NICE people in this world (I am not one of them), and they didn't have to have a tragic event in their child hood to BE nice. They're just #$#$ing nice!

So I'm glad that has seemingly been abandoned in the nu52

[BohemiaDrinker]

I`m torn on the Hal Jordan one; on one hand, I think the Parallax retcon was a great way to bring him back in a viable way; OTOH, I think Johns went too far back concerning when the influence of Parallax began; it pretty much gave Jordan a free pass for every single instance in which he acted liked a jerk, and I`m not fond of those.

[Famousringo]

Black Canary has gone from pre-Flashpoint framed for murder, to post-Flashpoint convinced she is a murderer, soon to be revealed as not actually a murderer at all.
It works for now, because the Birds of Prey are being portrayed as a bunch of renegade anti-heroes, so it's good to have her "guilty" of something to marginalize her from the upstanding heroes.

And I haven't kept up with Green Arrow, but I gather he never murdered Prometheus? Or cheated on Canary? I haven't even seen a reference that he and Canary were ever romantically involved in Birds of Prey.

[stk]

And I haven't kept up with Green Arrow, but I gather he never murdered Prometheus? Or cheated on Canary? I haven't even seen a reference that he and Canary were ever romantically involved in Birds of Prey.

I'm not sure they've even met yet.

[R0NIN]

I dislike Hal's clean slate. As BohemiaDrinker said they made it so every questionable thing he ever did wasn't his fault.
I dislike Barry becoming the Speedforce and everything that entailed for the other speedsters especially Wally.

[finfangfool]

What, you mean like having his Uncle inside of him? It would explain some things.

[The Darknight Detective]

I`m torn on the Hal Jordan one; on one hand, I think the Parallax retcon was a great way to bring him back in a viable way; OTOH, I think Johns went too far back concerning when the influence of Parallax began; it pretty much gave Jordan a free pass for every single instance in which he acted liked a jerk, and I`m not fond of those.

After what DC did to him, Johns should have gone back all the way to Hal's birth.

[jackdaw53]

I don't like most retcons, certainly not if they substantially alter a major established character, and make us look at long established stories in a fundamentally different way.

For me, the fact that they are often used in comics by certain writers is usually an admission of a lack of confidence in ability to create new characters.... a fear that any new character they come up will not match up to "old favourites".

To me, it just doesn't work. I remember Hal Jordan and Barry Allen the fist time round. The current (2012) versions are quite different... it would have been more "honest" to create new characters to serve new stories, or further develop Kyle R, Wally W, Bart A, Jay G, etc.