Your retcon flasher has 3 charges. (Retcon: revision to DC canon, be it comic book, TV, film, or other). You can replace them if you think of something you want to retcon more, but you only get 3 total!
And if it’s a spoiler for anything recent, please blur and mark it!
Negative Man’s negative spirit being an alien named Keeg. not everything needs to be explained! the question is often more interesting than the answer!
The Three Jokers. same reason as above. I actually LOVED the Mobius Chair telling Batman “there are 3 Jokers,” but then the intrigue was ruined!
Martian Manhunter is always a founder of the Justice League. More so than even the Trinity. J’onn has been through it all with this team from the OG to the Detroit Era to his Oreo days with the JLI to mentoring a bunch of pups in Task Force, etc etc.
Jason Todd never comes back to life. I like Jason, but I like The Joker more, and Joker isn’t scary or threatening if everything he does just gets undone.
The Amazons do not kill all of their male babies. They throw them back into the Well of Souls, where they’re scattered across the globe. This is the origin of most unexplained super-strength metas.
I’m removing every time that any DC character has been defensive of Amanda Waller. I know that when you sign up to work for DC, they make you swear on the Watchmen TPB that you will write Waller as unequivocally and one-dimensionally evil with no altruistic motive whatsoever, and that you will have all the heroes defend her by saying “sometimes life is grey, therefore she can do any evil child-murder-y thing she wants”. I refuse to accept that. Every DC hero is fully aware that Waller is slightly less moral than Darkseid and the only reason she isn’t in Green Arrow’s underground prison on Lian Yu is because there’s a top-secret button somewhere on Earth and if she doesn’t personally press it every twelve hours it will execute a Machiavellian plan that will kill every super’s loved ones in creative and exciting ways.
I forgot the third thing, so I’m gonna wait til I remember, 'cause it was a real good one.
i thought about retconning the post-Ostrander one-dimensional-evil-ing of Waller, but i think it’ll happen eventually. Ostrander’s Waller was really interesting and complex, and everyone since then just made her another boring villain.
There’s definitely more than 3 things I’d wanna change, but these are the first 3 that come to mind:
Golden Glider and Bronze Tiger survive the end of Joshua Williamson’s Rogues. I thought that was a damn-near perfect Rogues story but I was so pissed at Williamson’s apparent need to kill off every single Rogue by the end. Kill most of them, sure, but at least let a couple of them get away instead of having them get randomly shot right at the end
No romantic/sexual interactions between Babs and Bruce. I’d say this one speaks for itself
On the CW Supergirl show, remove Mon-El entirely and have Lena be Kara’s main love interest #SupercorpEndgame
If it makes you feel better, I think they pretty much wrapped up the Heretic stuff in Patrick Gleason’s Robin: Son of Batman series, where he found all the Heretics that his mother had cloned and took them to an island where they could live out the rest of their lives in peace. It means that someone could use them down the line, but it can also be a good ending point for the plot thread.
I think I like the idea of the Kents or on Themyskira that we’ve seen in more recent ones, but a young Kara being raised as a Robin would make for a very interesting Elseworld.
I love most of this – definitely a better way of cleaning up some of the stuff from Azzarello’s run than what Rucka did with “it was all a lie! Now watch Diana flop around like a tired baby while Steve Trevor does all the work.”
I’m not sure about the whole “origin of most unexplained super-strength metas” thing. I’m not sure how much of this it would explain, but I feel like it would either be so little that it hardly matters, or so much that it feels like the Amazons are too connected to everything.
Pretty much. Like, I can maybe see Babs early on in her crime-fighting career having a crush on Bruce. I mean, this is a young woman who between her intelligence and lived experience feels more mature than her peers, who is suddenly being trained by this incredible guy who actually takes her seriously. Like, yeah, I could totally see that happening. However, Bruce absolutely SHOULD NOT reciprocate or share those feelings.
Cyborg was a founding member of the Justice League, but when Raven comes to the League with the problem with Trigon, none of them listen…except for Cyborg, who goes with her, and that’s how he’s brought into the New Teen Titans. He’s still a member of the Justice League, but when he’s not doing missions with that team, he’s hanging out and helping his newfound family in the Titans.
I feel like this is an elegant way of making both histories work well enough.
2:
Instead of having aritifical growth stuff and New Gods tech to explain how Batman has a twelve year-old son in a 5-ish year timeline, have it that Bruce and Talia were a couple before he became Batman while training with Ra’s al Ghul. We’ve already had stories of Bruce being trained by Ra’s like The Killing Time and The Knight, it wouldn’t take much to add that element too. And with Rebirth and all seemingly adding more time to Batman’s history (bringing it back to 10+ years), then the age range for Damian makes more sense – as much as ages in corporate superhero comics make any kind of sense, at least.
