Green Arrow and Black Canary #5
ANAL CONTINUITY WITH A CONTINUITY ****E.
Winick says: As a child, Connor was harrassed and bullied for his ethnicity, and reacted violently due to "impulse control and rage issues."
Actual continuity says: Connor was harassed and bullied as a child, but only because he had a fat allowance and was a bit preppie. Any racial overtones were absent (though obviously not out of the question). And he kicked their asses because he was good at fighting, not because he had anger problems.
Winick says: Connor's mother sent him to the ashram to help him channel his anger.
Actual continuity says: It was Connor's idea to go to the ashram, and only because he wanted to learn the ways of a warrior/archer. His mom, the hippie, just thought that it was cool. She had no idea that Oliver had ever been to the same place.
Winick says: Connor went to the ashram as an adolescent, not from birth.
Actual continuity says: This is true! Connor went when he was thirteen and left with Ollie five years later. This is something that Winick thankfully hits the bullseye on, as opposed to pretty much every other writer who seems to be under the impression that he was left at the temple doorstep as a baby or something.
Man, I do appreciate what Winick is doing. I get where he's coming from and it does make sense. And the setup of those scenes makes me think that he definitely read the same exact past issues that I did...which, in way, makes his arbitrary retcons all the more irritating. That's really all that there is to it: retcons are irritating. They're irritating when the writer in question does them out of ignorance, and they're just as irritating when the writer in question does them in full awareness.
The punchline, of course, is that I'm 300% certain that they're only irritating to me, and that anyone who hasn't meticulously studied Connor's chronology -- which would be every other person here, I imagine -- simply thought that this was a decent backstory with a lot of dramatic impetus. And it is. Taken on its own, taken in this issue and the context of this series, those retcons made for very good scenes. It made for a very good issue.
I guess it just goes back to the age-old retcon question: how much is too much? How far back is far back enough? How many years do we get to hang onto the "validity" of a scene or a characterization before it becomes fair game for whichever writer to start twisting it around or negating it outright? In ten or fifteen years, are we going to have some random writer completely redo this very thing we're reading right now, GA&BC#5, to fit whatever new and "dramatic" flashbacking revelation is appropriate for that particular story arc? I mean, if every story has an expiration date, then what's the expiration date for stories we're reading today? When should I go ahead and say, "alright I'm done enjoying this particular tale from the past; go ahead and revoke it now"?
That feels wrong to me, the idea that at any moment, any past story could just be undone or altered. It has always felt wrong, and I imagine that it always will.
Which is not, for better or for worse, to say that this was a bad issue because of it. Not necessarily.
(8 out of 10)