Re: Literary term search: revising fictional history in a series

In article <2008031715291616807-kurt@busiekcomics>,
Kurt Busiek <kurt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


On 2008-03-17 12:23:39 -0700, Richard Shewmaker <spam.this@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Sea Wasp wrote:
Richard Shewmaker wrote:
I'm fairly sure that, at some point in the past, I came across a term
that defined the act of altering the history of books early in the
series to accommodate changes in the later ones

Retcon.

From "retroactive continuity", originating IIRC in the comic-book
world, where it's a way of life.

Thank you. Interesting. I'm not a comic book reader, so this might be a
dumb question: any idea why it happens a lot in comics? I'd think that
because they are short, and therefore easier than novels to fact check,
writers would try to avoid retconning. Is it common enough that no one
finds it surprising? Now that I'm thinking about it, I can't recall any
instance of this in a novel, I mean one that stood out so much that it
stayed with me. It must happen but I suspect that it would be
criticized as being careless/sloppy writing in a novel/series of
novels. Is this a dichotomy between *serious* fiction writing and comic
writing?

Comics may be short, taken one at a time, but there are more pages of
Superman adventures than there are of all of Stephen King's work put
together, and Superman stories are only part of a "universe" that has
Batman, Wonder Woman and lots of other characters in it. So things
pile up.

There are also factors like the fact that, say, Iron Man debuted in
1962, but he isn't 46 years older than he was when he debuted, so they
adjust his past (and the others characters') from time to time to keep
them at the commercially-best ages and still contemporary. So while
Iron Man's origin originally happened during the Vietnam War, today
Tony Stark wasn't yet out of diapers when the war ended.

Every now and then they decide they need to revise something big, and
do big cosmic stories to do that. It doesn't happen much in novels,
because novels aren't usually written by hundreds of different writers
over a period of decades, and all expected to match up with one another.

Which is not to say it doesn't get out of hand from time to time, but
it happens because of the giant sprawling multi-creator continuities,
not because comics are inherently sloppier.

And when it happens in novels, it's usually a matter of the writer
pretending it was always that way without explanation, or playing the
"appearances were deceptive" card. A handy example is Sherlock Holmes'
"death" at Reichenbach Falls -- Conan Doyle undid it by saying "Oh, you
only _thought_ he died, he really survived," which is how a lot of
comics retcons work, too.

kdb


I would say the Iron Man origin thing and the Holmes thing are two
differnt types of retcons, perhaps even to the point that they are
two different things. In the Holmes case everything still happened
as Watson related it, it's just that things out of his pervue were
not as he expected. In the other case, it's more of an actual
revision in the backstory, though presented as if "that's the way
it's always been".


Ted
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..
.

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