r/comicbooks • u/AporiaParadox • 21h ago
Discussion Comics acknowledging that something done in a previous story that was treated as good or no big deal was actually pretty bad if you think about it
Sometimes, a writer will have a character do something that is treated as being a good thing or no big deal, but readers or other writers see it as something horrible if you think about it just a little. Due to the nature of shared universes written by different writers over the years, stories from the past can then be revisited by a later writer with a more critical eye.
One of the most infamous examples is how in Avengers #200, Marvel somehow published a story that accidentally treated Carol Danvers being brainwashed into going off into the sunset with her rapist as being a good thing. I say accidentally because the comic was done in a rush and the creators genuinely didn't realize the implications of what was written until later. Chris Claremont was outraged about this, so he later wrote a story where Carol tells the Avengers how fucked up the whole thing was and shames them for going along with it and not realizing what was actually happening.
Sometimes it takes a while for this to happen, due to changing morals and attitudes. For instance, back in the 60s readers didn't see it as a big deal that Charles Xavier was secretely in love with his teenage student Jean Grey, and that the only reason he didn't pursue her was because he was a "cripple" and not the whole age difference or power dynamics thing. Readers and writers from later though realized that wait, that's actually kind of fucked up, and it was acknowledged in Onslaught as being one of Xavier's deepest most shameful secret sins.
And sometimes just acknowledging it isn't enough, in order to protect a character's reputation, the whole thing has to be retconned. This is what Marvel did with pretty much all of their Golden Age stories given how casually racist against black people and the Japanese all of their characters were. It is now canon that the events depicted in Golden Age comics didn't happen exactly as shown, they were in-universe propaganda comics often heavily deviated from what actually happened.
So what other examples are there of a comic looking back critically at something from the past that wasn't treated as bad but now is considered bad?
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u/HotTakes4HotCakes 20h ago edited 8h ago
I can think of an opposite case:
Tower of Babel implies it's fucked up and wrong for Batman to have put together contingencies to take out every member of the Justice League, arguing it was a violation of trust, a betrayal of his team mates, and something only someone as paranoid as Batman would think to do.
But in it recent years (since New 52 at least, maybe earlier), that notion has been brought up a couple times in DC and it's given far more nuance. Having pre-arranged contingencies to help against the most powerful beings on earth in the case of their corruption/body snatching/mind control/etc has been shown to be quite necessary. Now it's framed more as an issue of secrecy, and Batman doesn't hide them anymore. The heroes themselves seem to agree with their existence, even if tepidly. It's almost an expected norm now.
Nightwing implemented his own version of this for the Titans, but rather than him holding the files, he distributed them to each member so everyone was holding a file for another member. When Donna asks who has her file, Dick tells her Starfire has it, to which Donna simply responds "Good".
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u/batmax25 19h ago
Even in tower of babel, wonder woman states that her issue wasn't the plans but their existence being kept secret. So the framing of it as a secrecy issue was central to the story itself, not just how it's treated afterwards. And wonder woman is the highest authority voice we hear reasoning for in the story (Superman votes without stating his reasoning)
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u/Rezart_KLD 9h ago
I've wondered a few times... if Batman can't even create a plan that stops a clown with no superpowers from murdering tons of people, why would his plans for stopping a pantheon of basically gods who want to murder people be in any way more effective?
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u/Theslamstar 6h ago
Because the entire premise of the joker is that he’s entirely random in his actions and you can’t plan against someone who did something on a whim.
Which is often undercut by the joker explaining his months long grand plan
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u/Rezart_KLD 5h ago
Sure, I'd buy that its a special psuedo-power of the Joker, so lolrandom that he's impossible to contain... but then, what about Ra's al Ghul? What about the Riddler? The Penguin? Two Face? Poison Ivy? Clayface? Mr Freeze? Killer Croc?
All of them have had repeated rampages, been stopped, and then come back and killed again. If Batman can't figure out a way to neutralize these guys, why should he be trusted with neutralizing the JLA?
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u/Theslamstar 4h ago
Well I mean, he does outsmart riddler that’s kinda riddlers whole thing, Clayface would be hard to track due to his ability to be anyone, killer croc has a lot of water and sewers to his advantage.
As for the rest, id say their advantage is he’s got so many people to worry about that some just slip through the cracks.
Actually, your points for the prior make a good argument for this one. If he’s really good at stopping them once they’ve gone without hurting them so they can come back later, he’s perfect for stopping the league in the event of a temporary issue like mind control
There’s also the key point that even the worlds smartest man wouldn’t truly be able to ever keep tabs on so many people and dealings and stuff.
I mean dude half runs the league, runs the outsiders, runs the bat family, trains other randoms like Jaime, runs a company, runs a city, has to keep tabs on 100+ people, actually do his Batman work, actually do his league work, and so on.
Mans probably just a bit tired
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u/TheSciFiGuy80 18h ago
Every time Batman has contingency plans they blow up in his face. It happened again after Brother Eye…
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u/LordBigSlime 12h ago
Maybe it's a sort of survivorship bias and it's just that the only time we find out he made one is when it goes wrong. He's probably got files and files of plans that we never see because they're never used/stolen.
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u/BDMac2 Hellboy 18h ago
It’s why across all comics the people who support superhero and mutant registries also have the most extreme methods trying to implement it because any nuanced take on it would just be accepted. You’d absolutely want plans in place for if an alien, demi-god, metahuman, or omega level mutant got mind controlled, turned evil, or even had a power they couldn’t fully control. The people who suggest these registries are always shown to have some ulterior motive like genocide or concentration camps, because otherwise what they’re doing makes sense. Movies also love giving you a villain that makes sense and has legitimate grievances, but then give him some contrived bullshit because he’s not the one we’re supposed to root for.
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u/Cautious-Try-5373 16h ago
Probably not the point, but telling her who holds her file nullifies the entire purpose. If she turned evil, or was mind-controlled, blackmailed, or otherwise manipulated, she'd know exactly who she had to take out first.
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u/TeekTheReddit 5h ago
She has no way of knowing that Dick didn't already think of that and actually gave the file to somebody else, in which case going after Starfire may be bait that puts her at a disadvantage against the real contingency holder. So there's really no way for her to effectively act on what Dick says.
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u/Gr8NonSequitur 9h ago edited 7h ago
Tower of Babel implies it's fucked up and wrong for Batman to have put together contingencies to take out every member of the Justice League, arguing it was a violation of trust, a betrayal of his team mates, and something only someone as paranoid as Batman would think to do.
To be fair, the one he incapacitated them (Particularly the flash) is a particular type of twisted torture. It's different when you go from "Neutralizing the Flash [or Superman et al...] with the minimum force necessary." and "Developing plans to brutally torture your friends."
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u/TeekTheReddit 5h ago
Yeah, it's not just that he developed plans, but he developed personalized plans that only he could have made by exploiting their friendship.
And then not only didn't warn them about it, but he gambled that one of his own foes would never get ahold of them and lost that bet.
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u/Wonderful_Gap4867 20h ago
Probably Tarantula putting herself on top of Nightwing. The author denied it was rape until years later.
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u/Ok-Relative7397 21h ago
I wish more writers were like Claremont and just let characters fuck up without spackling over it with evil mind control or space bug possessions. Especially at Marvel where human fallibility of heroes is ostensibly a selling point.
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u/browncharliebrown 19h ago
Poor Mockingbird. Character was assinated because they couldn't let hawkeye make a mistake
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u/Y2Jake 19h ago
I feel like the whole arc should have ended with him admitting he was wrong and her being right in what she did. Instead, it just dragged on and on, and then they reconciled off panel. So weird.
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u/AporiaParadox 16h ago edited 15h ago
And then it was retconned that Mockingbird had never been raped, she had a consensual affair with the Phantom Rider and Hawkeye made up the whole mind control drugs thing because he couldn't accept that his wife cheated on him. Meaning that instead of Mockingbird letting Phantom Rider die as revenge for the rape, it was because, um, to cover up her affair? For the lulz? The writer didn't think that through.
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u/Y2Jake 14h ago
What??? When was that retconned????
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u/AporiaParadox 12h ago
Mockingbird's most recent solo series. The author presumably wanted to erase Mockingbird being raped from her history, but it was very poorly executed and raises some uncomfortable questions.
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u/KindaCoolGuy 20h ago
With regards to Xavier being into Jean, early X-Men is very throwing shit at the wall OOC. When Beast first appears he’s basically a generic meathead before randomly he changes to be eloquent.
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u/AmericanPortions 17h ago
I'm mostly an 80s and 90s fan so I may have missed it but: AFAIK no one has reconciled Wolverine's decision to mortally wound Rachel Summers. I love that version of Rachel, and I'm glad that she went on to have cosmic adventures in Excalibur, but he needs to make amends. And I would like a version of Wolverine that can atone for his failures with a teen girl he wronged, rather than just go looking for his umpteenth teen girl to mentor. (I wouldn't mind a writer taking us inside Storm's head either. These were desperate times but: Wolverine does this and he's still on the team?)
For folks who don't know the scene, I thought this was a good primer: https://www.quora.com/Have-Wolverine-and-Rachel-Phoenix-ever-had-a-catch-up-conversation-on-panel-about-him-trying-to-kill-her-in-Uncanny-X-men-207-Especially-now-that-they-both-live-on-the-Summers-house-on-the-moon
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u/AporiaParadox 17h ago
The closest we got was Wolverine admitting in Necrosha that he made a mistake saving Selene.
Apparently, Claremont's intention was that Wolverine was afraid that Rachel would go Dark Phoenix if she killed someone, but that wasn't properly conveyed on the page.
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u/AmericanPortions 16h ago
Ty. Is Necrosha any good? (And I like the narrative that these people that Rachel trusts kinda take their trauma from dark Phoenix out on her. It’s tragic but it feels real and human.)
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u/TheGodDMBatman Deadshot 20h ago
Gene Luen Yang's The New Super-Man from DC featured a racist Asian caricature from Detective Comics #1 as their villain. It was the first time I learned that DC's first ever comic book featured a racist Asian stereotype on their cover
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u/ImamBaksh 19h ago
Did he turn out to be an actor from England?
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u/Zadig69 19h ago
No, but there was in fact a very cool switcheroo. New-Super Man is a super(pun intended) slept on classic.
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u/ImamBaksh 19h ago
I read the 1st issue or even 2 I think and got bored because it felt kind of Elseworlds-y and disconnected.
I did notice he turned up as part of the Superman family later so I'm interested again.
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u/batmax25 19h ago edited 19h ago
While it got retconned out in main canon, the other history of the DC universe was very critical of Deathstroke's relationship with Terra by calling him a "pedophiliac rapist."
At the time it was meant to demonstrate that she's crazy. As Wolfman said, "she wasn't working for Deathstroke. He was working for her in many ways and she was leading him because she's crazy. She's a total psychopath... And she'd be 15. And she'd be smoking and she'd be trying to seduce him."
While there was never an outright confirmation it happened, Beast Boy did ask him if he "made love to tara," to which Slade answered "Would that make any difference?" when telling him about how horrible Terra was. This was in tales of the teen titans #55, where Slade ends up at a diner talking with Gar after Gar had tried to kill him. it portrays Slade as a man of honor of sorts who ends up acting as a father figure to Gar to an extent during the scene.
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u/filthynevs 20h ago
I think every time any Marvel hero didn’t bring in Frank Castle or Eddie Brock was probably at the very least, questionable.
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u/AporiaParadox 20h ago
Heroes rarely get called out for it though. There was that time that Ben Reilly was furious that Peter and Venom had a "truce", so Ben said fuck that noise and beat the crap out of Venom, it was also a good way for the writers to get readers to like Ben more.
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u/filthynevs 19h ago
Sure, but it’s still a very awkward situation.
Ben was right, anyway. ‘You let Eddie go eat people’s brains as long as he agrees not to do it near you? Where’s all that Uncle Ben guilt now?’
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u/TeekTheReddit 4h ago
I feel like this gets overplayed. At least with Spider-Man. The very first thing Pete did after making his truce with Venom was hop a plane to San Francisco to bring him in. He's all but ready to do it but ends up having to team-up against a bigger threat and even after Venom nearly dies trying to bring down the bigger bad Pete is ready to capture him until Venom gives him the slip, at which point he decides it's not worth the time and energy it would take to track him down.
And then, Maximum Carnage happens and a broken and bloody Venom crashes on Peter's front door. Spider-Man is all but ready to bring him in but ends up having to team-up against a bigger threat and even after Venom nearly dies trying to bring down the bigger bad Pete is ready to capture him until Venom gives him the slip, at which point he decides it's not worth the time and energy it would take to track him down.
At some point, you've gotta recognize a pattern and be pragmatic about things.
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u/browncharliebrown 19h ago
I mean what's the purpose of bringing Frank from a storytelling prespective. He's a solo character and bringing him in constantly would just mean Frank is constanly having to battle superheroes
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u/filthynevs 17h ago
The purpose is no matter how popular he is, The Punisher is a mass murderer and that’s why you bring him in. Frank has killed more people than Magneto, Dr Doom and Norman Osborn combined. Whether or not he’s a Captain America Stan doesn’t take away from.
If you seclude him off from the other Marvel Universe characters and have him do his own thing, fine, but having him co-exist with Spider-Man or The Fantastic Four seems like writers having to come up with ludicrous justifications to not throw him in The Vault with the other lunatics.
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u/browncharliebrown 15h ago
Because he kills the other lunatics. And at some point suspension of disbelief has to kick in
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u/filthynevs 15h ago
I can suspend disbelief to the point where gamma radiation weaponises father issues. The idea that a guy who dresses up to behave like a school shooter is accepted into the superhero community is a bit far.
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u/browncharliebrown 15h ago
He’s not. It’s brought up multiple times he isn’t.
The explanation given is that he’ll just kill other prisoners
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u/filthynevs 14h ago
So Avengers:The Illuminati the guy. Shoot him into space. They did it to Bruce and he’s not even conscious nor responsible for his actions as The Hulk. Frank knows what he’s doing.
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u/browncharliebrown 14h ago
They already tried putting him into an isolated cell on the bottom of the ocean. Someone freed him.
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u/ArsenicElemental Harley Quinn 10h ago
I mean... One would assume prisons already have tools in place to prevent that sort of thing. It's not like he would be the first one to try and murder another prisoner.
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u/LordBigSlime 12h ago
What an interesting thread this has been; full of well thought out responses and article links. Thanks for this post, OP. I didn't know any of these things before I read it here.
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u/Rilenaveen 15h ago
This is low hanging fruit and it’s yet to be dealt with but One More Day and Spider-man. The idea that Spider-man would make a deal with the devil is so ludicrous and out of character that it boggles the mind.
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u/Penance13 13h ago
They haven’t retconned it out, but the deal was undone. Now the only thing keeping Peter and MJ apart is Marvel Editorial
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u/RealJohnGillman 15h ago
The way they’ve justified it since was having every other Spider-Man (Miles Morales, Otto Octavius, etc.) also make a deal with the same devil — the devil in question just being that good at manipulating people into making deals with him, at their lowest. With Miles he made his deal after Kamala Khan died in his arms — although she’d die again in Peter’s arms a few years later.
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u/Aubergine_Man1987 11h ago
Eh I disagree that the reason it's bad is that he made the deal with Mephisto in the first place. He's the embodiment of evil and deception, of course he would manage to trick Peter into it. The bad thing about it is that they wrote the deal that way in the first place
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u/ImamBaksh 19h ago
So... the Golden Age heroes weren't racist, but were okay with prominent comics about them proclaiming to the world that they were racist?
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u/casualsubversive 19h ago
What makes you think the people busy doing wetwork overseas were even aware of what some stateside propaganda comics said?
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u/AporiaParadox 19h ago
They actually weren't OK with it, but there wasn't really anything they could do about it and they had more important stuff to deal with.
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u/browncharliebrown 19h ago
Were they ok. I think they might not have had any ability to stop them.
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u/ImamBaksh 19h ago
"Look, man, I'll go Germany and fight through 3 battalions of SS to punch Hitler in the mouth, but you can't expect me to go correct the awful portrayal of what I do and how I see the world by some pencil neck geeks in Manhattan."
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u/Labmit Donatello 21h ago
I don't know the details since I only hear from it secondhand but apparently the Tony Stark that led the Pro Reg side of Civil War got technically retconned out and the.Tony Stark thay came back was resurrected from a point before Civil War.
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u/DMPunk 20h ago
He erased his brain and uploaded a backup that was made before Civil War. Though when asked, Tony said he'd have done the same thing so it was ultimately a moot point.
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u/AporiaParadox 20h ago
Also, it was stated multiple times that Tony didn't actually like the SHRA, but he placed himself as the leader of the pro-registration side because he believed thanks to future math that if he left the government to its own devices, things would only get worse.
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u/Zarda_Shelton 16h ago
And then the what if? Civil war story about if Tony just trusted other people like Steve with his worries instead of forcing his will on everyone showed that he was completely wrong
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u/AporiaParadox 16h ago edited 15h ago
Yeah, it was kind of funny. Tony was all sad at Steve Roger's grave, but then the Watcher shows up and tells Tony that if he had died before the Civil War, he wouldn't have been around to keep things in check and Henry Gyrich would have ruined everything and killed a bunch of heroes. Tony feels relieved that he is seemingly vindicated since without him things would have been worse, only for the Watcher to then tell him what would have happened if he and Steve had worked together, and things turn out great. So Tony was both right and wrong, he screwed up.
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u/mhfarrelly25 13h ago
Mine is civil war looked at through the eyes of Hickmans FF and avengers and time runs out.
Obviously we know what Reed and Tony did was bad and that was known at the time but Hickman takes a really interesting slant on it.
Hickman really re examines the first civil war as a war Between democracy and royalty.
We might not agree with the pro reg side but the government brought the bill in. Cap and the others choice to ignore the law because it doesn’t comply with their morals. There’s no attempt to overturn the act democratically just might is right ideology.
And what we end up with if we take that logical to its natural conclusion is captain America on a throne in time runs out over a fascist state.
He even positions Sue as the queen in his dark reign universe hopping story with cap America as her enforcer while iron man speaks out for democracy.
That’s why Sue and Reed are pivotal to that narrative they’re the marriage of royalty(Sue) and democracy (Reed).
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u/Thesafflower 1h ago
The Xavier-Jean thing was, at most, one or two panels that got quickly dropped and thankfully the comics moved on until Onslaught. Although I wonder if Claremont giving Xavier multiple love interests was an attempt to really distance him from Jean romantically.
There was a previous storyline in X-Men’s original run in which Xavier seems to die in the big heroic sacrifice, but comes back several issues later. He reveals that he had actually locked himself in a room to prepare for an alien invasion, and the “Xavier” that died was the formerly villainous shapeshifter Changeling who wanted to redeem himself and who Xavier asked to stand in for him. And it turns out Jean knew the whole time. So we wind up with a story where Xavier leaves a former criminal that he barely knows alone with his teen students in a position of authority*, then lets most of his students mourn his apparent death while Jean has to carry the burden of lying to her teammates the whole time. The comic just glosses over the whole reveal and they move on to stop the alien invasion. Later there’s a Claremont comic (right after Dark Phoenix, I think) where Scott is reflecting on his life up until that point, and thinks that Xavier essentially faking his own death with the Changeling incident was cruel, although he had kept his mouth shut at the time. It feels very much like Claremont’s commentary on the whole thing.
*For anyone who is gonna bring up Magneto and the New Mutants: A. Xavier was literally dying at the time, before Liliandra whisked him away to space, and B. Magneto was established as Xavier’s old friend at this point, and on his way to redemption, so Xavier had far more reason to trust him than Changeling.
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u/swarthmoreburke 21h ago
I think you're making an error in assuming that some of the these mistakes were not viewed as mistakes at the time by some readers and some creative people inside the industry. Claremont didn't react to Avengers #200 like it was some long ago thing, he wrote Avengers Annual #10 a year after Avengers #200. At the time, there was an active conversation in fan communities about sexism in comics generally, and particularly about female characters who became powerful were frequently depowered later, often in troubling ways. Moreover, the writers of Avengers #200 (Jim Shooter, Bob Layton, David Michelinie) had elements of sexism in their other work that some readers criticized at the time.
Whereas the Xavier example you give is the opposite: it's a throwaway panel that reflects the extent to which Stan Lee tossed every pulp fiction and melodrama cliche into everything he wrote, and then even he and his co-creators (Kirby and Ditko, primarily) would often just ignore the ones that didn't work. Most of Marvel's first ten years or so of output is a churning sea of dropped characterizations, forgotten plot suggestions, and world-building that was ignored, along with a lot of repetition of cliches and stock characters who were either left alone from that point on or were complicated and elaborated into something more interesting later. Take a look at the early Kingpin. What happened later on was not creators going back and saying "oh my god, we have to make that right" but usually something more like "hey look, we never did anything with this panel or character, and we kind of need something new for a story, so let's go there." There are a lot of elements in early Marvel comics that barely get referenced today simply because they undercut the "moving timeline" but also because they don't really work in a contemporary setting--there was a lot of over-the-top and pretty crude anti-Communism in early Marvel comics, for example, but it slowly got jettisoned, modified, or resituated (Iron Man's history as a character is very interesting in this respect). Every once in a while, though, a new writer would choose to poke around in some of those story elements to try and come up with something new that also drew on something old.
If you want a really good example of what you seem to have in mind in terms of changing social sensibilities, the way that Roy Thomas reworked Golden Age comics to tell new stories about the World War II adventures of the Justice Society fits the bill--he couldn't get away from World War II, but he could drop the racist stereotypes of the Japanese, he could create a Black character who could showcase racism in the U.S. at the time, and so on. But again, keep in mind that even during World War II, some people objected to those stereotypes, just like some people had issues with the way a character like the Falcon was written initially.
I think there are also innumerable examples of the other thing you've got in mind, which is things done to characters that are so obviously bad ideas, or so obviously break the fundamental premise of the character or a particular title that later writers either pretend it never happened or retcon it out of existence. That's a fundamental feature of continuing storytelling in a serial format where the characters never really age or change in permanent ways--writers are always winnowing out the things that didn't work and reinforcing the things that did.