Nerd Concepts episode 2

Hey Everybody, welcome to Nerd Concepts.  Every episode I wear a wacky costume and explain a nerdy concept.  Today we are talking 

about retcons.  I’m dressed as lazy Spider-man because he has one of the most well known and unpopular retcons, which we will get to in a minute.  Retcon is short for retroactive continuity.  Retcons are when new information is released in a story that changes your 

understanding of previous events.  Sometimes, this is because an incoming writer on a series in some form of media doesn’t like where a

previous writer was taking a series, to fix a an unintentional continuity error or simply to shake things up.  The concept is very common 

to comic books but can appear in any media.  Swamp Thing, shown here in the early volume written by Len Wein, was a guy who turned into a mutant plant monster.  When writer Alan Moore took over Swamp Thing he didn’t ignore the previous series but changed readers 

understanding of it by making Swamp Thing a living mass of plant who had absorbed the human body and brain of Scientist Alec 

Holland and only thought it was him.  Alan Moore used false memories to explain away the silly 1950s adventures of British super hero 

Marvel Man (or Miracle Man as it was known in the United States) when he came up with a dark reimagining in the 1980s.  

Let’s get back to Spider-man, one of the most confusing and hated retcons of all time.  In the 1970’s Marvel introduced a story where Spider-man fights and later teams up with a clone of himself.  The clone dies in an ambiguous ending but the storyline was left untouched for many years.  

In the 1990s marvel introduced a new character named Scarlet Spider, who seemed to be exactly like Spider-Man.  It turned out that the character was the clone, who had survived and spent years going by the named Ben Reilly.  Then it turned out that Ben Reilly WAS the real Peter Parker and the Peter fans had followed since the 1970’s, was actually the clone!  Ben Really got a new costume and took over as Spiderman for a year before figuring out that actually he was the clone after all. He died of some mysterious affliction known as “clone degeneration”.  Some would argue that he really died of story line degeneration.  So there you have it, Retcons!  Thanks for watching!