Good Comic/ Bad Comic 1: Retcon

When you are reading ongoing comic series, mostly superhero comics, there are two big elephants you have to deal with, retroactive continuity called retcon and Comic book deaths. Both aspects can be handled in a god way or in a bad way, like every other thing in storytelling. Retcons are mostly unavoidable, because when you have a series running for years and decades, you have also different writer, interpretations of this series and maybe the one or the thread and development you want to get rid of.

Now there are different ways of retconnig. First the Addition, where you add several thing to the history of a character without denying any existing events already occurred, second the Alteration which mostly says: “What you saw isn’t really what happened.” It can also be some deus ex machina who alters magically the reality, third and last is the Subtraction which removes entire events or history and gives place for redefining the whole subject.

So I like to take a look in this first entry of “Good Comic/Bad Comic” on two retcon’s done recently in the two major publishers of Superheroes, Marvel and DC. Like the title of this column says I will start with the good comic.

Black Retarded Lesbian- Diversity in fiction gone wrong

How i already pointed out in my Essay „Star Trek: The lost Generation” there are two major traps waiting for you as a writer when you are dealing with the topic of diversity.
The first and most known one is the one of Oversimplification or Romantasizing, for example the stupid American tourist or the always nice and smiling Chinese people. This is mostly known as stereotype and very wide spread, you just need to watch a movie made by Michael bay and wait for the black people.
The second and least one is to overwhelm a character with problems and handicaps with the intention to make him relatable as possible. This technique leads very often to what I like to call “Black Retarded Lesbian”, derived from the song “Even Black Retarded Lesbians can be god awful” from Funny van Dannen.
Inspired by the term “Women in Refrigerators” coined by writer Gail Simone as a reaction of the treatment of women in comics I like to start a collection of every BRL in fiction I can find.