Everything you know is wrong! (but actually isn't)

[JoeZhang]

Every so often in comics, a writer might do a story that we can be described as "everything you know is wrong!" that radically changes the back-story of a character or what we know about them. One of the more successful attempts of this was Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing where we found out that Swamp Thing was actually a plant that thought it was a man not a man that was turned into a plant.

However, sometimes a writer will do this type of story and nobody takes any notice. The best examples I can think of are:

Captain Atom - during the Extreme Justice series, it was revealed that Nathan Adams was actually a clone of the real Nathan Adams created from the alien metal that gave him his powers - never mentioned again anywhere.

Hawkman - During the 1990s, the character's backstory got very complex and then Geoff Johns came along and boiled it all back down to basics. Hawkman was a reincarnated Egyptian Prince. Then in the aftermath of Infinite crisis Jim Starlin wrote a Hawkman special that revealed that everything you knew was wrong and that his memories of being a Egyptian Prince are lies and that he's really... well we never find out as Hawkman is quickly removed from Starlin's stories and Johns and others do a series of stories all based around him being an Egyptian Prince.

Wolverine - Jeph Loeb recently did a story that revealed that all of the wolf like characters in the marvel universe are descended from a wolf tribe (Editor note: Hold on isn't a Wolverine a type of weasel?). As far as I am aware, every other creator in the Marvel Universe has completely ignored this revelation.

Iron Man - ah, The Crossing, Tony Stark was a dupe of Kang and always had been. Heroes reborn happens and this is never mentioned again and neither is the fact that Tony Stark murders a couple of people.



Anyone got any other examples (or corrections if I've remember any of this wrong)?

Note, I'm not asking for story changes that you didn't like (OMD and the like) but ones where it was a major change that was completely ignored or quickly gotten rid of.

 

[Silvercrest]

During the Cosmic Odyssey miniseries in the 1980s, Starlin retconned the nature of the Anti-Life Equation by deciding it was a living entity. (He was making the simplistic assumption that anti-life = death.) This entity was completely swept under the rug for the longest time, although I understand there were some references to it in the last few years.

And the infamous Fire Elemental arc for the original Firestorm.

Edit: Also during Cosmic Odyssey, Darkseid claimed that four stars were the gravitational linchpins for the entire Milky Way: Our sun, and the suns for Rann, Xanshi, and Thanagar. Supposedly if you take out any two of them, the galaxy will fall apart or collapse in on itself or something. (This whole thing was irrespective of the Anti-Life Entity business and should still be true today.) Well, Xanshi's sun is gone. That means theoretically, any time the other three stars have been threatened since then, the entire galaxy was at stake, not just one solar system. So, was this ever mentioned during Final Night or any other time our sun was at risk? I think not.

 

[JoeZhang]

During the Cosmic Odyssey miniseries in the 1980s, Starlin retconned the nature of the Anti-Life Equation by deciding it was a living entity. (He was making the simplistic assumption that anti-life = death.) This entity was completely swept under the rug for the longest time, although I understand there were some references to it in the last few years.

That's a good one, I don't think we ever saw that take again.

 

[Whofan]

The events in the Crossing were addressed in the Avengers Forever miniseries by Kurt Busiek. Basically, it did a lot of work untangling all the continuity issues involving Kang/Immortus/Doctor Doom/Rama-Tut and all that. It revealed that the Kang and Mantis in the storyline were imposters and Iron Man was duped, mainly.Plus it made sense of how the classic Human Torch and The Vision were both the same and not the same.

 

[Silvercrest]

Oh, and this isn't comics, but I've just gotta mention it: The Warp 5 Limit in Star Trek.

 

[Whofan]

Also not sure if this counts, but the Bruce Jones run of the Hulk brought back Betty and the Leader, but the recent run by Pak and Loeb has ignored that by ressurecting them all over again.

I think the explanation was that Jone's entire run was a bad dream by the Hulk, or something.

 

[JoeZhang]

Also not sure if this counts, but the Bruce Jones run of the Hulk brought back Betty and the Leader, but the recent run by Pak and Loeb has ignored that by ressurecting them all over again.

I think the explanation was that Jone's entire run was a bad dream by the Hulk, or something.

I think they actually capped off his run by getting Peter David to do an issue where the Hulk wakes up on an Island and Nightmare is there and basically says "and that was all a dream and never happened!"

He doesn't quite directly address the reader but it's not far off...

 

[Whofan]

Also wasn't there a storyline in X-men at some point that had Nightcrawler's father be some sort of devil, and that Abyss (a villain) was his brother? I don't think that's been mentioned a lot.

Plus there's that whole mess with Xorn/Magneto.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

Yeah, basically, stupid ideas are forgotten.

 

[Nardpuncher]

Highlander 2

 

[JonnyQuest037]

There was a Flash story in the Silver Age where it was revealed that the lightning bolt that helped transform Barry Allen into the Flash was sent by an alien named Mopee. Pretty much everyone hated that story and it was never referred to again.

I think there was also a Hawkman story from the late 60s or early 70s where his secret identity was revealed to the world. This was explictly done away with in the 80s Shadow War of Hawkman mini-series.

AFAIK, no one has made any reference to Gwen Stacy having children fathered by Norman Osborn since JMS has stopped writting Spider-Man. And I'll bet money that one one else will ever refer to Kevin Smith's addition of Batman wetting himself during a crucial moment in Year One.

 

[shivkala]

John Byrne tried to introduce Skurlls into Hulk's origin, something that was lampshaded by Rick Jones in the Peter David written Captain Marvel title, who reads that issue and just laughs.

 

[Whofan]

Oh yes-the 'Chapter One' stuff. Basically he also did it with Spider-Man, linking his origin with Doctor Octopus's and lots of other retcons which have since been ignored.

The Hulk one was pretty bad, as well-and also ignored.


Actually a lot of that era of Spider-man (Mackie/Jenkins/Bryne) seems to be ignored these days.Apart from Bryne's Spider-Woman being recently killed off in a rather grotesque fashion in a recent issue of ASM.

 

[byron lomax]

I'm not sure if this counts, but in the 1990 Batman storyline "Dark Knight, Dark City" it is revealed that Batman may, at least in part, have a supernatural hand in his origin. A Satanic ritual carried out in the early days of Gotham Town (in the Eighteenth century) ended in disaster, with a risen bat-demon (Barbathos) trapped in a cellar while the cultists fled in panic. It remained there in limbo, and, in its own words:

"My heart, kept locked in this pit; While all around me, Gotham grew and grew, like my own body, expanding year by year....my blood and seed mixed with the mortar, my breathe in the mud and the sewers and the buildings great and small.... my spirit in every brick, in every inch of timber; the whole city and bent and mishapen echo of my desolation...."

The demon explains that it waited patiently for a man who would set a trail of riddles (guess who?) and for a bat who would answer them, so that it could be finally set free. It isn't really revealed how much, if any, direct influence Barbathos had in Batman's creation, but it does explain how the city breeds and attracts so much evil.

The revelations were completely ignored afterwards, until Morrison started mining the story to play a part in current Batman and Robin/Return of Bruce Wayne arcs. However, this was writer Peter Milligan's intention: at the end of the story, Batman concludes that the revelations have no real relevance to his mission, and simply resigns to what might be true.

 

[Christopher]

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Spider-Man's two cocoon transformations that happened within a year or so of each other. First, in Paul Jenkins's Disassembled tie-in of Spectacular Spider-Man, Peter was transformed by some sort of insect queen and underwent a metamorphosis that gave him organic webshooters in his wrists like in the movie, plus a new spider-sense that gave him the ability to communicate with insects Pym-style (even though spiders are arachnids, not insects). This was never mentioned again. (Well, except for a very brief, ambiguous allusion two issues later in the same title, but never anywhere else.) Though subsequent stories didn't specifically mention mechanical webshooters, they didn't specifically establish their absence either. To all intents and purposes, it was as if the story (which obviously was only done to bring Peter's powers into line with the movie version) had never happened.

Particularly since just over a year later in real time, maybe weeks later in story time, there was the crossover event The Other: Evolve or Die, in which Peter "died" and went through yet another cocoon-like transformation that resurrected him with new powers including a souped-up spider-sense (this time based more on the actual senses of spiders, but amplified) plus spikes that grew out of his wrists (and a No-Prize to anyone who can explain what the hell that has to do with spiders). And there was absolutely no mention that Peter had been through a very similar transformation just a short time before. Very little use was made of Spidey's new powers after this, since the next couple of big editorially-mandated events came along and precluded any real exploration of it. And then the Mephisto retcon just a couple of years later erased all of this and restored Peter's powers to normal, mechanical webshooters and all, even though what Mephisto did was supposed to be merely a rewriting of people's memories rather than a physical alteration of reality.

 

[Admiral_Young]

Yeah "The Other" storyline I didn't mind that much...a lot of fans hated it at the time...and it's funny that it hasn't been touched on since it occurred alongside the first or second "New Avengers" arc as Peter and MJ were living in Stark Tower, oh and that's another thing that OMD has erased...I suppose that Peter was living by himself in the Tower with Aunt May who was banging a Skrull, and that Logan hit on no body causing no rift with Peter, and that Tony and MJ never graced the cover of the Daily Bugle having people think they had an affair!!

Sins of Past doesn't count as per the posters original statement requirements since Gabriel has been used as recently as the "American Son" mini-series.

I actually like what Grant Morrison did with the Anti-Life Equation during "Final Crisis" not sure if that was always what it was.

I'm surprised no one has brought up the Legion of Superheroes with the "Five Years Later" "Threeboot" and "Post Crisis" editions. Geoff Johns and Paul Levitz have gracefully restored the Legion to almost their Silver Age glory! Long Live the Legion!

 

[Myasishchev]

My "favorite" "everything we knew was wrong" moment is no doubt Geoff Johns' reinvention of Hal Jordan as bigger than Jesus. Turns out that he suffered from a bad case of yellow alien fear syphillis, which magically absolves him of everything bad he ever did. This replaces the far less believable "everything we know is wrong moment" that preceded it, that he was a man who had a mental breakdown after the three or four million people he most identified with died as a city in the refrigerator in somebody else's story, and who turned violent only after his omnipotent bosses called him a pussy.

Reading Geoff Johns' Green Lantern is like reading what Winston Smith would have written after his face almost got chewed off by rats.

 

[Mr Light]

The Cosmic Odyssey version of Anti-Life did promptly disappear but Starlin brought it back for his "Death of the New Gods" mini-series leading into Final Crisis.

 

[Admiral_Young]

This is the wiki article for the current version of the Anti-Life Equation which seems to be a reconciliation of both Starlin's and Morrison's version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Life_Equation

 

[sojourner]

Has Darksied ever mentioned what he plans to do with the Anti-Life Equation if he ever gets it?