10 Changes That Totally Ruined Comic Book Characters

Being a comic book writer is not easy. Not only do you have decades worth of history to keep straight across dozens of different titles, combined with dealing with retcons that confuse what is and isn€™t canon, but you€™ve also got a very passionate fanbase. A fanbase with a variety of different opinions about how their favorite characters should be portrayed. Different segments want the characters to change and evolve, while other segments want things to remain the same as they were when they started reading. Trying to navigate the difficult minefield of how to change a character while maintaining a strong sense of who that character is at their core is certainly not an enviable task. These characters are supposed to remain relatively eternal and as times change, aspects of the characters must change with them. You can€™t have Tony Stark injured during the Vietnam War if you still want to portray him as a man in his physical prime in the twenty-first century. And when the slightest misstep could call legions of fanboys to descend upon you with vicious barbs and on rare occasions, even death threats, it makes the task all the more difficult. That being said, there have been some changes that were so awful that they effectively destroyed who the character once was, transforming them into something completely different. While some of these egregious changes have since been retconned, others still remain, sapping these characters of the unique qualities that once made them so intriguing.