The DCU
Cerebus Retcon in this franchise.Comic Books
- Angel and the Ape was a Silver Age comic about a girl named Angel and a gorilla named Sam fighting crime in the city, with the oddity of the latter never being mentioned (except everyone assumed Ape was a very hairy human). When it was revived in 1991 it was explained that Sam was actually the grandson of Gorilla Grodd, a DC Universe simian supervillain. Like Grodd, Sam has psychic powers, which in his case make him look human to others as long as he concentrates.
- Batman
- Batman R.I.P. and the events leading up to it are one big Cerebus Retcon. All that Silver Age Batman wackiness? All either hallucinations caused by Scarecrow or Joker gas, or delusions of a young Batman as he took part in a dangerous mental experiment to try to understand the Joker's mind. Also, the original Batwoman was retconned into being a spy who was hired to find out Bruce's identity, before she fell in love with him and ended up Becoming the Mask (although weirdly enough, Bette Kane's time as Batgirl was intact before and after the Cerebus Retcon.
- Harleen reveals that "Harley" was previously an insulting nickname used for Harleen Quinzell in university due to her (exaggerated) reputation for sleeping with faculty (what do middle-aged guys start riding when they have a mid-life crisis).
- The villain the Mad Hatter was always slightly creepier than most, but in the first Secret Six miniseries it became canon that he was a serial rapist, a drug addict, only ate food with hats on it, and was afflicted with macrocephaly. For a villain whose hat (harhar) is casual mind control and was drawn after a Tenniel illustration, this worked surprisingly well.
- In Ra's Al Ghul first appearance, he wanted Batman to marry his daughter and have children with her. That was shown as him wanting a male heir to the point where Batman called him the world's oldest misogynist. But then, when he was resurrected, he planned to take over his grandson's body which was his plan all along. Showing that he did not want a male heir to continue his legacy; he wanted a male heir so he could have a new body to be immortal.
- When Captain Atom was retconned after Crisis on Infinite Earths, his Silver Age adventures were turned into a cover story by the government to establish his superhero identity.
- Convergence reveals that Brainiac has never been subjected to the retcons that have repeatedly altered the DC Universe. He is a being existing outside of time and space ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths, and just about every version of him seen since his first appearance have been more or less puppet constructs acting out his will.
- The changes made with Crisis on Infinite Earths combined this with Cosmic Retcon, warping the entire DC Universe to usher in The Dark Age of Comic Books.
- DC Infinite Frontier undid the infamously unpopular decision to kill off Lian Harper, the daughter of Arsenal and Cheshire by revealing Cheshire allowed everyone to believe Lian was dead when she instead left her amnesiac daughter in Gotham City for the sake of giving her a chance at a normal life. While Lian's death was one of the darkest events of the post-Crisis DC Universe thanks to what it did to the Arrow Family, the Titans, and Roy Harper, it being undone by way of Cheshire faking Lian's death manages to make it even worse. Not only does it mean that Roy's Face–Heel Turn and violent breakdown, instigated by his friends and family halfassing it, was for nothing, it also means during the apparent years everyone believed Lian was dead she was really homeless and alone on the streets of Gotham. Having to turn to stealing to survive, Lian became known as "Shoes" and ended up a pickpocketer now working as Catwoman's lackey "Cheshire Cat." As such, the retcon of Lian's death resulted in the girl having lost her family and her childhood, her father and friends suffered for nothing, and Cheshire only made herself even more miserable and alone by having no idea where her daughter was or if she was even still alive after abandoning her. However, as of Green Arrow (2023) the events of Cry For Justice still occurred in some form since it's confirmed that Malcolm Merlyn was controlling the situation behind the scenes and forcing the Arrowclan apart for a currently unknown reason. Lian was still alive but any attempt to find her father made her teleport away.
- The Flash: Back in the Silver and Bronze Age, Barry was always depicted as a kind, heroic man, and a Parental Substitute for Wally; even his darkest act, killing Thawne, was in large part out of desperation. Starting with Identity Crisis (2004), it was slowly revealed Barry has a dark side; him killing Thawne was after he had voted to Mind Rape Doctor Light and brainwashed The Top, something that exploded in his face. When he came back, Barry showed a selfish tendency leading to events like Flashpoint. His treatment of Wally became far from perfect, and in many ways he's been quite a toxic figure for him. The writers later pulled back on this a bit, with the reveal that Thawne had been subliminally encouraging Barry's dark side since the New 52 started.
- The original premise behind Kid Eternity was that a clerk in heaven made an error and Kid Eternity died before his time while boating with his grandpa. He was then resurrected to do good stuff by summoning heroes of the past. Then Grant Morrison got their hands on the poor kid in the modern age and made some dark revisions in a 1991 miniseries that revamped the character. Demons made up all that misfiling stuff, the clerk is a minor demon and the "historical figures" he becomes are demons as well. It's all The Plan about earning their way back into heaven by "helping" humanity via evilution. Oh, and he's an orphan; the man he calls "grandpa" is actually a child molester. Much of this was ignored after Kid Eternity was reintegrated back into the standard DC Universe.
- The 2016 The Flintstones comic, being a Darker and Edgier Black Comedy gives us some very grim explanations for traits of gags from the show, such as Fred's "Yabba-Dabba Do" Catchphrase being a nonsense mantra for his post-traumatic stress disorder from his time as a veteran, how all of the animal appliances are sapient and hate being used as such (the word "appliance" to them even qualifies as a slur), so they're essentially enslaved, and once they become obsolete, they're "recycled", and the Great Gazoo is an extraterrestrial game warden who protects the native wildlife (read: humans) from alien threats. You'll hardly believe this is the comic of a family comedy with a Laugh Track.
- Green Lantern:
- Back in the Silver Age, Hal Jordan seemed to have the least dramatic backstory of any DC superhero: he was a cocky, handsome, all-American test pilot who spent his free time trying to woo his boss's daughter, and was on uncannily good terms with his family. But Geoff Johns' post-Crisis run went into a bit more detail about Hal's background, and revealed that his arrogance actually masks some truly sad experiences. For starters, he saw his father die in a test flight when he was just a child, and his brown bomber jacket is actually a memento of his father. For another thing, his mother disowned him after he ran away from home to join the Air Force on his 18th birthday, and refused to speak to Hal on her deathbed. This led a guilt-ridden Hal to intentionally get himself kicked out of the Air Force by punching his commanding officer so he could speak to her. But he arrived too late and she died of cancer. Hal's brother Jack blamed him for driving her to an early grave. That mistake is the reason Hal got his job as a test pilot for Ferris Aircraft, since they were the only aviation company that would hire him after his dishonorable discharge.
- The Green Lantern's weakness to the color yellow has long been the butt of jokes from comic book readers (and other superheroes) for its perceived silliness, and even Green Lantern fans long dismissed it as an artifact of the Silver Age. But the weakness didn't seem nearly as funny after Geoff Johns finally revealed its origin in Green Lantern: Rebirth: it turns out that the "yellow impurity" in the Central Power Battery that caused the power ring's ineffectiveness against yellow objects was actually a malevolent alien Eldritch Abomination called "Parallax"—the living embodiment of fear, which was imprisoned in the power battery by the Guardians to stop it from enslaving the universe.note Parallax's mastery of fear was so great that it led to Hal Jordan's corruption and Face–Heel Turn in Emerald Twilight, which culminated in him rebelling against the Green Lantern Corps and successfully draining the Central Power Battery. So, yes...the Green Lantern's weakness to the color yellow brought the largest peacekeeping force in the galaxy crashing down.
- In Justice League International, there was a gag where a Tap on the Head would transform Guy Gardner from his usual Jerkass personality to being all hearts and flowers (or vice versa). Much later, Guy's own comic would reveal that every time he lost consciousness the demonic half-Vuldarian Dementor was screwing around with his personality, and had been ever since he entered a coma pre-Crisis (before which he was neither a jerk nor sappy).
- The supervillain brainwashing plot arc which began in Identity Crisis (2004) used this trope in two ways:
- Prior to Identity Crisis (and particularly during the Silver Age), heroes used "mindwipes" and other forms of selective memory erasure all the time, frequently to preserve the heroes' secret identities. Ethical issues relating to this were seldom (if ever) addressed. Suddenly, in Identity Crisis, the ethics of mindwiping came to the forefront, and were revealed as the cause of a major past schism in the Justice League.
- In addition, several changes in certain supervillains' behavior were attributed to the effects of mindwiping. Most notably, this was used to explain how Dr. Light went from being a serious threat to the Silver Age Justice League to a joke villain constantly bested by the Teen Titans by revealing that he was given, not just a mindwipe, but a personality alteration after he brutally raped Sue Dibny in Identity Crisis.
- One of the most controversial revelations was that Catwoman's turn towards Anti-Villainy (and sometimes outright heroism) during her 2000s series was not the result of Character Development, but rather a mindwipe and personality alteration dealt by Zatanna.
- The prevalence of these in comics, especially during The '80s and ‘90s is parodied in an issue of Planetary, where an Expy of Miracleman rants about how his wholesome and idealistic Silver Age life was twisted into something needlessly (and comically) dark and ugly."I didn't want to find out that instead of getting my powers from a transcendent scientist-mentor, I was grown from the DNA of Aryan super-athletes and Hitler's personal sex midgets! I didn't even know Hitler had personal sex midgets!"
- John Dee, a.k.a. Dr. Destiny: originally a supervillain defeated by the Justice League, he had a magic ruby that could make dreams come to life. Sounds dangerous, but since this was The Silver Age of Comic Books, he was handily defeated and not thought of again for a long time. Come The Sandman (1989), it was revealed that it was Dream's own ruby amulet, and that while in Arkham Asylum Dee had gone completely, omnicidally insane. When he stole the ruby back, he plunged the world into twenty-four hours of horrific madness straight out of nightmares and warped desires before finally being stopped by Dream's direct intervention.
- Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade: Belinda Zee, Linda's Bizarro analogue in this 'verse, initially seems in her first appearance like a typical Alpha Bitch trying to humiliate and belittle Linda just because she's evil. But in a later issue, we see her talk to a psychologist and explain that her nature as a Mirror Self of Linda makes it so she feels the opposite of whatever she's feeling at any given moment: When Linda is happy, Belinda is unhappy. But when she's unhappy, the reverse is true for Belinda. So the only way for Belinda to feel actually, truly happy is if Linda is miserable. So naturally, Belinda tries as hard as she can to make that happen.
- Superman: Red and Blue issue one has a story by John Ridley that revisits World's Finest #192-193, where Superman and Batman were captured by Colonel Koslov, and implies that Clark was subjected to rape or at least sexual assault during that time.
- Issue 3 of Unstoppable Doom Patrol revisit Grant Morrison's tenure on Doom Patrol, most notably when Larry Trainor and the Negative spirit were merged with Eleanor Poole into the non-binary Rebis and Robotman's insistence on referring to Rebis as "Larry" — and reveals that even years after Larry separated from Rebis that he resents Cliff deadnaming them. To his credit, Robotman does own up to how offensive he was being to his friend and apologizes for it.
Films
- In Superman II, Zod's Dragon Non was a silent brute upon whom Jor-El looked with contempt. This characterization carried over to the comics... and then it was revealed Non was once a close friend of Jor-El's until he was abducted and lobotomized.
