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I love the phrase "turning heel". I usually use it to describe when one friend dumps another suddenly.

Eh, the main thrust of the Batgirl stuff is fairly typical ("It was mind control!"), but some of the details were indeed pretty ballsy. ("She brought Lynx back to life and then killed her again!" "She sniped somebody in Robin a month after being dedrugged because she had a relapse!")

Does the Dan Slott "everything I don't like was actually a cosplayer from another universe" count? If I have to name a specific event, it'd probably be it being used to retcon - was it Hulkling? one of the Young Avengers - joining the intiative.

The "Xorn was actually Xorn's twin brother pretending to be Magneto pretending to be Xorn" stuff.

"The guy you thought was Spiderman for years was actually the clone!" has to be up there, along with the ultimate "It was all a plot by... Norman Osborn!" retcon.

No mention of Superboy-punches?

Shvaughn Erin being a drug-induced transexual in Legion's One Year Gap.

I still like the Jason Todd's not dead/Superboy punch. Actually, pretty much everything caused by a Superboy punch. That's awesome.

Quasar #18's retcon-that-saves-the-universe has got to be in there, right.

And, if I can make mention of a non-Quasar story, there are two really massive examples involving Elektra over the years.

Lets start off with the earliest one from my childhood.

Dark Phoenix was a universal power that replaced Jean as the shuttle crashed, leaving her in a cocoon at the bottom of the Hudson river to heal. Jean never really destroyed a solar system.

No mention of Superboy-punches?

Have they actually been used to "explain away" anything in this sense, though? I wouldn't think that Jason Todd's return would count; it's just a resurrection, not actually a retcon of his death.

Although Judd Winnick's "Actually, in Hush it was Jason Todd, who then swapped places with Clayface pretending to be Jason Todd" probably would count.

I have a particular fondness for Gerry Conway's "Black Canary was active in the 1940s, but isn't in her 60s now because she's actually her own daughter" retcon from the early 80s.

The "Hawkman wasn't actually Hawkman, he was an alien spy sent to Earth who pretended to be Hawkman before the real Hawkman ever set foot on the planet" was definitely a fun one, too.

Legion department:

The TMK/TM run was rich with these, of course. The Eltro Gand business, the Protty/Lightning Lad business, re-writing Brainiac 5's breakdowns as caused by Glorith, to scratch the surface

But before them, Validus as the time-displaced offspring of Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl. And the Pocket Universe.

The Aunt May who died was really an actress.

Dr. Light becoming a figure of ridicule due to a botched mind-wipe by the Justice League.

The Legion "pocket universe" origin.

A much more minor one, but one that still makes me shake my head is Norman Osborn and the Sandman being cousins because Ditko drew their hair the same way.

M. Bloom, wasn't the Canary retcon actually Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman, not Gerry Conway?
I accept that one in the same way I accept Brand new Day - I like the resulting stories, as long as I don't think about the implications of how they got there.

Boldness? I think one of the boldest of all time has to be One More/Brand New Day.

'nuff said.

Xorn was actually Xorn’s twin brother pretending to be Magneto pretending to be Xorn-----> =)

Not quite bold as some of the others, but I think Walt Simonson & the Doombots is worth a mention.

Mary Jane having her arm broken by that monster in the other, then in the next issue (which took place immediatly after the previous issue) her arm was fine.

I think Iron Man and Spiderman explained it with some super-duper science and then broke the 4th wall with a wink to the reader.

Anyone else notice a huge amount of DC on this list?

The Rampaging Hulk movie bit.

Alicia Masters was a Skrull.

Wow, so many after Brian's five! I'm really starting to think most retcons sound pretty "bold" (trying to resist saying "stupid" in the spirit of snark freedom).

A really, really short list would be retcons that don't make the reader think "wow, did they really just do that?"

"Not quite bold as some of the others, but I think Walt Simonson & the Doombots is worth a mention."

If he actually came out and said, "And that time I got beat up by Squirrel Girl... man was that Doombot screwed up," then I'd agree with you but he didn't really retcon anything. He just dangled the possibility of retcons in front of fans and let them fill in their own blanks.

There's always the "Batman's just an urban legend... who has appeared in public often and is a high profile member of the Justice League." I guess it isn't much of a retcon if you just insist that its true in the face of contradictory history but it was monumentally stupid.

Yep, One More Day/Brand New Day is the biggest one, IMO. And not working too well, as the title is now hemorrhaging readers every 3 months.

I thought that Hal's graying hair was spawned in Ganthet's Tale. Didn't it get whiter after he got hit with entropy or something like that? But I guess having a big yellow cootie explain everything works too. Stupid HEAT people...

Scarlet Witch suddenly not remembering she had children that were negated (even though a couple of writers earlier she very much -did- remember that), then having a psychotic break because if chicks don't get to have babies, they just go crazy.

I've always had a perverse fondness for Roy Thomas's retcon of the Black Condor's origin in Secret Origins #21. Sophisticated 80's sensibilities had brought into question the Golden Age explanation of BC's flight: being raised by condors. Thomas brought some hard science to that origin. While it's true that Black Condor was raised by condors (prior to his encounter with a U.S. senator who coincidentally looked exactly like him so that when the senator got assassinated he could assume his identity), it turns out that the condor nest he was raised in happened to be located near a radioactive meteorite.

Scott Rowland: I just pulled out JLA 219 and 220, the issues where the Canary retcon happened. Looks like we're both right. Conway and Thomas did 219, Thomas did 220 on his own.

It says something about how dismal the state of DC Comics is that Johns didn't bother to undo the murder of a child in a Superman comic while he was at it, and now depicts that child's mother as a trashy bimbo who keeps throwing herself at a married Clark Kent.

Similar to what was done with explaining away every other Toyman, Geoff Johns is now claiming in Action Comics that we've never really seen the true Brainiac all these years...

Norman Osborne shtupping Gwen Stacy and producing two kids can be kind of considered a retcon, in part because it was used to explain why Gwen ran off to Europe (to have her kids supposedly) in Amazing Spider-Man shortly before she was killed off. Also, it was used to explain Norman having an ulterior motive for singling out and killing Gwen (apart from the fact that she was Peter's girlfriend).

The Xorn mess strikes me as far more ridiculous than any of the others, and they're still pushing hard on it, to boot.

I think the Xorn/Magneto one gets super special status because of how quickly it happened. Morrison's seat wasn't even cold.

I also like the result of the Byrne/Claremont rivalry where Byrne said that the Doom that Wolverine light his match on was actually a Doombot. Doombots - the Superboy Punch of Marvel. Or is the Scarlet Witch? Or Mephisto? Or "it's magic" (remember, it has no rules!)?

Tessa being the first X-Man.. I don't think anything was done with that, luckily enough, but it does take balls to retroactively insert a minor background character as predating the founding members of a team.

Another one from Avengers Forever: "The Vision was too based on the original Human Torch, Byrne doesn't know what he's talking about." That one made me smile, as I'd really disliked Byrne's retcons and changes to the Vision in West Coast Avengers (does that make Busiek's undoing of it a "re-retcon" or a "de-retcon" as opposed to just a retcon?).
In fact, Avengers Forever is to me a prime example of convoluted continuity wankery and fiddling with retcons and the like done in the right, fun, way.
Before Johns, Busiek was the master of this kind of thing, until his health issues took so much wind out of his sails. It would be fun to see him and Johns working together on some big continuity-fix project.

Nightcrawler being half demon. Lame

Some bold retcons which are actually good:

Alan Moore's Marvelman

Alan Moore's Swamp Thing

Alan Moore's Supreme

The Sentry was a pretty bold retcon and I liked the original mini but I think bringing him back as a permanent character was a mistake.

I wasn't around at the time, but what was the reaction to " Captain America actually got frozen in ice before the end of WW2"?

I'm also surprised noone mentioned Deadly Genesis yet.

Roy Thomas has pulled off dozens of retcons in his career. I kind of liked his retconning away most of the actual WWII Cap, Subby, Torch et al. stories as published, by saying that their actual activities were classified, and Marvel couldn't portray them. Then there's the two Cap imitators and the the Bucky imitator the operated after Cap and Bucky were lost in a plane explosion (and who helped save JFK!)

Then, there's the whole thing with Wanda and Pietro Maximoff's parentage; random gypsies to two WWII era Marvel heroes (that sure sounds like something Roy did) to Magneto - who happened to deal with them for years without knowing they were his kids....

Then there's the stuff forced by the decision that your characters aren't allowed to get older. Even if Jay Garrick was a twelve year old in college when he gained his powers, he's at least 80 now. Various stories have been tried on this stuff (Roy wrote one where various WWII era characters still active in the present day on Earth-2 were exposed to some sort of radiation that would retard the aging process; Alan Scott got de-aged by the StarHeart energy when they changed his name to Sentinel; and Ted Grant got some sort of "nine lives" power). And Tony Stark was a munitions supplier in Viet Nam - until that would make him too old.

The whole idea of shared-universe continuity was just beginning to be created at around the time Cap was unfrozen, so the concept of a "retcon" was still years off, even if what would later be thought of as a retcon was happening all over the place.

I would say the whole, "No Guy Gardner isn't an alien with weird powers but is human!" thing but no one has bothered to explain it so it isn't really retcon'ed yet....

One of the ballsiest I've seen, and most successful, is Ed Brubaker's "No, Bucky isn't really dead."

John Byrne's "World of Smallville" still has my all-time most heinous retcon. In a Millennium crossover, Byrne explained that the Manhunters were, in fact, closely tied to Superman's formative years. To wit:

- The Manhunters were responsible for the blizzard that coincided with the landing of Kal-El's ship.
- The Manhunters abducted and killed Lana Lang's parents.
- The Manhunters replaced young Clark's pediatrician with a Manhunter agent.
- Through their pediatrician agent, the Manhunters implanted monitoring devices into all Smallville children in order to constantly watch young Clark.

and best of all:

- Lana Lang was, from infancy on, a sleeper Manhunter agent who regularly reported on Clark to the Manhunters.

I'm pretty sure the approach taken by every writer after Byrne is that none of this ever happened. A bold set of retcons, but not a lasting one.

Specific Superboy-Punch side effects:
*I think one of his punches caused all of the Doom Patrol's history to be reset to explain Byrne's Doom Patrol (which was then incorporated with all previous versions by a fight with Superboy-Prime).
*Tempest's son Cerdian became his daughter. This one was weird to me, because I am not certain that girl-Cerdian has even appeared since, so I'm not sure why it even occurred.

The thing about the Toyman retcon is that it also implies that Toyman is a very unreliable narrator. Which means he could be deluding himself about all of the previous Toyman being robots built by Toyman.

I have no problem with say, the Toyman who murdered Adam Grant being a robot, while the Hiro Toyman from Superman/Batman is still human [and that Toyman made a robot version of that character because he's not right in the head.] There's nothing in Johns' retcon that eliminates that possibility.

Johnny Blaze's Ghost Rider actually being an angel instead of a demon was really, really bad, too.

Magma's Nova Romani village was really a bunch of tourists under Selene's influence. Or maybe it wasn't.

Of course, Mopee might be the brassiest of all.

To me, the ultimate unnecessary retcon of all times was: changing history in Crisis on Infinite Earths so the DC Multiverse never existed in the first place!

What really annoys me is the excuse given for doing it: "The Multiverse confuses fans." Really? The only DC Comic set on a Parallel Earth at the time was All-Star Squadron. The rest of the multiverse was rarely seen. Besides, we're talking about COMIC BOOK fans. If we can discuss aliens and time-travel and whatnot, are parallel Earths REALLY going to confuse us? I think the real reason was that the idea of having multiple versions of most characters annoyed somebody in power (Marv Wolman?) and he just wanted them eliminated. Just as somebody decided it would be cool to bring them back 20 years later.

-The Beyonder is revealed in New Avengers: Illuminati to have been...an Inhuman? I'm not even sure what was being suggested exactly, but I think it's best left ignored.

-The Dr. Doom that fought the X-men in their first encounter (a three-issue arc where he teamed up with Arcade) was really a Doombot. That one always bugged me and in hindsight feels like Byrne was just undermining Claremont's story for the hell of it.

But the most disastrous ones are these beauties from Bill Mantlo's Alpha Flight:

-Puck's small stature is caused by a demon trapped in his body

and

-Northstar is not a mutant, he's a fairy! From Asgard, that is...

As an attempted retcon:

-Apparently Mantlo tried to introduce Peter Parker's illegitimate son into the pages of Spectacular Spider-Man but Jim Shooter vetoed it because he didn't want their flagship hero depicted as someone who would leave a girl knocked up.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned what I would consider to be the Grand Champion of this category: The original crisis. Love it or or hate it, you have to give some acknowledgement to DC's cojones for essentially saying "Whoops, the universe just collapsed. Sorry! Alsoeverythingisdifferentnowkaybye." Granted, there were a lot of weirdly drawn out hiccups and back-pedaling, but still.

A few others that get credit for the swagger of their gait, without commenting on quality either way:

-Catwoman was a prostitute. Then: wait, no, actually, she was just PRETENDING to be a prostitute.

-Like Black Canary, Wonder Woman was actually her mother.

-Spider-man was chosen by the divine essence of Spider. (Or not?)

-A small one, but Hercules (maybe Thor too?) speaks Shakespearean English as opposed to Greek or a more modern dialect because he likes the way it sounds.

-Tony Stark was a pawn of Kang for something like twenty-five years of his pubished history. This is also, apparently, why Hank Pym was a wifebeater.

I second the many mentions of Byrne's various changes to Doom, Hulk, The Vision, The Doom Patrol, etc, etc. What makes him an especially good candidate for this sort of thing is the utter disdain he frequently expresses for whatever he's erasing, usually expressed as "Story [and usually by extension, Writer] X totally missed the point of the character, showed no respect or understanding of what the original creator wanted, and is stupid and incompetently done. I, however, totally understand all of these things and will fix this collosally idiotic move." This, understandably, hurts some feelings, and almost always leads to his retcons being re-retconned away, such as when Peter David had a character laughing at inaccuracies in a Byrne Hulk comic. Thus, I think Byrne should be declared the official champion of outrageous retcons since they almost always spawn more and have the added advantage of making grown men act like 12-year-olds in public.

Also, I want to acknowledge Johns' truly heroic attempt to make the various Hawkmen make any #$@% sense in a consistent way. Hawman's entire history, at this point, can essentially be considered one giant retcon that bares a few passing similarities, at points, to some previously published comics.

I dunno, Andy, I think a lot of Johns' retcons are the same thing as what you describe of Byrne's retcons - Johns changing things (like the Toyman stuff) that he thinks were dumb.

I swear I started that before Sijo posted. So yeah, I'm with him on that point.

Hmm, well, I'll cop to not following creators public personas as much as I used to. I'll confess, I think ultimately most retcons are creators trying to get rid of stuff they don't like/don't want to have to use. But I know that Byrne tends to be very public and (arguably) pretty obnoxious sometimes about putting down other creators' work. Does Johns do this, too? If so, I'd certainly be willing to concede the point.

I'm glad Thok pointed that out about the Toyman story. That story is more ambiguous than Brian gives it credit for.

How about all the Hawkman retcons?

I would say the whole, “No Guy Gardner isn’t an alien with weird powers but is human!” thing but no one has bothered to explain it so it isn’t really retcon’ed yet….

wasn't that in GL: Rebirth?

On a similar note, this isn't particularly bold, but it is the last retcon I've read, which is "Booster Gold is responsible for Hal Jordan getting the GL job over Guy."

How about "Arissa says she's 13, but the length of a year on her planet means she's actually over 200 by our estimation, and that's why Hal isn't a creepy pedophile?"

How about all the Hawkman retcons?

Including the really dumb "bold" one this week. (Given that and Starlin's interpretation of the Source in Death of the New Gods, I want Starlin taken off any DC cosmic stuff as soon as possible.)

If it's really "Wow, did they really just try to explain away X with Y?" then X has to predate Y-- so I think lots of the random stupid shoehorns (Manhunter Lana, for example) don't quite fit. And there are two funny subcategories:

1) Where X really was an anomaly in need of explanation, but Y was wacky bizarre overkill.

2) Where X wasn't an anomaly (middle-aged super-hero goes gray around the temples) or had already been adequately explained in comic-book terms (police scientist Barry Allen was bathed by electrically-charged chemicals and...), and so the introduction of zany element Y is just gratuitous.

The retconned-in Thanagarian link to Carter Hall's Golden Age career was a zany explanation of the zany anomaly that the post-Crisis Earth had multiple Hawkmen running around. The Hawk Avatar was a zany explanation of... the unremarkable fact that more than one hero in DC history had a motif that involved wings, or something. Type 1, Type 2.

John Byrne's Golden Age Wonder Woman retcon was type 1, and was awful and stupid...

I've never read the old Golden Age Sandman stories, but did he have the dreams that plagued him like they did in the Sandman Mystery Theatre series? If not, there's one.

Speaking of Sandman, Neil Gaiman's early issues explained the reason for Wesley Dodd's dreams being Morpheus' captivity and that the entire 1970's Kirby Sandman series was actually just a dream of its main character.

Another one I'm surprised nobody has mentioned is the revelation in Morrison's Doom Patrol that the Chief is the one who was responsible for all the accidents that led to Cliff Steele, Rita Farr, and Larry Trainor becoming Robotman, Elasti-Girl, and Negative Man. Though with the Superboy Punch, who knows how much of that is still currently in play...

And I don't know if this counts or not, but Grant Morrison killing and then reviving Buddy Baker's family "just because he could" was a pretty bold plot twist.

Oh, how about Giffen's recent Ambush Bug-inspired retcon explanation for Identity Crisis? That one sort of explained some major head scratchers upon which that series was based.

SPeaking of Byrne, I'm surprised no one mentioned Spider-Man: Chapter One

- Doom-bots. Just the fact they are out there under-mines any Doom story.

- Xorn not being Magneto. Followed by 'No More Mutants'. And the books in-between those two events just scream of 'we're stalling until we come up with a retcon'.
Made even more funny by the fact that an easier out would have just been to have a lot of Mutants in one place get killed, but that was the trigger for the 'problem' of too many mutants in the first place.

- Cyclops and Havocs missing brother was kidnapped by Shi'ar on the first mission to Krakatoa and then raised in a tube, and now he's the most powerful being ever. I guess not really a ret-con, more an insert, but even more an anti-climax than the third brother being Adam X or Gambit.

- Johhny Storms wife being a Skrull. Hell, any long term character being revealed as a skrull. After the first time, it's just weak. Same as Doom-bots.

- Lock-Jaw can't talk, and the time he did was just a prank.
Really odd-time to play a prank, but that's what the Inhumans did. Apparently.

When Wonder Woman got the post (original) Crisis reboot, she was retconned into being a newcomer to the already established DC universe and that she was not a founder or member of the original Justice League of America. Several efforts were made by DC to shoehorn Black Canary into WW's pre-Crisis role. I like the Canary but this seemed an unnecessary and messy retcon and one that I'm glad has been reversed.

*forehead slap* Swamp Thing isn't Alec Holland, just some swamp muck that thinks it's Alec Holland.

I’m glad Thok pointed that out about the Toyman story. That story is more ambiguous than Brian gives it credit for.

Agreed. In that issue, the real Toyman is so mental he thinks Jimmy is still a teenager. Plus I simply can't buy that all those Toymen were "robots" because I can't believe that Superman, with all of his powers, wouldn't be able to figure out all those Toymen were robots. In fact, in the Silver Age he was the master of tricking people with his own robots. What a d!ck!

Recent return of Spoiler was rather bold, but in a good way. But like any good retcon it explained away a bad decision in the minimum of space.

Brian's Farty the Clown was probably a great example of an unnecessary retcon, although I never figured out exactly what he was criticizing.

Oh, how about Giffen’s recent Ambush Bug-inspired retcon explanation for Identity Crisis? That one sort of explained some major head scratchers upon which that series was based.

It's called a joke.

I know Identity Crisis was intended as a joke. But I thought Giffen's AB kind of legitimized it.

Would Jack Knight meeting Jor-El and telling him about Earth count as a retcon? If so, it was a really cool one. If not, it was still a really cool story anyway.

Ultra Boy was not dumb as a post but actually a genius who ACTED dumb, all while manipulating Glorith and Mordru into fighting each other and thus saving the universe from both of them.

Oh, and Phase didn't turn out to be Phantom Girl sent to the past. Phase was actually PG's cousin. Except she wasn't, because she was really one of the three bodies of the Post-Zero Hour version of Phantom Girl -- Apparition -- who's actually half-Carggite, so she could split into three. Really, it's true! Their father was actually a reprobate Carggite gambler. Seriously! And two of the bodies were sold to the Luck Lords to pay off his debts. And then Phase got sent back in time. But now they've merged together into one body, so it's all OK. Or it would be, if anyone knew where the heck the Post-Zero Hour Legion is.

Look for more happy LSH retcon fun starting this year in Legion of Three Worlds, by...who else, Geoff Johns!

Wow...so many bad, bad retcons here. I'd like to see Brian make 2 lists, one with the best retcons, one with the worst (unless he's already made them and I haven't seen them). The worst would be much harder to limit to 5, just based on what people have mentioned. As for the best...the Swamp Thing retcon actually worked.

Yeah, the whole "Johnny's Alicia was really a skrull" has to be the most douche-baggy ret-con, doesn't it? Especially because DeFalco did it in his first or second issue on the title. After Byrne had built that story so slowly and naturally, and then Stern and Englehart and Simonson had all respected it. Just despicable.

(And ripped off from "Legion of Super-Heroes", as Brian has pointed out. )

I'm glad she's back but Spoiler's death and return was lame.

They screw around too much with the Jor-El era Krypton, the Starman bit reminded me of that. Just this past month we had a story of Jor-El pulling (by accident) Thomas Wayne to Krypton to make sure Earth is good for Kal.

I, however, like most of Geoff Johns rectons. Look what he's doing in Green Lantern right now. Hector Hammond, Black Hand...even Alan Moore's Abin Sur story...it's all tying together rather nicely. And don't forget how he explained away the strange look of the race behind Star Sapphire.

Nightcralwer never really wanted to be a priest - he was being manipulated in a plan to make him pope and kill all the Catholics with disintegrating Eucharist! That's crazier than a soup sandwich.

It's such a minor point that it barely counts as a retcon, and I kinda thought it was silly, but "Weapon X really means Weapon TEN!" was ridiculously ballsy.

I've always (yes, since the dawn of time) wanted to see a "Top 5 Retcons that Prove Charles Xavier is a Bad, Bad Man" list. People have already mentioned two top contenders for that list (Deadly Genesis and Sage's new origin - there's just no way hanging around Sebastian Shaw in that outfit was a pleasant assignment) and here's another: Professor X wasn't really dead, he was so busy preparing for an alien invasion that he asked a terminally ill supervillain to impersonate him so the X-Men wouldn't realize he was preparing for an alien invasion, which was very important because ... oh look, a butterfly!

Boldest? Here's my 5:

1) Swamp Thing was never Alec Holland, he's just a bunch of plant matter that THINKS he's Alec Holland.

2) Professor X is secretly Onslaught & has been in love with Jean Grey all these years.

3) The Phoenix was never Jean Grey -- The REAL Jean Grey's been at the bottom of Jamaica Bay all these years! This one opened the door for infinite retcons/returns from death.

4) Spider-Man's been a clone for the last 20 years.

5) Gwen Stacy had Norman Osborn's love children (BLEECH!)

The first half of Mulholland Drive, the part that was a pilot for a TV series, actually isn't real, according to the second half of the movie. Retcon right in the middle of a film OF everything and everyone we'd seen up to that point, yes, that takes the cake.

Do the dreams count?

- She-Hulk dreaming all non-Byrne issues.
- The kid of ClanDestine dreaming all non-Davis issues.
- Hulk dreaming (or nightmaring) all Bruce Jones issues.

Avengers Forever retcons can be summarized as "Everything Steve Englehart established is good, and every retcon made over his work is a Space Phantom"

All of the various retcons involving the origins of Magma of the New Mutants, while not as ballsy as say, Sins Past, were certainly annoying.

A bold retcon that worked for me: The Chief engineering the accidents that created the Doom Patrol.

- Angel´s blood has healing properties.
- Wolverine and every wolf-dog-cat-themed-super-being in Marvel Universe are evolved wolves
- Wolverine has always had bone claws
- We call Magneto Magnus but we don´t know his real name. No, now everybody remembers he is Erik Lehnsherr. No, wait, that name´s a fake, it really is Magnus. Ha! we fooled you, is Erik Lehnsherr.

"Avengers Forever retcons can be summarized as 'Everything Steve Englehart established is good, and every retcon made over his work is a Space Phantom'"

How is that bad?

The first half of Mulholland Drive, the part that was a pilot for a TV series, actually isn’t real, according to the second half of the movie. Retcon right in the middle of a film OF everything and everyone we’d seen up to that point, yes, that takes the cake.

I don't think it counts if it's all done in the same work*... although if it does, it earns extra points for making the reality more trippy than the dream.

*Apparently there was a fair bit of re-shooting and re-editing when it was taken from the pilot to the film, so it's not as B&W as to which part was in pilot and which part was made for film.
(And lets be honest, the first part is only interesting because of what comes next).

Jean Grey never really ate a solar system (or wore a black leather bustier, sorry Cyke).

Northstar's not a gay mutant with a "wasting disease", he's just a homesick fairy.

Nightcrawer's really, truly for reals a half-demon, the Eye of Agamotto just had a smudge on the lens during that annual.

Xorneto.

Wolverine and his anthropomorphic wolfman ancestors. While we're at it, let's throw in Wolverine's long line of conveniently dead true loves, long-lost friends who die as soon as they pop up out of the woodwork, and his slowly-growing troop of redundant sprog just for laughs.

Black Panther and Storm's twu wuv.

Wolverine was much more interesting before he had an origin or two and is now a hundred years old and used to fight alongside Cap, Nick Fury and now I guess, Ben Grimm, never mind anything said in Secret Wars.

Also, in the original West Coast Avengers mini series, Graviton poked a hole in the universe and out popped the Beyonder, then years later Englehart's weird FF run has Beyonder and Molecule Man (or was it Shaper of Worlds and Kubik?) as split halves of a Cosmic Cube, and now I guess the Beyonder was an Inhuman, from what someone said here. That's a lot of mental energy spent on a character with so few actual appearances! He seems to be diminishing in grandeur with each subsequent retelling. Me, I miss the Cap's-Body, Michael Jackson-haired, giant shoulder-vane-armored version that ended up a big baby in a busted test tube-version!

The best ever comic ret-con was that Baron Zemo killed Bucky in 1944 and Captain America was thrown into suspended animation. (I'm with Stan the Man, kill all kid-sidekicks)

The ret-cons that have irritated me the most, have mainly been from the X-Men.
1. Prof X wasn't killed by Grotesk, that was really another mutant called Changeling. Marvel Girl knew he wasn't dead the whole time.
2. Deadly Genesis. The X-Men get captured by a mutant island, Prof X doesn't call the Avengers, but forms a new team, this team gets killed (why weren't they captured?), Prof X still doesn't call the Avengers, but forms yet another team. Prof X then mindwipes all and sundry, so that the story can make any sense at all.
3. Phoenix wasn't really Jean Grey. Jean Grey was asleep under the ocean.
4. Madelyn Pryor was really a clone of Jean Grey.
5. Tessa was working for Prof X and he knew all about the Hellfire Club. He just chose not to mention it anyone during the Dark Phoenix saga.

Bold:
The Chief orchestrating the Doom Patrol origins

Abhorrent:
The Byrne Doom Patrol reboot... that in turn had to be SuperBoy punched into place... Sorry, but this was AWFUL!!! Cliff has been a stalwart piece of the Doom Patrol... All their histories were messed up for no reason other than John Byrne wanting to re-write Doom Patrol form the ground up... Poor Gar!...

Bold: Magneto is a drug-addict who infiltrated the X-men just by wearing a helmet and calling himself Xorn...

Abhorrent: That wasn't Magneto...

Not sure: Madeline Pryor... Wasn't Jean, but was a clone of Jean, but wasn't...

Bold: Wolverine and Cap's WW II adventures revisited from the other side

Crap: Wolverine and Sabertooth being enemies since Roman times... Blondes vs. Brunettes my arse... Where do the Red-heads fit in? (Rahne?)

Bold: Marvel Star Wars introducing Jabba the Hutt (in the first dozen issues), only to be told 60 or 70 issues later, "Er, actually he's not humanoid, he's a giant slug..." So they gave him a disease which transformed him...

Crap: Black Panther isn't Black Panther, oh wait, yes he is... but he's not... (Sentry-lad punch???)

Confusing: "No more mutants!" actually means "Only 198 mutants, plus mutates, plus augmented half-breeds, plus uber-mutants... that we know of..."

"Bold: Magneto is a drug-addict who infiltrated the X-men just by wearing a helmet and calling himself Xorn…"

I'm not sure if this counts as a retcon. Wait, it isn't. Bold, maybe. Retcon? Not so much.

"Crap: Wolverine and Sabertooth being enemies since Roman times… Blondes vs. Brunettes my arse… Where do the Red-heads fit in? (Rahne?)"

Seriously. Not to mention all the others shoehorned into that crap story...especially those like Feral, Thornn, and Sasquatch, who aren't even based on wolves!

The 2 X-Retcons that pissed me off the most, I'd have to say, were Deadly Genesis and the one about Tessa. What makes the Tessa one even more frustrating was that Claremont retconned himself!

Explaining the Tessa retcon leads to some of the most awesome BS ever, when people do, like, a Handbook entry for her. Stuff like, "Sage was likely angry at Professor Xavier that day, so that is why she didn't acknowledge him" or some such explanation for why she was, you know, HIS ENEMY back then!

wwk5d: Sorry, yeah, about the Magento/Xorn thing... What I meant was I thought Morrison's re-vamp of Magneto and addicting him to the drug was Bold... The following ret-con to Xorn's twin was the bit I hated...

the other "Oh no, he/she didn't actually die!" that I really hated was Incredible Hulk... He didn't die, bleeding, crawling towards a gamma bomb, closing the circle... He actually shrunk down to a sub-sub-atomic level where he reigned as king for a bit, before coming back to work in Vegas as a bouncer...

I really enjoyed the Death of the Hulk/Gammagate bit... I thought it really worked... one issue later, he's back...

Couldn't he have died, and Rick Jones become Hulk II...?!"?!

The sad thing is, if they wanted to ret-con the Magento/Xorn thing, they could have done it in a much less complicated way. I don't mind that someone called Xorn worshipped Magneto and impersonated him, I felt that introducing his twin brother just added nothing to the story.

Brian, it seems like Tessa was mad at Charles a lot, wasn't she?

Not to sound like a knee-jerk Geoff Johns fanboy, but to me there's a difference between his "I think this is stupid" retcons and Byrne's "I think this is stupid" retcons.

The Toyman thing, for example, never says any of the stories with previous Toymen didn't happen, they just happened in a different way than we were led to believe. Byrne, in many cases but not always, just negates whatever stories don't match his vision of the story or characters or creates new backstories out of whole cloth. Doom Patrol is the most glaring example of this.

Johns, so far, has mostly been careful to keep past continuity "in play" when working one of his retcons. Hal Jordan DID slaughter the Green Lantern Corps, but he was possessed by a yellow fear monster when he did. Toyman IS both a deranged child molester and a goofy prankster because both were robots built by the same weirdo. Guy Gardner WAS half-Vuldarian, but his body rejected the alien genes.

I'll take your word for it, Splint, but in either event, I don't think that really matters much to the specific point that Andy made, which was that Byrne was showing disdain by saying that the other writers did a bad thing, so Byrne was retconning their story.

Whether or not Johns does a cleaner job with his retcons, the motivation is the same as Byrne, "I think writer X did a bad thing here, so I am correcting it," and I don't think Johns is showing disdain for the other writers by doing so, so I'm just saying that if you're okay with Johns correcting what he feels to be mistakes, then you (that's a general you, not you specifically ) shouldn't have a problem with Byrne doing the same.

You can, of course, disagree with the decisions Byrne made, if you think he made a bad retcon. That's cool.

I just don't think it's fair to say that Byrne's retcons are coming from a "worse" place than Johns'.

I had forgotten the Lockjaw thing. Byrne making the character a cousin of the Royal family that they just treated like a dog for years was one of those things that made for a compelling stand-alone story -- as long as you didn't put the pieces together with how everyone had treated Lockjaw previously, which made Crystal, Medusa, etc all incredibly big a-holes. Best retconned, then original story and retcon ignored forever after.

Oh, forgot the "Genesis Wave", where all the pantheons on Earth were created from the energy thrown out by the demise of the Old Gods (from Kirby's New Gods 1). Written by Byrne, actually.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that Byrne ever actually read the characters he claims to love.

A favorite retcon of mine is Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron 4, where he showed why the JSA and friends weren't able to go and fight the Axis. It was an issue that needed to be addressed for the series to work, and his explanation set up the ground rules quickly and cleanly, and opened the door for future stories (which he didn't wind up doing, but still . . . .)

Maybe Mr Byrne just really loves the costumes!?!?

Two of the above weren't actually retcons:

1) Peter David didn't "retcon" that the Hulk escaped the Gamma Bomb blast by being teleported to Jarella's world, that was his plan for the story all along. A retcon is a story designed to explain away a story intended to be true at the time; the Hulk escaping certain death due to a bizarre plot twist isn't a retcon any more than the return of Superman was a retcon.

2) Sad to say, Professor X actually had thought balloons in the Lee/Kirby X-Men issues from the 60s where he pined for a young Jean Grey. EEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWW! So wrong on so many levels.

I'll toss in a retcon I haven't seen mentioned yet, one I actually liked--The Thing has always had the ability to become human, but has been subconsciously suppressing it because he thinks Alicia likes him better as a big rocky guy than as Ben Grimm. It's elegant, provides numerous story opportunities, and is grounded in what we already know of the character (to the point where it provides new insight to those old stories.)

The Tessa retcon still rubs me raw. And it wasn't even done in the service of explaining away something. Claremont just wanted her on his X-Treme!!! X-Men team for whatever reason, and rather than just show her switching sides then and there, he decided he needed to retcon her into being a secret X-Man, all the way back past Dark Phoenix to before the team was founded.

He even established that she first met Xavier when she rescued him from the attack that left him paralyzed the first time.

Oy.

And I've always wondered why, when the Golden Age Wonder Woman was retconned to be Wonder Woman's mother traveling back in time from the present to fight in WWII, they didn't just say that that the Golden Age Wonder Woman was her mother, who left Paradise Island to combat the universal threat of fascism in the guise of Wonder Woman. After the war, she went back to the island and years later, her grown daughter similarly leaves the island to fight for justice in the guise of her mother's old super hero identity.

Doesn't that seem a lot easier than needlessly throwing in the time travel element? Was there ever a good reason given that Wonder Woman's mom couldn't have just fought in WWII at the time, rather than having her travel back in time to do so?

Oh, and yes, Professor X back in the 60s was creepy, and has always been kind of a dick. See the aforementioned "I didn't die! A super-villain impersonating me died. I couldn't tell you because, shut up, that's why!" and Deadly Genesis retcons, as well as the whole "I have son? Good to know. I'll always be there for you son. Except when I'm in space with my girlfriend and you get possessed by the Shadow King. And later, when you're in a coma from that, and I forget about you, until you wake up and try to kill Magneto in the past."

I think in the end, it all comes down to what you do with the characters after the retcon is accomplished.

The FF- Johnny married a skrull retcon works for me because it undid a character development I couldn't quite accept (the breaking of the whole blind girl sees the inner beauty of the monster), and because it was actually followed through with (at least until DeFalco was pusehd off the series) -- Lyja's existence was dealt with, and the conflicting emotions Johnny had were dealt with in some fashion. Compare that with Lockjaw being a regular inhuman story -- no follow-up, no FF being aghast at how their allies have treated a sentient being as a pet, no attempt to undo the transformation, nothing.

So the Lyja retcon added something to the book, but the Lockjaw retcon just sat there (as did the retcon undoing it, but since its intent was to return things to where they were before the first retcon, I find that more acceptable.)

Another example: The retcons to make Namorita and Wonder Girl duplicates of other characters struck me as unnecessary - they added complexity to the backstory, without really adding anything for future stories. Compare to the Alan Moore Swamp Thing retcon, where there was definitely added compelxity, but it was also used to shape further stories.

Oh, yeah, to quickly clarify, I wasn't meaning to say that Johns is pure of heart and Byrne was a scoundrel for retconning, or even that one of them had intrinsically better story logic or mechanics. The disdain I mentioned was a reference to the fact that Byrne would often go out in public - interviews, his website, etc - and actually say some version of "I changed this because the previous situation was stupid and shows that the previous writer doesn't understand the character and is disrespectful of the character and/or lazy." (I can provide links, but I feel like now I'm pushing this thread in a direction I'd rather not, so. . .)

Of course, everyone who does a retcon may or may not feel this way, but there is, or at least can (should?) be a difference between feeling it and how you present it to the world.

To get away from Byrne, because deservedly or not, we're kind of ganging up on him here, I think Marvel's big P.R. error with BND was claiming that Spider-Man was "broken*," that the only workable, "real" Spider-Man was a single Spider-Man, and that Spider-Man was "fundamentally about" youth and the swingin' bachelor lifestyle.

Of course, they were going to piss some people off no matter how they did this, but by framing it as the above instead of something like "Hey, we all love Spidey. So our current writing and editorial staff got together, talked long and hard about it, and we realized that this group can do the best job, play their A game and bring you the best stories by making Spidey single again," they've implied two things:

1.) Marvel's staff, including many, many people who are still on board, are capable of missing the real point of our flagship character. For twenty years. I guess nobody really noticed. Oops. Our bad.

This one's just sort of funny. The really problematic aspect, though, is

2.) The only true Spider-Man is a single Spider-Man. If you've been enjoying the adventures of married Spidey, you don't really understand the character, and you've been enjoying the adventures of a fake, psuedo-Spidey. We're here to fix the problem that you were too thick to realize really was a problem. Dummy.

I think what bugs many people is the just-barely-unstated claim that all the stories these fans have read and enjoyed for two decades was essentially an illegitimate take on the character. It's needlessly insulting, and I think that's why claiming publicly that other creators/changes are fundamentally wrong is just generally rude and a bad idea.

Anyway, apologies for the slight derailing, and thanks for the forum to spout off my crazy fan opinions!

*All quotes come from either Joe Quesada or some memeber of the editorial staff.

Gotcha, Andy.

Thanks for clarifying!

Another Ben Grimm-related retcon that did a lot of good for the character - his being Jewish. It was something that almost went without saying given the character's background and close association with Jack Kirby, but it was nice to see it acknowledged. Another layer of depth to what was already one of the best characters in Marvel comics, and a nice tribute to one of his creators, to boot.

How about the most recent Handbook to the Marvel Universe series? Rawhide Kid wasn't really gay, he just acted oddly to confuse his enemies.

I'm not really sure whether the "Ben Grimm is Jewish" character decision counts as a retcon, because Kirby had stated that he always thought of the character as Jewish, and his religion was never stated in any book as anything else. It was just never discussed. Let's call that a gray area.

And my problem with the "Alicia's a skrull" retcon is that it's badly thought out. As with a lot of retcons that attempt to change large numbers of stories, the problem is that so many writers have acted on the original information as if it was true that there's no way to be able to reconcile every story with the new explanation. We're told that Lyja couldn't sculpt like Alicia, and hasn't done realistic sculpture since before she and Johnny were married (and hence, presumably, before she was replaced during the Secret Wars), but the She-Hulk has an Alicia Masters sculpture of her, done during Secret Wars II, and Steve Englehart had her sculpting animals during his run on the FF.

Another good example would be Bucky. Brubaker insists that they never actually said anything definitive about Bucky being dead, but he's apparently forgetting the Avengers Annual where Death sent a group of dead Marvel characters to fight the East and West Coast Avengers. Among them? Bucky. Oops.

Man, there seem to have been a lot of crappy X-Men retcons in books I didn't read. Super-evolved wolves? Secret agent Tessa? WTF?

The most elegant retcons are the ones that make you feel like it was there all along. They can even make rereading the originals seem richer and more interesting-- Moore on Swamp Thing, Gaiman on Kirby's Sandman and the Infinity Inc Sandman and the Golden Age Sandman, Gaiman on Black Orchid, PAD on Hulk's multiple personalities, Dan Slott's psychological-block explanations for She-Hulk's variations, James Robinson's Shade.

The worst are those that you really need to suppress the memory of when reading the original comics. Does anyone read Superman's origin and think "hey, this story is even better now because Jor-El met Jack Knight and Thomas Wayne and..." And the worst of the worst make you not want to reread the originals at all (I don't want to read even original Gwen Stacy stories now, for example).

I love the character of Guy Gardner, and I think turning him into a Vuldarian in the first place was a pretty bold way of dealing with a new editorial mandate. "Can't have more than one GL? Okay, fine, this character now has new abilities that can pretty much mimic a GL's abilities." Done.

I think the choice to have Guy's body suddenly reject his alien side was entirely idiotic and never should have been done (among much else in GL: Rebirth), but it wasn't a retcon. It didn't say, "no, this never happened," it took what HAD happened and moved on from there. Not every change is a retcon, after all, and this (bad) change only affected what came after it, not what came before.

John Byrne’s Golden Age Wonder Woman retcon was ... awful and stupid.

As pointed out above, the artificial need for time traveling may have been short-sighted, but otherwise this retcon was elegant and nigh-poetic. It addressed an existing issue without fundamentally rewriting it, and did so in a very simple and straightforward way. Say what you will about Byrne and his retcons, but Golden Age Hyppolyta was a stunningly smart move.

By contrast, look at the "Black Canary founded the JLA" move. I think it was a good idea for its time, and I'm sorry it's been undone, but it still went back and very specifically said not just "everything you THINK you know is wrong," but "everything you actually DO know and saw for yourself and can go double-check is wrong"...

Teebore, what made the Legion retcon even worse to me (and is proof that Charles Xavier is a Bad Bad Man) is how they eventually started claiming that every time Prof. X uses Cerebro, he "contacts with the minds of every mutant on Earth!"

Okay, I can buy that it's hard to keep track of that many mutants, so the fact that mutants he's never heard of - despite having been in mental contact with them many times - keep popping up isn't a deal breaker. I can even buy that he never noticed Cassandra Nova because her defenses were just that strong (more proof Charlie's a bad, bad man: killed his twin sister in the womb!) but the extremely psionically active, emotionally disturbed, blood relation that lived in the exact same place his old lover lives? In all those years that never caught his mind's eye?

The funny thing about the Year One Catwoman is that they could have easily said that she was not a prostitute but a dominatrix

James Robinson’s Shade.

Another bold Robinson one would have to be the affair between Starman and Black Canary (which also made reading their old team ups more interesting).
I often forget how big of a retcon that was - although I guess they are minor characters now, it's a pretty big thing to do past characters, who many consider sacred.
I think I always forget about it because it actually worked so well.

Hippolyta's time travel served two purposes. First and foremost, it allowed Diana to remain the first Wonder Woman; at least from the Amazon viewpoint. Second, it addressed why no one ever mentioned a previous Wonder Woman. There wasn't one until she went back in time and changed history. They had a scene where Jay Garrick suddenly remembered her being in the JSA.

While I didn't like much of what Byrne did on West Coast Avengers, his Vision retcon actually made sense. The original Human Torch, while called an android, easily passed for human. This presumably would include physical's he would have had as Officer Jim Hammond. We'd seen the Vision's clearly mechanical insides before, so there were explicit differences besides the external.

Does L.E.G.I.O.N. count as a retcon?

If so, that puts it right up there... Bold, clear (and slightly more obscure) links to the LoSH, and LOBO!

And great fun!

Sitting here thinking about Cap retcons:

1. The cool retcon of bringing Steve Rogers back in Avengers #4 necessitated a later retcon by Steve Englehart to explain that the Cap comics published in the 50's with Rogers as a 'Commie Smasher' were actually the adventures of a man who was so enthralled with the original that he took his name and had surgery to look exactly like him. (Stalker much?)

2. The thing about Bucky's return that nobody seems to mention is that the Cosmic Cube is all mixed up in the story. The Red Skull is in posession of one when he is shot. Cap later uses one to give Bucky back his original personality. I'll bet that Marvel asked him to build in an escape hatch in case the Bucky resurrection had failed miserably and an extremely powerful reality warping device seems to fit the bill.

Re: Spider-Man:

Clone Saga and then One More Day? Man, any way you try to come out the other end with a single Spidey, it never makes for a particularly compelling ride.

Is there any retcon you can think of which was so bad that it necessitated a string of later retcons to try and make it work? The only thing I can bring to mind is the original Crisis and the Legion of Super Heroes, man, they just can't seem to get it back to the core cool concept, although maybe Johns has the pull now at DC to make it happen.

Regarding the Legion, I kind of like the retcon that Johns implied in his recent Action Comics arc: young Clark Kent still went into the future & had adventures with the Legion, but he didn't operate as "Superboy" in Smallville (Johns had to kind of dance around this bit because he can't use the name "Superboy" right now).

What I like about most of Johns' retcons (and this column has made me realize just how many he's responsible for) is that they're generally pretty simple. So simple that they can be summed up in one sentence:

- Hal Jordan was possessed by a fear monster that caused the yellow impurity.
- The Toyman built robot duplicates that commited some of his more heinous crimes.
- We've never met the REAL Braniac, just his probes (although it remains to be seen how this one will shake out. I just hope that Johns shows us the coolest Brainiac we've ever seen).

I liked that recent Toyman one, because making his this monster that preyed on kids was just such an awful, boneheaded move. Not that making the robot that did so is much better... And it was a bit of a treat to see some of those other Toyman robots: even the Super Friends one was in there!

Anyway bold retconning is a-ok by me, if it's done to fix anything that never should have been done. Roy Thomas and Steve Engelhart were particularly adept at this even when it was pretty strained. Hell, look at what Thomas had to do one to explain the style of trunks Namor was wearing when the Invaders met the Avengers.,,

Speaking of the Moore Swamp Thing, I don't think Moore -- or anybody else -- ever got around to explaining how the last couple issues of the original comic book happened, i.e., when Swamp Thing actually reverted back to Alec Holland, which then eventually was reversed in the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN revival of the late 1970s, in a Lovecraftian fashion.

The simplest explanation is that the original Wein/Wrightson version of SWAMP THING lived on the legendary Earth-B, which thereby renders any need for a retcon unnecessary.

And of course, the Earth-B concept helps explain any other retcon that was so abrupt that it completely negated the storylines that preceded it.