Revise/Reboot: Retcons and the Modernist Restructuring of History in Superhero Comics

In modernist literature, traditional notions of history are famously subject to interrogation. Driven in part by a general post–World War I disillusionment, many modernist authors understood history not as a static thing, but as a concept to be re-examined and reworked. These writers often reconfigured the past in their writing as a means of recontextualizing the present in hopes of a more productive future, such as the fragmentation of history in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—in which classical and contemporary history collapse and recombine to occur simultaneously—or the transformation of Homeric epic into a single Dublin day in James Joyce’s Ulysses. But while modernism is perhaps the most visible moment in which authors turned to the past as a workable material, such adaptations of the past are not solely found within the bounds of canonical modernist literature. For instance, in mainstream American superhero comics—by which I mean those published by Marvel Comics and DC Comics—narrative history is transformed on a regular basis through retroactive continuity changes (also called “retcons”) as a means of escaping a limiting past. While contemporary superhero comics use the retcon for different goals than modernists’ experimental approaches to history—after all, these comics are primarily commercial—the retcons in these comics present the (narrative) past not as a static foundation to which we are bound, but as something that can be restructured and made new. Therefore, by examining superhero comics in relation to modernism’s reworking of historical time and temporality, we gain a clearer understanding of how those comics’ manipulations of the narrative past occur for surprisingly similar purposes.

Each time a new issue of a superhero comic is produced, its creators must reconcile it with a very long history. Superman, the oldest superhero published by one of “the Big Two” comic  companies, premiered in Action Comics #1 in May 1938, the first of a series that has been published on a near-monthly basis ever since and released its thousandth issue in April 2018 with no signs of stopping. Other iconic superheroes are not far behind, with DC Comics publishing eightieth anniversary commemorative issues for Batman and Robin in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

But while this longevity has helped establish these characters as major figures in the pop-culture landscape, it can also place limitations on the narrative choices that creators can make in the future. In the early years of the comic book industry, newsstand distribution methods forced superhero comics to be somewhat vague and contradictory in their continuity, creating what Umberto Eco called “a kind of oneiric climate—of which the reader is not aware at all—where what has happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy” and in which the superhero begins each issue at more or less the same starting point.[1] However—although the circumstances that led to its widespread establishment are the subject of debate—continuity, or the expectation that stories in superhero comics connect to one another in a linear narrative, is now the norm to the extent that an understanding of past comics canon has become considered “an essential aspect of both the consumption and enjoyment” of the genre.[2]

This practice of maintaining continuity, while granting superhero comics a rich narrative history, can create logistical issues in terms of storytelling. For example, take the seemingly simple linear progression of narrative time. Even though individual issues are no longer as self-contained as they once were, time still does not operate on the same terms in superhero comic books as it does in life or in other narrative forms like novels. With very few notable exceptions, superheroes are depicted as consistently existing at the same age as when they made their debuts, no matter how long ago that was.[3] While there is typically an unstated amount of time that takes place between story arcs, the advancement of time in superhero comics still breaks down upon examination, as a character’s continued viability requires them to never age. Since for the most part superhero comics are set in the present, the worlds around these characters are constantly changing to reflect contemporary society, while the characters progress at a much slower rate. Despite having, in some cases, literal decades’ worth of adventures, characters like Barry Allen (a.k.a., the second Flash) are still roughly the same age as when they first debuted (for Allen, in 1956), whether changing costumes in corner phone booths or texting their wives on a cell phone.

The introduction of continuity—and by extension character growth—also carries with it the threat of progressing too quickly. In the early years of superhero comics, a superhero’s powers could appear and disappear without any particular note. However, readers now expect the events of superhero comics to have lasting but not necessarily irreversible consequences for the character. If a superhero learns a new skill in one issue, then readers expect the character to utilize these new abilities when future situations call for them. While adding a new ability to a character’s superhuman arsenal can be exciting and may open up new storytelling possibilities, there is also the danger of making these heroes so mighty that few problems could pose as narratively interesting obstacles. Although the emphasis on continuity allows for characters to evolve over time, it also limits potential modification of these characters for fear of rendering them too powerful.

Perhaps most critically, past continuity in superhero comics could be seen as limiting a title’s creative potential in both the present and future. Maintaining these continuous stories over the course of decades requires multiple successive creative teams, each with different goals and ideas. This is a common feature of corporate superhero comic books, yet it carries real implications for the titles whose leadership those new creators now assume. Each time a character comes under the control of new creators or editors, the handover creates a moment fraught with a tension between creative impulses. When control over a work or character is transferred to another, Jan Baetens observes, the subsequent creator is usually compelled “above all, to prove that he [is] able to do as good a job as [the original creator(s)] while also doing something different.”[4] Additionally, it is during these creative handoffs that creators must decide what to do with past continuity, as each creative team brings its own ideas to the development of the character and its narrative. While the previous creative team took a character in one direction, the new team might wish to go in an altogether different one. See, for example, Wonder Woman #178, when writer/artist team Dennis O’Neil and Mike Sekowsky took over the series and, “[h]oping to encourage female readers to strive for independence,” decided to depict the Amazonian warrior abandoning her powers along with her iconic lasso and bracelets to become “a modern girl.”[5]

However, the common phenomenon of creator transitions means that an ongoing series or story must move from one creative direction to another, and that means deciding how that transition will be carried out. It is in this transition that we see the strongest expression of what Jackson Ayres calls “the logics of their authorial selves”—that is, their creative identities.[6] Ayres categorizes these authorial selves into two groups, each of which centers on how creators relate their own work to what has been previously published. The artisan, who focuses on “familiarity and stability,” works to make a seamless transition by carrying forward many elements of the previous creators’ work (e.g., storylines, aesthetics) before gradually making their own shifts; meanwhile, the auteur “privilege[s] disruption and novelty, telegraphing a break from a prior tone, visual style, narrative direction, thematic emphasis, or characterization” with no such transition (Ayres, “Writing for the Trade,” 241).

Whether these new ideas and storylines are introduced gradually by the artisan creator or suddenly by the auteur, the adaptation of a character to fit these changes can be a delicate balancing act between continuity and creativity. On the one hand, this new version must be similar enough to previous iterations that fans will continue to purchase the title. If a character or their adjacent themes (e.g., truth and justice for Superman, power and responsibility for Spider-Man, and so on) are too dramatically altered, the expectations established by previous iterations are not carried forward, potentially disappointing readers. On the other hand, creators may also feel the need to make their work distinct and to pursue new narrative directions or dimensions of particular characters.

It is true that not all creators see previous comics canon as a direct threat to the introduction of new ideas. Some comics creators, such as Grant Morrison, embrace previous variations in continuity—even seemingly contradictory ones—through what Hyman calls a homodoxy, which utilizes “the narrative coexistence of inconsistent elements culled from different versions of a character’s textual history” (Revision, 6). However, the majority of mainstream superhero comics—whether by command of the controlling companies in order to protect merchandising value, through creators’ own desires to avoid such complexities, or some combination thereof—attempt to maintain a linear, non-contradictory sense of continuity. Even Morrison, who enjoys “taking [characters] to the edge” of their possibilities in this fashion, has noted that “when it's time I leave, I'll try to leave the toys exactly as I found them” for the next writer to pick up, thus maintaining the overall flow of a linear “long chain” of storytelling continuity.[7]

This act of trying to maintain the “long chain” of storytelling can become more precarious with each successive changeover. If continuity were to remain unbroken, creators would be expected to accommodate each previous version of a storyworld or character down to their finest details with each new iteration. This is, of course, an increasingly daunting task the longer those storyworlds or characters exist and becomes exponentially more complex when—as is the case for many pop-culture figures—these characters are utilized on multiple fronts of a multimedia enterprise, because there is pressure to incorporate storyworld information introduced in other parts of the franchise.[8] For example, Batman’s iconic Batcave was not a creation of the comics, but of the 1943 film serial; however, this aspect of the Dark Knight is now so thoroughly bound up in the character’s mythos that it is now widely considered a necessary element of the character in all media forms.[9] Despite editors dedicated to the task of maintaining narrative continuity within characters’ multimedia existence, Karin Kukkonen points out that, inevitably, “inconsistencies emerg[e] in the different storylines and encounters involving these characters.”[10] Even if we imagine a perfect environment wherein creators and editors are experts in every detail of a character’s history, each writing decision under this paradigm would reduce the pool of future possibilities. In superhero comics, whose readers are notorious for pouncing on inconsistencies, the simple advancement of time becomes a threat to the maintenance of a single, consistent continuity. Although the introduction of continuity encourages readers to reliably return to their comics retailer in order to avoid being left behind, “the coherent and consistent development of the characters and their storyworlds [becomes] a problem” as storylines develop (Kukkonen, “Navigating Infinite Earths,” 40). As time progresses, a character or storyworld’s publication history becomes more tenuously balanced upon itself, threatening the integrity of the storyworld’s internal logic and verisimilitude.

However, in this conundrum comes its own solution: if the history of a fictional character or world is hindering its further development, then that history can be revised or reconceived in favor of the current creative team’s intentions and needs. It is through this logic that retroactive continuity changes, or “retcons,” operate. Through retcons, creators of superhero comics are able to, as Andrew J. Friedenthal defines them, “[revisit] past stories, told in previous installments of a long-form narrative, and ad[d] a new piece of information to that older story, literally rewriting the past,” thereby altering the context of previous installments and creating avenues for new storytelling.[11]

In what is perhaps a surprising instance of thematic resonance, the motivations that drive the repeated use of the retcon in superhero comics share similarities with what drove many modernists to try to reconfigure and transform their understanding of history. The then-unprecedented destruction of World War I unsettled many modernists’ relationship with traditional conceptions of history. As Cedric Van Dijck, Sarah Posman, and Marysa Demoor explain, after the war “[m]odernist writers considered themselves freed from a determinist Hegelian historical scheme . . . [with] the ability to pick and choose from history.”[12] Although they did not completely “sever ties with the past per se,” modernists were driven to “‘make it new’, informed by a Bergsonist understanding of time that highlights tapping past energies in order to invent new constellations” (Van Dijck, Posman, and Demoor, “World War I,” 36). No longer seeing history as a static notion, modernists took a transformational approach that recontextualized both past and present.

This tapping of past energies can be found when Eliot combines images from the past and present within The Waste Land—so that, for instance, a man walks across London Bridge and has a chance encounter with Stetson, “who were with me in the ships at Mylae,”—creating a “heap of broken images” that both alienates the present from its circumstances while connecting it to past realities.[13] Meanwhile, in his schema for Ulysses, James Joyce utilizes episode names taken from Homer’s Odyssey to draw mock-heroic parallels between the happenings of a seemingly ordinary day in Dublin and the epic travels of Odysseus, thereby encouraging the reader to view the actions and circumstances of Stephen Dedalus and the Blooms in a Homerian context. In both cases, Eliot and Joyce reach back to a previously established point in time—The Punic War for this instance in Eliot, Odysseus’s mythical journey shortly after the Trojan War for Joyce—to create new presents, transforming modes of navigating through history, both past and in the making.

The types of historical transformation that occur in the works of these modernists and those of comics creators, of course, very much differ in scope of action and intention. Most modernists were reconceiving history writ large as a means of restructuring our approach to our pasts and futures, while the creators of superhero stories are modifying or restructuring the narrative of a single character or (at its most expansive) that of an entire fictional universe in order to expand their storytelling possibilities. However, the modernist impulse to remake the past and the use of retcons in superhero comics share key, base commonalities in their approaches to the objects of their remaking. Notably, they both predicate themselves on the idea that the past is something that can be transformed for their own purposes. Whether trying to avoid the circumstances that led to the First World War or trying to reconcile current creative visions with previous publications, both canonical modernism and mainstream superhero comics view fixed, linear notions of history as something that must be overcome. They also view history as adaptable, to be altered and restructured at will. In both modernist writing and superhero comics, the past is not immutable, but can be revisited and transformed to create new meanings. Instead of remaining beholden to the past or else maintaining established understandings of the past solely for their own sake, both modernism and retcons in mainstream superhero comics attempt to mold a given history in order to re-envision the past, present, and future.

Since the term was coined in 1983, the retcon has become a major component of storytelling in superhero comics and popular culture in general.[14] Thus, it is unsurprising that not all retcons function in the same degree or manner in a particular genre. As Friedenthal notes, these alterations can take a number of forms within a narrative—many of which have been exhaustingly listed by media enthusiasts at the meta-analysis website TV Tropes.com under tongue-in-cheek names like “Remember the New Guy?” or “Backported Development.”[15] An examination of retcons in all its minute varieties would likely require several, lengthier essays. But while they are referred to using the same collective term, retcons, upon closer inspection, can be divided into two broad categories that I call “soft” and “hard” retcons, or, alternatively, revisions and reboots. Each of these subdivisions has its own approach to altering the past and is thus used for its own unique purposes.

In terms of retroactively altering continuity, the soft retcon acts much like a revision; it makes smaller alterations to an established past. These often take the form of presenting new information about past events to characters (and thus to readers) or of a flashback that adds new context to a past interaction between characters. No matter which specific form these revisions take, all soft retcons serve the same purpose of remolding the past by adding, removing, or otherwise altering smaller aspects of previously established canon to serve the perceived needs of a current, ongoing story. Secrets may be revealed, or long-standing assumptions might be shown to be false. Inconsistencies that occurred in the past may be rectified or explained, or backstory might be inserted or altered to propel new developments forward. In short, a soft retcon lightly adjusts previous continuity to make conditions “right” for whatever story the current group of creators wants to tell.

As a storytelling tool, these soft retcons are the easiest to use—and are thus more common—because they are the most conservative way of transforming a narrative history. Rather than altering the foundational aspects of the storyworld, soft retcons only change its details. For example, Batman’s infamous 1988 “Death in the Family” arc by Jim Starlin, Jim Aparo, Mike DeCarlo, John Costanza, and Adrienne Roy featured the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd, when he was murdered by the Joker as the result of a fan telephone poll that was, in turn, inspired by a Saturday Night Live publicity stunt (Fig. 1).[16]

Years later, in their 2004–06 “Under the Red Hood” arc, Judd Winick, Doug Mahnke, Tom Nguyen, Alex Sinclair, and Pat Brosseau revealed that the murderous vigilante  Red Hood is actually Jason, who had been secretly resurrected months after his death as a result of events presented in “Infinite Crisis,” a large-scale 2005–06 crossover event in which Superboy-Prime punched through dimensions and consequently caused retroactive alterations to multiple aspects of DC Comics’ established history (Fig. 2).

In this retcon, history does not begin anew; all continuity from before the “Death in the Family” storyline and the majority of what takes place afterward is still established canon. However, the “Under the Red Hood” retcon alters established facts about Jason Todd—most significantly, that he had died and remained dead—to create new narrative possibilities for creators to explore. Such possibilities include both the potential for revealing secret histories—as Jason has now been secretly alive during many of the stories that occurred between the “Death in the Family” and “Under the Red Hood” arcs, much like those that occurred between when, in 1963, Marvel established that Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes had been killed in action and when, in 2005, it was revealed that he had been, all this time, secretly alive and operating under the name the Winter Soldier—but also opportunities for the narrative present. While Jason’s death had haunted Batman as a reminder of his shortcomings in the years leading up to “Under the Red Hood,” the now-alive Red Hood can actively antagonize him, verbally reminding Batman of his failure to protect his crime-fighting partner and demonstrating a willingness to eliminate crime in Gotham City through means that go far beyond Batman’s comparatively less violent approach. Although aspects of Jason Todd’s history were retroactively revised, the majority of his past is still largely the same as before; it has only been altered to expand the possibilities of the narrative’s future by resurrecting a once-dead character.

Hard retcons, on the other hand, are far less common but have a much more intense impact on the comics canon. While soft retcons are a regular occurrence within superhero comics and appear on a regular basis, hard retcons are far rarer. If the purpose of a soft retcon is to preserve as much established canon as possible through precise revisions of the past, then the intention of a hard retcon is to wipe the slate clean. The latter is meant to be a complete reboot, in which creators can throw away the trappings of the past and rebuild a character or story from the ground up. We find an example of this in DC’s 2011–2015 “New 52” initiative, in which the company cancelled all of its existing titles and relaunched fifty-two new ones in its place (Fig. 3).[17]

Although many of the characters who were relaunched—Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and so on—had existed for decades, in this new DC universe superheroes had only appeared within the past five years. Decades of history were ostensibly wiped away, and all of the characters were revamped to equip them with new backgrounds, new costumes, adjusted power sets, and, occasionally, altered personalities. For example, in the New 52, Wonder Woman was born a demigod instead of created out of clay, and Barbara Gordon (who had operated under the identity of Oracle for 22 years) made her return as Batgirl thanks to an experimental surgery.[18] Meanwhile, the Justice Society of America—a precursor to the Justice League—no longer existed in the main DC continuity, but rather as an entirely different part of the multiverse (Margaret Rojahn, “10 Biggest Changes”).

Hard retcons like those seen in DC’s New 52 try to clear away the past and allow creators to construct completely new continuities, the new structures that subsequent continuity will use as its foundation. This is often done to retell origin stories in a newer context, modernizing the origins of characters conceived early in the twentieth century to fit current tastes, norms, and storytelling needs.

This is an extreme alteration to established continuity, so much so that Friedenthal does not see reboots as a form of retcon, as he perceives them as not coming from “a part of the story world,” but rather as a “marketing decision imposed from the outside” (Retcon Game, 7). But while Friedenthal is correct that most soft retcons are given in-world explanations—that is, explanations that are provided within the narrative to justify these changes—the alterations of a soft retcon do not actually come from within; all plot and its attendant continuity, whether maintained or altered through retcons, are decisions made by creators and the companies that employ them. These changes are being made to the storyworld, not by it. While the presence of an in-world explanation may affect how we view the narrative history, both the revising and rebooting of what is currently considered canonical in the comics “involves the revisiting of past stories, told in previous installments of a long-form narrative, and adding a new piece of information to that older story, literally rewriting the past” (6). It is a matter of degree of change and the care taken to enfold these new changes within the existing canon. With a soft retcon, only parts of the past are rewritten, while hard retcons purport to take a blank page and start rewriting from the beginning.

Out of these two broad categories, the hard retcon may be the most in line with the modernist vision of radically transforming the past and present. Because soft retcons only alter select details of existing continuity, they tend to be subtle in both scope and overall effect. They are more akin to a reader discovering new historical information related to previous comics canon, to be assimilated into existing schema, rather than the total transformation of the historical paradigm that is more commonly associated with modernism. Hard retcons or reboots, on the other hand, create opportunities for existing history to be completely restructured and reimagined, to be made new. While some core aspects of characters’ pasts might remain consistent between reboots—a rebooted Wonder Woman will likely still grow up on the all-female island of Themyscira, and so on—each hard retcon opens up new possibilities by letting go of practically all limiting ties to the past and embracing infinite narrative futures. Like canonical modernism, which according to Jacob Edmond emerged “through repetition, appropriation, and remixing” of increasingly replicable culture, the hard retcon in superhero comics takes the established canon and both repeats and transforms itself in its retelling.[19]

However, the hard retcon, while simple in theory, is much harder to implement in reality. In his prompt to “make it new,” Pound does not suggest that creators should try to recreate something without any ties to the past, but to use established forms in the generation of new possibilities.[20] Try as some comics creators might, it is difficult to restart from zero. No matter our attempts to reconfigure the (historical or narrative) past into something completely new, traces of these pasts are nonetheless still there in what they are transformed into. Even though the New 52 purported to be a clean reset of the DC universe, elements of pre-New 52 storylines still wound their way into the reboot. This was particularly the case for the “Blackest Night” and “Brightest Day” storylines, which were very popular Green Lantern-focused crossover arcs that appeared shortly before the New 52 retcon. Even though the New 52 was pronounced to be a total reboot of DC continuity, Green Lantern stories still dealt with the fallout of these two storylines, even though they were supposedly no longer within comics canon. Also, as Hyman notes, “[n]o amount of recursive revision of the story can completely erase reader recollections of superseded textual realities” (Revision, 64). Whether or not current continuity acknowledges information retconned away, it still persists.

Despite the commercial nature of the genre, both soft and hard retcons in superhero comics embrace a surprisingly modernist view of the past. Whether they utilize small revisions or complete reboots, creators of mainstream superhero comics approach history as fundamentally mutable. Even though continuity is now a core aspect of storytelling in superhero comics, these creators, like the modernists who came before them, rework received history to construct new creative possibilities on a regular basis. By understanding the similarities in how canonical modernism and superhero comics approach and transform established history, we are able to view the retcon as a way in which superhero comics carry forth modernist ideas in a popular, contemporary genre.

Notes