Posted: 17 March 2012 at 5:36am | IP Logged | 1
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Over in the AFTERMATH 41 thread, Tom French had this to say:'With all the lampooning of the comic book industry JB did in "FAME", the idea of "ret-conning" Vanguard into the Dollar Comics universe feels like we're back in familiar territory.' His use of quotation marks indicates Tom realizes that the Vanguard appearance in this issue is not strictly a "ret-con" -- "retroactive continuity" -- but this got me thinking. What is? "Ret-con" has become one of those terms that get thrown around by some fans without any real consideration of their actual meaning. Terms like "crossover", "mutant", even "reprint" have suffered a similar fate. But as the term was originally coined, "retroactive continuity" mean something that ALTERED what was "known". Thus, the introduction of Alex Summers in X-MEN was not a "ret-con", merely the revealing of a detail that had been "hidden" from us before. But the introduction of Superboy to the Superman backstory was most definitely a ret-con (one of the earliest), since it contradicted what was previously shown. Superman, in fact, has probably seen more ret-conning than any other single character. The changes to Krypton alone amount to a long, long list (from being an Earth-like world inhabited by people who already had powers like Superman's, all the way to being a massive world whose inhabitants were quite "normal"). Superman's powers have changed many times, and always retroactively (in early Superman stories, he could not fly -- but Superboy could!). His casual attitude toward killing badguys became an "oath against killing" and the flat out statement that he had NEVER killed! By contrast, Batman has seen fewer actual ret-cons, and some that have been introduced -- like Bruce Wayne's insane older brother -- have been promptly forgotten! At Marvel, ret-cons often tended to be more subtle, and requiring an almost microscopic knowledge of continuity in order to be detected. The Hulk as gray when introduce, but after he turned green flashbacks to his origin showed him green from the start. The FF's original flight "to the stars" became a flight to the Moon -- which had to be re-ret-conned when we actually got there! So, bottom line, here's my plea to fandom: let's not let this term (virtually unique to comics) lose all meaning. To really be a "ret-con", information revealed in a story has to be not only NEW, but somehow CHANGING what we thought we knew.
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