Retcons are always a fun time.
Sometimes, they’re made for the better, revising a storyline that fans and critics
alike didn’t think was up to par with the quality of the publisher’s other work.
Sometimes, retcons are used to fix a problematic storyline that messes with the continuity
of what’s canon.
And other times, they just seem absurd, questionable, and downright scary in terms of what they
do to our favourite characters.
So today, we’re taking a look at the latter, with our list of the top 10 scariest Marvel
retcons.
Some are very obvious retcons, while others are more subtle.
All of them are absurd in one way or another - they’re scary, they’re unsettling, and
they also make us want to crawl inside of our skin and never see the light of day again.
Not all of them, but a few of them will definitely hurt your soul.
So with that in mind, let’s get to it!
10 Xorn Was Magneto All Along!
But then he was Xorn again.
In 2001, Marvel brought in Grant Morrison to re-invent the X-Men, and amongst the many
new aspects he introduced, he also introduced a highly controversial character named Xorn.
Why was Xorn controversial?
Initially, he was a Chinese mutant who wore a skull mask that found his way out of prison
and into Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters, where he worked as a teacher.
At the end of Morrison’s run, he revealed that Xorn was in fact Magneto all along, who
prior was presumed to have been dead.
Xorn-neto went on a massacre in New York and ended up getting into a full on brawl with
the X-Men and was killed off again, all as some beaten to death metaphor to symbolize
the end of an era.
After Morrison left, Marvel retconned the storyline, revealing that this Xorn-neto was
actually just a Magneto imposter himself, and the real Magneto was alive and innocent.
Eventually they introduced a second Xorn, who was a twin to the original Xorn, and instead
of having a star where his head should be (hence the mask), he had a black hole where
his head should be.
And to make matters worse, there was no actual connection between Xorn and Magneto for any
of this to be justified - it’s noted in the official handbook of the marvel universe:
x-men 2005 that this happened all thanks to Scarlet Witch meddling with reality prior
to the House of M event.
Confused?
Yeah, most people still are when it comes to this retcon, too.
What did Magneto ever do to get dragged into this crap??
9 Puck’s Constant Pain Puck is a character who was first introduced
into Marvel Comics back in 1983’s Alpha Flight issue 1.
He’s a 3 foot 6 superhero named Eugene Judd who initially, when created by John Byrne,
had no super powers at all.
He was just exceptionally acrobatic and incredibly skilled at combat, and was always armed with
a good sense of humour.
To make things more interesting, the character suffered from constant pain thanks to a condition
called achondroplasia, which often is correlated with dwarfism.
But as time went on, Puck’s origins were retconned, and when Bill Mantlo took over
Alpha Flight, he decided to give a new meaning to Puck’s aching.
The retcon made it so that his small stature was due to a mystical influence, something
that Byrne called Mantlo out on for not understanding what achondroplasty meant.
Anywho, Puck once upon a time was 7 feet tall, an adventurer who stumbled upon something
called the Black Blade of Baghdad which contained the spirit of an evil sorcerer named Raazer.
Judd accidentally freed him, but trapped him using some sort of ancient mysticism, which
basically put Raazar inside of his own body, trapped for eternity, causing him non stop
pain that eventually caused him to shrink down physically.
But also made him immortal.
So, from regular guy to someone walking around as a living prison for a mystical evil sorcerer.
Yeah, that seems like it makes the most sense, right?
8 Scarlet Witch’s kids I feel like the only sacred thing when it
comes to Wanda Maximoff’s family life is that she is a twin and her brother is Quicksilver.
Seriously - don’t get us started on the whole ‘Magneto isn’t actually her father’
debacle.
So, let’s try to not make this confusion - Wanda, aka Scarlet Witch, once upon a time
had twin sons named Wiccan and Speed.
They become members of the Young Avengers.
Vision was their father.
Yes, he’s a robot, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
So, Wanda believed she had these two children with Vision, until it was revealed that they
were actually created by her reality warping abilities.
Makes sense, cause dude is a robot.
Anywho, it just gets worse from there.
Wiccan and Speed are apparently made from two pieces of Mephisto’s soul, who then
tried to reabsorb those pieces, which then reincarnated Wiccan and Speed into Billy Kaplan
and Thomas Shepherd.
The whole things is just very, very confusing.
Moral of the story- hide yo kids?
7 Jean Grey was never Phoenix The Phoenix Saga, and Jean Grey by association,
is perhaps one of the most iconic and recognized X-Men stories to date.
And according to this retcon, it’s also pretty meaningless.
You all likely know the story - Jean is possessed by the Phoenix Force, a powerful cosmic entity
that consumes her and ends up getting a bunch of people killed, including herself.
By the end of this year, there will officially be two live action movies that follow that
storyline.
After Scott attempted to move on by shacking up with the literal clone of Jean Grey, Madeline
Pryor, it was revealed that, surprise, Jean was actually still alive!
The Phoenix Force had apparently preserved her body in an underwater cocoon.
BUT THEN - it turned out she wasn’t the phoenix at all!
So yeah, Jean’s big sacrifice in killing herself in order to prevent the Dark Phoenix
from destroying the entire universe is basically pointless.
Some serious nihilism going on over at Marvel I suppose.
6 Spider-God What’s one way to piss fans off?
Retcon an origin story that’s over half a century old, and toss in a terrifying large
and powerful spider in the mix while you’re at it.
Obviously we’re talking about Spider-Man here.
In the controversial Spider-Man: The Other story arc, it’s revealed that Peter Parker
was actually chosen by a Spider God to become the web slinging hero.
Which, yes, in case you’re wondering, makes zero sense.
Thanks to J Michael Straczynski, the Spider God, a totemic god, quietly manipulated Peter’s
actions, and went on to give him new powers as well, which allowed him to communicate
with arthropods, have a poisonous bite and - get this - wrist stingers.
Best part is, this was NEVER mentioned again.
Ever.
Fans hated it.
And it’s also one of the reasons that our next retcon on our list was brought into the
fray-
5 Spider-Man: One More Day Yet another wonderful retcon thanks to J Michael
Straczynski here.
And Joe Quesada!
So the One Day More story arc is the famous controversial story arc in which after Peter’s
identity is revealed publicly, Aunt May ends up getting fatally injured.
In order to save her, Peter strikes up a deal with Mephisto, one of Marvel’s best narrative
tools when it comes to retcons, who agrees to let Aunt May live if Peter gives up his
life with Mary Jane Watson.
Peter does it, dissolving their marriage - it’s the product of that lame cliche that superheroes
don’t deserve to be happily married.
Anywho, the decision cost Peter his future daughter, who he also got a glimpse of throughout.
But it reset a lot of aspects of Parker’s life, and involved a terrifying demon in order
to do it.
Stupid AND scary!
4 Sentry Sentry’s story is a little terrifying.
Sentry’s story starts off with the alias of the character, a man named Robert, remembering
that he once was a superhero.
He realizes that no one else remembers him being an active superhero, and the deeper
the narrative dives, the more we learn about this life that Robert, aka Sentry had in the
Marvel Universe.
Turns out, Sentry has an evil other half living within him, that, with the scope of the powers
he has, was a supreme threat to the marvel universe.
So sentry, with the help of Reed richards, ended up having everyone on Earth’s memory
of him erased, including his own.
Essentially, his whole story was a massive retcon in order to introduce a character and
squeeze him into previous storylines that had already existed in Marvel’s history.
It’s one of the less painful retcons on this list, since it is doing something interesting
with the narrative, but perhaps the scariest aspect of Sentry’s entire story is how horrifying
his other half, Void, truly is, and why he would go to those lengths to forever suppress
him.
3 Karen Page Are you guys familiar with Women in Refrigerators?
It was a website started back in 1999 by author Gail Simone that highlighted all of the ways
that female characters had been mistreated in comics.
It had become a trope - the female characters were often used to progress a male character’s
narrative, and were subject to brutal murders, intense injuries, , or were just flat out
depowered.
Even Wonder Woman had to deal with that sh*t back in the 70s.
Anywho, that exact concept can be applied to this ridiculous retcon surrounded Dare
Devil’s lady pal Karen Page.
Karen was given some pretty crappy treatment - she was made into a prostitute, was given
AIDS (which turns out was all an illusion thanks to Mysterio after all) and then died
in Mat Murdoch’s arms after Bullseye killed her.
All in all, Karen was retconning from a character who went to California and began a successful
acting career to a character who became addicted to heroin and started starring in From Daredevil
issue 227 onwards, it just gets worse and worse for the character.
2 Hydra Cap Hydra Cap is the most recent retcon on this
list.
So, in 2017, there was a series called Captain America Steve Rogers that set the foundation
for some massive ‘reveals’ concerning Steve Rogers’ origin story.
We learned that he had been a sleeper agent all along for HYDRA, and was basically a who
stood against everything the character EVER stood for.
It was ludicrous.
He ends up starting this whole war, with him working with HYDRA for global dominance.
It’s later revealed though that it wasn’t actually Steve Rogers - instead, the culprit
behind this was an alternate timeline HYDRA duplicate of Rogers.
But considering the political climate that that series was released during, needless
to say, making the epitome of American patriotism a fascist was a little on the nose there,
Marvel.
1 Gwen Stacy & Norman Osborn Got it ON This one is actually really, really terrible.
It seems like poor Peter Parker gets the worst of the retcons, doesn’t he?
Or maybe they’re all just penned by J Michael Straczynski and that’s why they all suck.
This retcon in the story arc Sins Past added a lot of unnecessary details and motivation
behind the events of the famous 1973 The Amazing Spider-Man The Night Gwen Stacy Died storyline.
After a pair of twins attack Spider-Man, Peter later finds out that they’re actually Gwen
Stacy’s children, who are out to kill Peter for revenge.
MJ would break the news to Peter, telling her that Stacy had confided in her - Stacy
slept with Norman Osborn, and gave birth to his twin children in France shortly before
she died.
The reason why Osborn went after her that night was because she was a threat to his
potential heirs, and wanted to raise his children with Peter instead.
He was going after both Peter and Gwen that night.
Still, the panels in which we see Osborn get freaky with Gwen are, well, not great, and
kind of burn themselves into your retinas.
Sorry friends.