10 Comic Book Cliches That Need To Die

8. Character Retcon

There's an unwritten rule in comics. The characters don't age, or they do it very slowly. This keeps the characters fresh and relevant to the readers as comics continue to come out.

Except sometimes companies decide that they need more than an iPad to keep their characters fresh. Every so often, DC rewrites their entire universe; and it's met with mixed results.

The general feeling is that DC wants to make their characters history a little more digestible without endless trips to Wikipedia. It also gives them an opportunity to tell varying origin stories and bring characters back to a place where they can grow and evolve.

I understand it, I personally don't like it, but it at least makes sense. Then there's Marvel. Marvel takes the method of having all of their characters history count (mostly) and is made up of one long epic story.

This creates a problem. Sometimes characters get boring, or they've really just evolved as far as they can. So Marvel just up and changes an entire character's history. 'Cause they can.

Spider-Man is probably the one that fans reacted to with the most negativity. Marvel took one of their spotlight characters and just decided to change everything. Peter Parker has to make a deal with the devil to give up his love (no, really) for Mary-Jane, that totally changed his history. Marvel said that they wanted to make Spider-Man more relatable again and make his character struggle. I'd buy that excuse if it just didn't come down to Peter having more awkward dates. It's a little late now, but you know what's a relatable problem Marvel? Divorce. At least it's more relatable than going to hell in order to give up your "love". Character retcon is generally lazy writing and happens far too often for readers to ever get invested in the characters. Why take a story seriously if what they're reading might not ultimately carry any weight.