In Q & A, a weekly feature of Fantastic Fangirls, we ask our staff to tackle a simple question — then open the floor to comments.
How do you feel about retcons in comics?
Anika
Excuse me while I get on my soapbox. I feel that the collective comic book industry and fandom should stop fighting the cyclical nature of comic book stories and embrace the retcon. If comics were about maintaining realism within the confines of their fantasy Peter Parker would be sixty-seven years old this year. But it taking fifty years for him to age fifteen isn’t really an issue, it’s that he’s had fifty years worth of stories and that’s too much to fit into fifteen years (and it’s closer to ten anyway). It’s too much to move forward with. Comic book continuity only goes so far, then someone gets to hit the retcon button. Sometimes it’s logical, sometimes it’s absurd, sometimes it’s welcome, sometimes it feels like a personal attack, but it always comes around again.
I would like to freeze origin stories and let everything else be a free for all. Why does there have to be a prime universe? Set limits on series instead of characters and let the creators tell the stories they want to tell: borrowing this, ignoring that, exploring the other, exploding the new. And then after that series is done, another team gets a shot to tell a whole other story. Or not! I don’t want to do away with continuations or crossovers entirely. I want to do away with whining and arguing about whether or not a retcon was “worth it” or “necessary” or “a power trip”. I want to dismantle the hierarchy of what “counts” and what’s “real”. I want there to be a comic I can hand a new reader every month.
It would take a lot of bravery to implement my plan. And a lot of trust. It’s a near impossible task. But these are stories about superheroes and things are only impossible until they’re not.
Caroline
It’s all pretend.
I say this at the risk of being extremely obvious. But. Whenever you (and my “you” includes “I,” because I do this, too) find yourself getting upset that the stories you read didn’t happen, it’s worth remembering.
It’s all pretend.
So, for me, the question of whether you like a retcon is the same as the question of whether you would have liked a story if it had been told that way in the first place. The retcon process is neutral (and in fact I often prefer an ingenious retcon to a carefully planned story). If anything, I wish comic books didn’t spend so much time on it and just basically announced, “Yes, we did it that way before. Now we’re doing it this way.”
Just ask Holly Robinson.
Sigrid
I am a mixed and hypocritical fan of retcons. To wit, I like the retcons that remember the things I agree with while forgetting or revising the things I dislike. And I scowl at retcons that accomplish the reverse.
I am a big fan of reboots, re-envisionings, and Alternate Universe takes on things, though. I really enjoyed Marvel’s Ultimate Universe. I liked many of DC’s Elseworlds. I like the baldfaced chutzpah with which X-Men comics have forty-kajillion future-alternate-possible-AUs. If establish continuity comics want to end everything and start all over every few years, I’m along for the ride.
Nothing anyone can publish in the future can take away the stories I love. And what’s new might be another thing I enjoy. So why not? Bring me your rebooted retcon re-imagining and let’s see what happens.
So what about you? How do you feel about retcons in comics?
I only hate retcons when they remove my favorite characters entirely from the universe they existed in for years (DCnU – see Donna Troy, Wally West, etc). I actually like a lot of the new DC stuff (see Aquaman, Batgirl, Wonder Woman, JLA).
I also hate character assassination during retcons (Starfire, Selina Kyle) or things that make no sense to me (Emma Frost/Namor & Jean back from the dead AGAIN, etc).
AUs, Elseworlds, what ifs are all interesting but don’t take away what I lived about the character or comic to begin with because I will stop buying. I already have done so with Red Hood & Catwoman.
There’s good retcons and bad retcons, and the kind that is really indifferent but which causes unnecessary complications. An example of the last category resulted e. g. in there being (AFAIK) at least three conflicting accounts of how Ben and May Parker became the guardians of Peter Parker, with Peter either still a baby or a pre-school toddler. None of the stories is really bad, still it bugs me. Another noxious kind of retcon is one that is tailored to a current storyline but which makes no sense with past continuity, such as the 1990s one where it was “revealed” that Cody Robbins never got out of the coma he fell into at Rogue’s first kiss, which fit the scared-of-her-own shadow wimp Rogue of the era but made no sense at all with Rogue’s established behaviour and easy-going attitude towards using her absorption power in stories written earlier and in particular those set before Avengers Annual #10.
Sturgeon’s Law definitely applies to retcons in general, but thanks to the “unnecessary complication” category, 90 per cent would be a very conservative estimate. On the whole I’d say that experience shows that there are too many retcons already, we don’t need to encourage writers and editors to do more of them, rather we should require them to be more careful in their use and consider the consequences of the change they institute.
@ Anika
Even in a case like Spider-Man, which is special (he’s been around for fifty years and was published in multiple titles most of that time), I don’t think retcons actually help the situation of a crowded continuity. “One More Day” demonstrated that – basically everything that happened is still canon with the exception of a few cherry-picked events, but it was done in a flawed way that added confusion and left unanswered questions (which is why reader’s still don’t know e. g. whether Mary Jane was pregnant during the Clone Saga in the retconned continuity or not). Here a complete reboot would have been the much better option, and I probably would be reading Spider-Man again by now had Marvel chosen that route rather than the one they did. (After all, I have been reading Ultimate Spider-Man from the beginning and thanks to Quesada and his henchmen it currently is the only Spider-Man book I read).
@ Caroline
Hear, hear!
@ Sigrid
I mostly agree with you, but I do see elsworlds, alternate timelines and reboots as something very distinct from retcons.