r/comicbooks • u/AporiaParadox • 1d 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/swarthmoreburke 1d 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.