There is a device in comics called the 'retcon,' which means "retroactive continuity." Basically, it changes things that already happened in order fit a contemporary writerly goal.
I've identified two distinct kinds of retcon, so far. The most common kind involve introducing new elements to a story that the reader hadn't previously seen in order to radically reinterpret certain events. The obvious version of this is the "it was all a dream" retcon. This isn't logically impossible, within the story. Readers are merely informed that what they thought were real events (within the fictional world of the narrative) weren't real at all. This happens in comics all the time.
The Clone Saga is one of the biggest, most horrendous fuck-ups in Marvel Comics' history. In it, a clone of Spider-man, complete with Peter Parker's memories and thought to have been killed in a late 70s, throw-away adventure, turns out to have lived. He comes back, and it turns out that he is the real Peter Parker, and the character readers had followed since the 70s was the fake. The story was awful, dismal dreck, but it was not logically impossible. We simply didn't know that the Peter who seemed to have survived the original story in the 70s was the clone, not the original. Woops.
The second kind of retcon is something I've already mentioned. It's what Julia Round, a fellow comics scholar, refers to as 'superscription,' literally 'writing over' a previous narrative element. In this version of retcon, something for which readers have demonstrable evidence is contradicted in a subsequent story either by radical rupture in the narrative, or writerly fiat.
To continue the previous example, readers' reactions to the Clone Saga were so overwhelmingly negative (and with good reason), that the powers that be at Marvel Comics decided to just plain chuck it all and start fresh. They basically rebooted Spider-man continuity, returning him to a point at which there were no clones, where his Aunt May was still alive (she died mid-way through the Clone Saga), and Peter Parker was back to being the smart-ass superhero readers knew and loved.
On a case-by-case basis, superscription usually happens by fiat. Which is to say, they just happen, and readers have to just live with them. When they occur on a massive scale, though, they're sometimes facilitated by events of cosmic proportion that attempt to either justify or explain how continuity suddenly, radically changed.
DC Comics (in)famously rebooted its entire universe of characters in 1985 in an event called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The multiple individual universes that previously existed in DC Comics, which facilitated the occasional cross-over of characters from one to the other, were suddenly squished together into one big, seemingly consistent, timeline. This took a year's worth of comics to depict, and was followed by decades of "so, how did this now happen in the past?" discussions, most of which defied the verb tenses of the English language.
Despite their technical differences, however, retcon and superscription function to solve almost exactly the same problem of storytelling. In order to tell a story now, a writer must violate an established element of a story that happened then.
In the case of superscription, this is often just a convenience, a narrative element swept under the rug, like the fact that Leia claims to remember her mother in Return of the Jedi, but her mother dies in childbirth in Revenge of the Sith. Lucas et al. wanted to alter a story element for the sake of drama and pacing, so they did. No harm done, really, but a continuity problem none the less. In the case of retcon, this is often a way to either create a new story, as is the case in the Clone Saga.
Both, however, are routinely used to correct what are percieved as bad stories, or stories we'd like to have never happened. Crisis on Infinite Earths was supposed to clean up DC's continuity, to simplify the universe of characters. Instead, it confused the ever-living crap out of several generations of readers. A recent story called Green Lantern: Rebirth was a grand retcon, not a superscription, meant to undo a story in which a beloved hero, Hal Jordan/Green Lantern II, turned into a cosmic villain called Parallax.
The question I'm left with is this: why do audiences in comics and sci-fi need these interventions? Why are we incapable of simply ignoring or dismissing stories that we don't like? Why do we take it personally when George Lucas or Rick Berman or Geoff Johns write a bad story about characters or settings that we love? Why can't we let go?
Posted by orion at May 31, 2005 4:07 PM