Here's a couple of questions for you writers and creators out there - especially those with longevity in your comics and large archives:

1) TO RETCON or NOT RETCON - Is there a healthy way to RETCON your storytelling without deviating too much from the original premise of your series? Do you feel you've successfully accomplished this? Has any series in print or on web done this successfully in your opinion?

2) MOTHER OF REINVENTION? - So many print comics do this...can solid retconning keep a series from "jumping the shark"?

3) STAYING THE COURSE - Though I'm sure most of the print comics do this because a series like say, Spider-Man has seen tons of writers in the 40+ years its been in circulation - with most web comics consistently having ONE writer/Team of writers, how viable is it to retcon and how often should it happen?

1) I have retconned 4 times. I've also started over 4 times so I guess that may not really count as retconning.
Now that I know the gist of my story I will not go back and change things. If I messed up then I messed up.
I would have to change future events to match what I have done, not vice versa.

2)IMO the best way to reinvent is to start over. If you feel you can't reinvent with the events you have already set in place.

3) Again this is just my opinion but all good stories should have a beginning and end. If it needs to continue on for infinity + it should have lots of smaller stories and change characters. Perhaps moving on to children and such. Now this is in the realm of a somewhat serious story.

If you are talking about ageless comic strip characters and such then that's different =p

EDIT: I'm also assuming you are talking about "bad" retcons that change things instead of simply adding to previous events... The new spiderman story comes to mind.

I technically retcon often but of my non-uploaded material (a couple hundred pages behind my current work), so I change dialogue of my older pages to better match the stuff I'm currently working on. -- In other words, no one knows that the inconsistencies existed...

It's not a good thing to "change facts" but I think one can change the focus of a story for the better and allow established "important facts" fall to the background and not be important at all. My characters had a set of semi-supernatural abilities that I eluded to early in my story (it was my plan to make that a big part of things), but I essentially those behind entirely and make no or very little mention of it later. I almost pretend it never existed at all, but the story doesn't deny it or really contradict itself. It's just a "left behind" plot point.

If you have to actually change the facts of the story and rewrite history, then you should start a new story or start over. Or you can write separate spin-off tales with similar world/characters but as different story lines and separate from each other (like the several "Tenchi" anime series, a number existing within their own canons).

If a series isn't too epic in scale (more real life-ish) a series can continue for a long time but not as a single story. It can work when presented as a series of stories in a continuity of the same world/characters. Time should pass. People should age.

Oh, and writing character back from the dead or something like that is a cheap cop out. I only like it if it has been planned all along and there are some hints along the way that show it wasn't a just a whim to "bring him back." (Maybe before the death, they mention a restorative technique, questions surround the death, a mysterious character appears around the same time, anything like that.)

Print comics are generally very bad at retconning but this is largely because of the obsession with cross-title continuity. Perez's reinvention of WW in the 1980s worked within the character's own comic book because he took the character back to square one and started with her origins. Everything that had gone before (WW2 etc) simply "never happened" (well, not to her!)

Crisis on Infinite Earths from the same period, however, was (in my opinion) a dismal failure because of the absurd attempt to make the retconning itself part of the continuity. This meant that, instead of starting with a clean slate, future writers had even more baggage to weigh them down. The same is true of the new wave of "Crises" and - from what we hear - of the attempt to revamp Spidey.

I avoided the (possible future!) problem in my comic by deliberately making the core characters ageless, trying to explain that within the story, and even drawing attention to it by allowing the supporting cast to age around them.

To answer your questions, Blntmaker, I feel that:

1: Yes, of course there is a healthy way to retcon, but it's not easy and I would try to avoid it whenever possible. Usually this works best when you try to do a complete restart.

2: Yes again; a lot of retconning can actually help a comic, but only if it is done properly. I suppose the best example of proper retconning isn't even in comics at all. It is in pulp fiction. Two of the longest running pulp fiction series right now, The Executioner and The Destroyer, have both been, slightly, retconned to fit with modern times. Little pieces have changed slowly and logically over time to make the characters more timeless.

3: Not often at all. But again, this depends on what sort of comic you're writing. If it's a realistic comic, retconning doesn't make much sense. But if you have a superhero comic, you could get away with it by doing what you need to do carefully.

Personally, I think it's a bad idea to retcon when it would be so much easier to do something else to keep your comic afloat.

Oh, and everyone has been talking about the new Spider-Man retcon that eliminates almost everything in a rather absurd manner. Well, I've kept my subscription, and I'm still reading it. Let me tell you, it isn't the best move Marvel has ever done, but the new writers are doing the best they can and keeping things fun enough. But, though I'm still enjoying it, that does not make Marvel's choice a good one.

ooh, I'm gonna try and answer this without bringing up Spiderman; so here it goes:

(1)I'm not totally against retconning if it's done in a clever way, like how they retconned in batman beyond to make Terry Mcguiness Bruce Wayne's clone. I think it's cool to change things to explore a more interesting story point/arc, but only when there is a significant amont of thought put into it. You have to think, "What will I be sacrificing if I change this?". I don't like when writers paint themselves into a corner and then use retconning to "correct" a "mistake" so that the story can continue. But retconning just because you want spiderman to go out on a date is unexceptionable (oops)

(2)I'm kind of on the fence about this. I mean how many different X-Men revamps are there? Once again, I think it takes careful planning and consideration in order to pull off a remake. There has to be a balance of what to change and what to keep. Knowing what works and what doesn't. It's difficult though because one tiny change in the wrong place can screw up the entire thing and also because you have to compete with the original.

(3)I think if you don't have to retcon you shouldn't. I think one thing manga serials have over standard american comics is that once they establish their universe's history, it's pretty much set in stone and every story there after is based on that history, no matter what. Manga almost never retcons. So no matter what, Naruto will always be an orphan, he'll never find out that his parents were really alive in Europe the entire time(sorry, another spiderman refference) and the Hokage won't ever be magically brought back to life. And I think for the fans, it shows integrity in the work. Nobody wants to read over 300 issues of back story only to have it be made irrelevant(yet another spiderman reference)

I think it boils down to writing. If you've written yourself into a corner, you may have no choice to retcon but it's always better to try to avoid it, in my opinion.

On my superhero comic, the AR-MEN (not on DD), I wrote myself into a corner and it took 5 years to come up with a way to properly resolve the matter. I didn't do a complete start over from scratch. I just had one character alter history at one critical (and unexpected) point in time to affect the rest!

In Green Lantern, it was "revealed" when Hal Jordan returned that he hadn't actually "turned into" the supervillain called Parallax but that Parallax was an entity from the negative matter universe that's basically the embodiment of fear. The way I'm summarizing it now it probably sounds a bit silly, but it actually works because in the GL universe you now have Parallax as the embodiment of fear and Ion as the embodiment of willpower, which is what drives the GL rings. They actually managed to break it down to basic emotional concepts that way, and it all makes a lot of sense. It's pretty cool.

spacehamster
In Green Lantern, it was "revealed" when Hal Jordan returned that he hadn't actually "turned into" the supervillain called Parallax but that Parallax was an entity from the negative matter universe that's basically the embodiment of fear. The way I'm summarizing it now it probably sounds a bit silly, but it actually works because in the GL universe you now have Parallax as the embodiment of fear and Ion as the embodiment of willpower, which is what drives the GL rings. They actually managed to break it down to basic emotional concepts that way, and it all makes a lot of sense. It's pretty cool.

Thanks so much! Now see, there's a great example of effective retconning. What you hope for here, is that it doesn't anger too many diehard purist of such a legendary comic like GL.

Retconning would be pretty much impossible in my comic, since the passage of time is a very intrinsic factor in its premise. But I did give a glimpse of what the future holds for Cassie in my "These Are The Good Old Days" strips, where 101-year-old Cassie goes back to the present time to show her great-granddaughter what computers were like in the early 21st century.

I don't really intend to have TLT run forever... but I am open to letting someone else take the reins once I'm ready to retire. My only stipulation then would be that the series would have to center around not Cassie herself or a modern-day version of twentysomething Cassie, but a descendant of Cassie's, with her own set of friends.

blntmaker

spacehamster
In Green Lantern, it was "revealed" when Hal Jordan returned that he hadn't actually "turned into" the supervillain called Parallax but that Parallax was an entity from the negative matter universe that's basically the embodiment of fear. The way I'm summarizing it now it probably sounds a bit silly, but it actually works because in the GL universe you now have Parallax as the embodiment of fear and Ion as the embodiment of willpower, which is what drives the GL rings. They actually managed to break it down to basic emotional concepts that way, and it all makes a lot of sense. It's pretty cool.

Thanks so much! Now see, there's a great example of effective retconning. What you hope for here, is that it doesn't anger too many diehard purist of such a legendary comic like GL.

I think the retconning works in this case simply because it's such an absurdly horrendous idea to suddenly turn Hal Jordan into a world-destroying supervillain. In cases like this the acceptability of a retcon is directly proportional to how bad the idea was in the first place.