The 15 Dumbest Superhero Retcons Of All Time

This thread was the first I heard of this idea and I agree it is completely stupid. At least in Earth X et al it was used as an explanation for why Wolverine was so different from other mutants (and he wasn't descended from wolves; he was descended from original human stock that the Celestials (?) hadn't tampered with).

I'm sure this will be retconned too. Or hand waved away ("You aren't evolved from wolves - that Romulus used a psychic technique to trick you!").

I was thinking about other retcons - although "No More Mutants" probably wasn't a retcon (does Scarlet Witch really have that much power?), its impact has been hand waved away, as has the time when the Punisher became a supernatural ghost fighter for Heaven.

There's a fantastic interview somewhere of where that comes from. The best part of the quote goes something like "things had to be more realistic, so like, dragons had to talk telepathically because that was more realistic somehow".

Yup. As much power as Franklin Richards. They are both reality warpers.... arguably the strongest mutant power of all.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the whole Disassembled thing way beyond what Wanda was shown to be capable of before? As in she used to just make someone trip on their own feet or make a gun misfire? I'm not much of an Avengers reader (more of a JLA guy) so I don't know for certain, but I believe that was one of the main criticisms against the story.

Also, that it was one of the most obvious and inelegant ways of undoing the previous writer's work in the industry that decade. Ahem.

So, I referenced this above, but here's what happened.

Someone at Marvel said, "everything's gotta be realistic!" Dragons can't talk, that's silly. They can only communicate through telepathy. That's more realistic.

Eventually this hit Wanda. "Bad luck, how could a power give other people bad luck?" So, someone got stuck trying to come up with a more realistic interpretation of her power. What they decided was that she was actually altering history, unconsciously altering time so that a guy forgot to clean his gun this morning and it jams up or creating an alternate universe where he didn't tie his shoes causing him to trip. Someone took this and ran full on with the alters reality until the interpretation was used to the extreme of Disassembled and House of M.

But, hey? At least its more realistic.

And she warped it so that Doctor Strange realized there was no such thing as chaos magic, even though he's probably had like dozens of adventures where he fought against someone wielding chaos magic?

>.>

"Reality Warping" isn't a power! It's an excuse for sloppy writing! It's answering "But how does that work" by screaming "A wizard did it!", all the time, forever!

%&@# the "reality warping" power and every character and author that has ever used it, ever, in the entire history of the medium! #@$& them in the ear!

*is dragged off in a straight jacket*

More obvious than One More Day? No More Mutants is just the same press of the reset button, for pretty much the same reasons. If you want to have stories where mutants are a rare and persecuted minority, you can't exactly have a massive, growing population of mutants out there forcing the world to deal with their existence. It undermines the Perpetual Now that the mainstream comic universes seem to enjoy.

Also, if you think mutants are allegories for various subculture groups, it has a wonderful scent of unintentional dark, dark irony.

In the ear.

Amazing the difference delivery makes, eh? It also helps that Marvel dealt with the continuity gap immediately with Decimation, making it clear that a whole lot of mutants simply had their powers turned off at the moment in time right before the reality wipe. Having immediate consequences for warping reality eased the blow significantly (like having some guy immune to lava suddenly find himself incinerated). Having characters remember what life was like before the wipe gives some kind of purpose to it, since its an event they actually have to respond to.

One More Day mostly just sucks on hamfisted, not even going to try and make sense of this, screw you, delivery. Things happened, but they didn't happen, but people remember they happened, but don't remember. Worst of all, the story has no consequence. Peter did something big, but since it did/didn't happen in the first place, there's nothing to build off of. A change occurred, but the authors have to write this world in which we're all familiar with things we were never told.

Back to House of M; I think the greater criticism isn't the nature of the delivery, but the general absurdity of the outcome. "No More Mutants, except the cool ones and ones central to the story, they're good still".

I quite agree that Hal's breakdown in Emerald Twilight made no sense and was out of character. However there are other instances in that volume of GL of Hal acting odd before Coast City was wiped. When GL was consigned to Action Comics Weekly, Hal was having issues, then the mysterious alien Priest begins giving Hal lessons and makes him doubt himself, the Guardians, etc. Then comes the encounter with Malvolio where Hal's ring is destroyed and he is forced to use a makeshift weapon and use deadly force against Malvolio. (in other words Hal was afraid for his life and used deadly force for the first time).
Hal takes Malvolio's ring and leaves and Malvolio reveals he isn't dead and then we see that his all yellow palace was a construct and apparently Malvolio was too and that it was a plan to destroy the GLC and Guardians with Hal as the pawn.....

When the series restarted, Hal was like a shadow of himself, loss of confidence which in turn affects the will power and he's content to be semi active at best as GL and let Guy and John shoulder the burden. Then comes the Old Timer Guardian going crazy from FEAR of being alone (hmmm) and Hal is doubting himself at first but pulls it together to lead the fight, get the Guardians back and help bring down the Old Timer.

After that Hal still was having some issues but they were under control until he faced Guy Gardner in ish 25 for the right to be GL of sector 2814. Guy provokes Hal into a fight, and Hal struck first. This leads to a power ring fight which the GLC breaks up and Superman commented this was out of character for Hal. Hal wins the fight and reclaims his sector and all seems well, until Coast City is wiped out. Then he goes bonkers and becomes Parallax. Then he later gives his life to save the sun and later returns as the Spectre. Then comes GL Rebirth and Sinestro states that Parallax is capable of making incredible constructs, thus leading us to beleive that the Sinestro Hal had killed was a fake, but if you trace it back far enough and you can conclude that the whole Malvolio incident and likely Priest as well were also Parallax/Sinestro attacks along with any encounters Hal-Spectre had with Sinestro. All designed to torment Hal and give Parallax total control.

However Hal does have some guilt in the affair in that he didn't see what was happening and that while Parallax was pulling the trigger it was still Hal's hands on said trigger.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Fought?he was using the stuff for a while.

No more mutants wasn't really a "La la la, that didn't happen!" retcon. Morrison introduced millions of mutants, and the idea that mutants would eventually outnumber humans. This didn't fly with someone in editorial. (Which makes you wonder why they let him do it to begin, but most of what Morrison did during his last X-Men was re-written.) So Cassandra Nova had the uber sentinels wipe out 98% of the mutant population of Genosha, and the effects of that are still felt to this day. And Scarlet Witch came in as well, and now mutants are back in the minority/endangered species list, which they've also been dealing with ever since.

As for Scarlet Witch's power, didn't she have a powerup from her exposure to chaos magic* and a connection to Xavier's telepathy to make the House of M reality?

*It's never been confirmed to my knowledge, but I still think Wanda's Chaos Magic thing came from JLA/Avengers. Which would be all sorts of awesome if Magneto ever found out, and decided to lead an attack on the DCU as a result. Hey, wishful thinking.

Note "one of the most."

Also, I can respect more what Morrison was trying to do with X-Men by having more mutants crop over the globe. I mean, it's firmly cemented in X-Men lore that mutants are the successors to humanity and more people will start manifesting powers. Actually bringing an element of that into the universe rather than have it as some far off future/alternate reality event was getting old, as was the oppression of a minority theme. X-comics were simply too stagnant.

I forget the telepathy bit. Part of the reason Wanda was able to affect the entire world like that was due to Xavier's "touch every mind on the planet" trick (that's regularly used to create world threatening events come to think of it). The whole thing is still a change to the originally intent of her power. Originally she threw bolts of energy that caused "bad luck" to occur to the affected target. Now it "rewrites history to alter its current state" which is the new "realistic" take on "bad luck". Bendis just took this a step further and made her "target" the entire planet, loosely explained with Xavier being there.

The other bit about it was that she'd lost control of her power. In a sense, it was like Cyclops. She was basically altering history around herself without actively trying to. Its not all that different from the usual story where an energy manipulator loses the ability to direct their blasts, leading to a big city wide explosion or something, except she was randomly firing blasts of causality.

Yes, Johns thought things out carefully. As to that whole "if the Guardians or GL's kill a Korugarian male the CPB will self destruct" schtick, I consider that a lie that Sinestro's spirit projected from the battery to the telepathic GL's that mind probed it. case in point, part of that tale was the so called origin of the CPB and how the Guardians used their natural BLUE energy to shape a yellow Crystal into the CPB and the result of Blue and Yellow of course is green........yet the Guardians were stated to be the generators of the power that flowed to the CPB and hence to the rings....but when they would use their power.....it was green energy and not blue.

Then when the Guardians get called back by Hal to fight the old timer, the Old Timer commented how they only had their diminished personal reserves of power while HE had it all.

Also the Old Timer when insane from the FEAR of being alone........makes one wonder if Parallax hadn't bonded to the Old Timer to drive him nuts as a prelude to getting to Hal.

Geoff Johns strikes me as one of the few writers with any overall plan and that he clearly thought things out for Rebirth, Sinestro War, Blackest Night and beyond.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

"There is no such thing as chaos magic."

Yes and now Joe says an upcoming event will be in regards to magic and should allegedly bring magic back into strong prominence in the MU. Supposedly this will explain such things as THOR's apparently lack of the Odin power after rebuilding Asgard and supposedly the last of it being used to fix Mjolnir as well as the status of Doctors Strange and Voodoo being affected.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Matt Fraction's pretty good at this as well. He was writing things in for Iron Man way back when he first started the Order and the "solution" to the death of Tony was written into the very first issues of World's Most Wanted.

Brubaker does something similar, though I get the impression he more plans out story beats in advance, then fills time until he feels the need to reveal them. Reborn could have easily happened a year ago, but the interest in the title was high enough the machine could break and be saved for another day.

Morrison clearly plans things out ahead; they're just insane things that no one can actually follow. He wrote the sequel to Final Crisis two years before the event after all.

Also, Marvel's cosmic team seems to have a handle on long term planning. I don't know how intentional it really was, but the big bad of Realm of the Kings appeared in the very first issue of Guardians of the Galaxy. They're either excellent planners or they do a phenomenal job of winging it naturally.

Peter David used to do a great job of this for X-Factor. He seems to have given up trying as Marvel continually shoved story mandates down his throat, sadly. No sense trying to plan when they won't let you reveal the story naturally anyway (which is really both sad and funny when you consider how obscure the book is).

Where may I order this series?

i was just holding out for an emotional sound system.

F-sharp the sound of willpower,D-minor the sound of fear.

or maybe an emotional scent spectrum.

the scent of roses could be the scent of love.the scent of crap could be the emotion repugnance.

nah those are just as idiotic as the emotional color spectrum.

equating emotions with a narrow bit of the electromagnetic spectrum that the terrestrial organisms of our planet can see due to the chemical composition of our eyes is just silly.half of it is just bad cliches.

"are you yeller(yellow,a coward)?" "i am seeing red(angry)"

hell,i am surprised they did not make blue the color of sadness(feeling blue).what is the color of sadness anyhow?oh wait,they never bothered to make one.they grabbed a handful of emotions and stapled them on to the narrow bandwidth of light that we can see,and now we have the mood-ring lanterns

call it irrational if you like.but reading about the color of emotions seems as idiotic as if i was reading something in which they described the texture of sandpaper as the texture of hate,and the texture of silk as the texture of love.

yes,then again that was not the story in emerald twilight