10 Controversial Comic Book Retcons Fans Hated

Ever since comic books first hit the shelves, characters and their pasts have constantly been changing. A lot of these changes have been long since forgotten, or sometimes even considered to be fundamental to the characters fans know and love, but some changes still cause controversy to this day.

While all retcons have always been controversial in some way or another, they are usually accepted by the fans after a while, but when writers decide to change a character’s past or their personality, fans often go into a frenzy trying to change them back, in some cases even going as far as to boycott the series to the point where the run gets cancelled or the character gets rebranded.

In order to understand why these retcons are and were so controversial, it's important to understand that many of the characters being discussed were characters people grew up with, and while some changes may not be as shocking or terrible to those new to Marvel and DC's worlds of capes and cowls, they're still changes some fans simply could not live with.

During the Amazing Spider-man #509 (Sins Past), Peter Parker receives a letter from Gwen Stacy from before she died. After careful examination and a confession from Mary Jane, Peter and the readers learn that Gwen had an affair with Norman Osborn seven months before she died. The result of the affair was two fully grown twins born two months premature, who were ageing rapidly due to the Goblin infected blood they had inherited from their father.

The reason Gwen was killed was because she refused to give the children to Osborn, due to the fact that she had seen what his influence had done to his own son Harry. So, it came as no surprise when it turned out Norman had taken the children anyway, and had trained the children to assassinate Spider-Man.

The decision to not simply have Peter be the father was because the editorial team felt it would age the character too much. This, of course, sparked outrage within fans, as it not only ruined the perfect character of Gwen Stacy, whom Peter constantly referred to as his moral compass (along with Uncle Ben), but also meant that Peter has two children he never discusses and does nothing about, which seemed ridiculous to long-term fans of the web-slinger.