Comixfan Round Table #2 Part 2 - Retcons: Spider-Man, Wolverine & More

[John H]

The Retcon - Part 2.
The Retcon discussion continues...

David Branson: Marvel generally does retcons more than in-story reboots (for the latter, see Mephisto as Divorce Lawyer, boo hiss). A non-in-story reboot would be the Byrne Spider-Man which never took off.

And let's not forget that ghastly Trouble miniseries. That was a definite retcon that was so hated Marvel quietly let it drop.

William Keogh: Unlike John Byrnes' failed Chapter One series that tried to rewrite the origin of the character. Busiek paid proper respect to the Spider-Man mythos in Untold Tales; I'm not sure you would call it a retcon as much as it was adding on to the early years of the character.

David: Untold Tales of Spider-Man was definitely good. I think I would agree it's not really a retcon per se, though -- just stories set in the past.

William: Well, we had to bring it up sooner or later. The One More Day retcon. The single worst thing to ever happen to the Spider-Man titles.

We're supposed to believe that Peter and Mary Jane would make a deal with a devil to save the life of crotchedly old gravely wounded May. We're supposed to believe May would want that out of them. We're supposed to accept that Peter Parker reverts to more of an early eighties version of himself, single, broke, and stuck in a rut. We're supposed to believe the marriage, in effect, never happened. And that there are a whole lot of holes in Peter's life, yet to be explained.

Years of story continuity, tossed out the window, because Quesada essentially wanted Peter to be single. Divorce would have made him seem older. MJ dying would have done the same.

Peter Parker, instead of being given a chance to evolve and grow, is now, in essence, suffering from Family Circus syndrome. He'll never get unstuck. Not with Quesada running Marvel. This retcon rates as one of the worst ideas you ever came up with.

Alister Hooke: The One More Day retcon/reboot has had both successful and unsuccessful elements to it. It was sickening at the time. A real slap in the face of loyal Spider-man fans, many of whom had invested in Pete and Mary-Jane's marriage. I remember feeling bewildered and angry at JQ at the time. I knew what he was trying to do, but the way he went about it was an unholy mess. The idea of Pete doing a deal with the devil to save his frail old ready-for-the-grave aunt just didn't ring true to me.

BUT...

There is no denying that the post-faustian pact Spider-man stories have been among some of the best Spider-man stories ever. In particular, The Gauntlet has proved to be a consistently great series of stories with a host of vintage Spidey villains (Sandman, Electro, Rhino, Mysterio and Lizard) pouring out of the woodwork to give our hero some pain. So I guess this has been one retcon with major plus and minus sides to it.

Marty P: Those stories could not have been told with Peter still married with MJ? I'm with William on this: BND is one, if not the worst ideas Marvel has come up with.

Alister: I wouldn't disagree with that. But Brand New Day may not have happened without the cleansing bonfire that was One More Day, in the sense that it incinerated the status quo and forced a whole new direction out of necessity. It's a shame that a whole mass of creativity and enthusiasm was injected into the Spider-man line only once JQ had dropped a bomb on it. Quite unnecessary as you say, but the fans are still buying the book because the current stories are good regardless.

David: I pretty much agree with William and Marty here. I think OMD bugs me on two levels. The deal with Mephisto is one -- but the genuine "time has been altered for the last 20 years of published stories" is another.

I think I simply don't care about Brand New Day. All I can see is the loss of character development. Knowing that -- as stated in interviews -- Marvel's deliberately keeping his status quo unchanging, that Peter must always basically lose in the end because it's so sympathetic and readers can identify with it and so on, means I know in advance that nothing interesting that lasts will be allowed to happen to him in this regime.

I think some of the not-quite-retcons of the last few years at Marvel are basically they're just more on a character-behavior level. Tony and Reed were planning things for years. Tony'd been hanging onto Thor's hair for years. The Illuminati had been doing their secret stuff since the Kree-Skrull War. Scarlet Witch had actually been crazy for ages, and apparently had been effectively playing Norman Bates with the long-dead corpse of Agatha Harkness for some time, calling into question her relatively recent appearances (ew!!).

Oh, I'd forgotten about the Spider-Woman retcons from her recent Origin miniseries -- anyone want to say anything about that?

William: Oh, that Spider-Woman origin is a headache, David, but it's been a while since I read it.

Marty: I missed that. What was 'wrong' with that?

David: I remember that everything from the time period of Jessica's birth to Bova's species has been inexplicably altered.

I recall that the Evolutionary War annuals summed up a lot of established stuff about Jessica, what with the Wundagore connection, that was wildly at variance with the mini.

While her original origin is indeed convoluted and just plain strange, that is what you wind up with in the Marvel Universe after decades of continuity. If she were being introduced in a movie, or in the Ultimate Universe, then that's fine, remake her as you see fit, but when I realized how much was just being inexplicably jettisoned, even before I realized how much I disliked a certain writer's writing in his other works, I dropped the title.

William: The Clone Saga, or the second Clone Saga, the retcon that had Ben Reilly revealed as the original Spider-Man. It had a lot of fans up in arms (that was when I started reading comics). It might have been better at the time had they not named him the clone, but had Peter retire for awhile and let Ben take over the webs. Marvel would have a single Spidey, Peter could have a family with MJ, and life would go on.

Instead they went with Ben Reilly as the true Spider-Man. Which infuriated the fans. Still, I thought at the time (and still do) that Ben was an interesting character, that there were some good characters (Kaine especially) that came from that era, and some good stories. Inevitably Marvel knew they couldn't get away with it, and retconned the retcon, returning Peter to the webs, and doing in Ben (along with Peters' daughter, more's the pity).

Another retcon? Aunt May's not Aunt May. In Amazing 400, we had the death of Aunt May. It was a powerful issue. But instead of letting the story stand, Marvel decided to retcon it. Of course, JMS really fleshed her out, gave her much more dimension and depth, so that's a positive that ultimately came out of this retcon.

One more retcon that kind of falls in between the two sides: JMS' attempts during his run to establish Spider-Man as connected to the mystical side of things, that he was, in essence, a totemic figure.

David: Much of which got junked along with everything else in OMD, alas. The whole storyline in which Aunt May deals with Peter's ID as Spider-Man was fantastic, and finally got away from "poor Aunt May, her heart might give out if she ever learns." Sigh.

William: JMS did really well with her character, particularly how she adjusted to the secret identity.

David: I liked the whole Spider-totem thing myself, but I was in the minority there, I think.

William: I think it was one of those things that had positive and negative qualities. It felt too convoluted at times, but at least some good stories came out of it.

Clay Olsen: See I liked the 'Peter we knew was a clone the whole time' idea... It was a big and unexpected twist. I've never seen anything wrong with clone characters though. Being a clone wouldn't make him any less interesting as a character. And of course I liked Ben Reilly as well and wish that they had let him stick around and take over.

William: I might have liked them going with Ben as Spider-Man for a few years, just not having him be the original. It would have been good to have Peter just be a husband and a dad.

Clay: As for retcons like Illuminati, I'm not totally against them. The Illuminati as a concept has some good ideas... the execution and retcons created by the series didn't really follow through.

William: The concept might have been promising, but the follow through felt more like fitting square pegs into round holes.

Oddly, the concept of the Intelligencia now unfolding in World War Hulks doesn't seem as jarring as the Illuminati. At least not yet.

David: My gripe with Illuminati was not only with the characterization of the folks involved, but with the idea that the major characters whose innermost thoughts we've been privy to since stories published in, what, 1972, were all hiding something this monumental without even giving it an on-camera passing thought for the stories published over the last three and a half decades. It's just untenable.

William: I definitely have to agree with that one.

David: (It's part of my gripe with Xavier in Deadly Genesis: Not only does it impugn his character, it means this terrible, guilt-wracking, earth-shaking secret was in the back of his mind and Moira's since the first appearances of the All-New, All-Different crowd from 1975 on -- which is just plain ludicrous. Not to mention, of course, the sheer number of powerful telepathic folks (Dark Phoenix, etc.) who could have picked up on it and said something...)

William: What he did to Danger is another such example.

Clay: But the Illuminati group met only a very few times, before falling apart. And for the most part didn't accomplish anything until after the groups official break up. There really wasn't anything to hide is the sad thing until very recently. Shooting the Hulk into space, Capturing the Infinity Gems, Registration and Skrull-lektra all had to have happened post-breakup and fairly recently in the timeline.

William: But keeping the group secret all that time? Not so likely.

David: Clay, I never really thought about that. So much for "This changes EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW!!" etc. I still don't see Strange sharing things with the others and keeping that from Clea, Wong, etc., or Reed keeping secrets like this from Sue -- perhaps not even Charles from Moira or especially Lilandra -- and definitely not Black Bolt from the rest of the Royal Family. But yeah, there wasn't nearly as much secret crap going on (written so far, anyway) as it sounded like there was supposed to be.

William: Above all, I really don't see Reed keeping it from Sue. Of course, for the point of their major events (Civil War especially) there seemed to be a policy of writing Reed completely out of character for awhile.

David: There's simply no way the Beyonder could have been a mutant Inhuman. He was already retconned into being an unformed Cosmic Cube. And there's really no way that all of Secret Wars II, including all the crossovers which appeared in every single Marvel comic published at the time this side of Planet Terry, was taking place on a sort of fake Earth he made. I don't know what the heck Bendis was up to there.

David: Oh, we've forgotten one big, painful retcon from the last few years. Alongside Illuminati, Deadly Genesis, Sentry, and Jessica Jones, we have Romulus. Oh my God I hope once it's over he's just written out somehow. And the whole "hidden race of people descended from wolves" makes no sense at all. I love Golden Age stuff, but I swear, it's like something out of the 1940s ("Raised by condors, the baby learned to fly!" "Injected with mongoose blood, he gained super-speed!" etc.).

Marty: Romulus? I have read about that online, and I am happy I didn't buy the book itself. It's really hard to believe Marvel actually was okay with all that.

That retcon hasn't been retconned yet?

David: Actually, the Romulus thing is hitting its big finale in the next issue or two, I believe. One might hope that perhaps it will end with a great big "Ha! I fooled you all! I made all of that crap up!" scene before Romulus gets, presumably, killed.

One might hope that, yes.

~The End~

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[William Keogh]

And one of the things we missed out on mentioning in all that OMD nonsense is that for some inexplicable reason, forcing Peter back into a pre-marriage mode meant resurrecting a character who really didn't need resurrecting. Harry Osborn.

A question for those who are still reading the main Amazing title: what about little Normie? Is Harry a dead beat dad? Or did the kid get erased from existance?

[Phil Hunn]

With the advent of OMD, Joe Quesada single-handedly destroyed not only my own enthusiasm for 616 Spider-Man, but also that of my Comic Book Guy, who's been a Spidey fan for forty freakin' years.

That's some feat. I don't care whether the stories post-OMD are good or not, it's just not my Spidey anymore. No "everyman" superhero, whose entire gimmick is based on doing the right thing, should have made a deal with the ultimate evil for little more than his own selfish (and surely Oedipus-complex-influenced) reasons.

The worst thing, though, was that Joe Quesada's idea of making Peter "more relatable" was to turn him into an unemployed, girlfriend-less loser living with his aunt and (apparently) looking at porn on his computer. What does that say about his attitude to Marvel's fans?

[William Keogh]

Well said, Phil. Perfect way to sum up OMD.