If that counts as a retcon then the Back to the Future films were all retcons of themselves

I’m fine with the Back to the Future movies being considered retcons of themselves. The term just doesn’t have much force in such limited usage (where the changes are evident only for, what, 10 minutes of total screentime in the three films?) unlike the grander scale changes that comic book retcons typically have (but even then, that’s only typically – some comic book retcons are LESS significant than the Back to the Future stuff, like Patsy Walker’s mom’s name being Dorothy instead of Betty).

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.

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.,,

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).

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.

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

And great fun!

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.

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.

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?

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”…

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).

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.

Thanks for clarifying!

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.

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.