Ret-conning: Good Or Bad For Comics?

I'm currently reading the mini-series "DC Universe: Legacies", which re-establishes (in the wake of recent mind-bending events) for current readers the official continuity of the DC Universe from beginning to present day.

In the most recent issue I noticed some changes in the time line that were minor, but still noticeable and it got me thinking about the idea of retroactive continuity changes in comic books.

It used to be that comic book companies tried really hard to keep all of their properties consistent with each other. But as continuity became more complex it became harder to keep them all straight. In an attempt to clean house, DC comics created a storyline in the mid-80's called "Crisis On Infinite Earths" which basically wiped out the multiple universes they had been juggling and migrating the survivors to a single earth. Shortly afterward, a "History of the DC Universe" was published to establish the new continuity. But it wasn't more than a few years before the continuity got mucked up again.

These days ret-conning happens most often, not as the result of a cosmic crisis, but because of writers who simply choose to ignore certain events of DC's past that they don't like, or who pretend that things happened or were true all along that they are really just establishing for the first time.

One writer famous for this is Geoff Johns. The habit has worked for him because he has a knack for distilling characters to their purest forms and then fleshing out those elements in fresh ways. He also has a knack for adding brand new concepts to characters that make them interesting in ways they never were before.

But other times, ret-conning doesn't work so well, or cuts out elements that readers really wished hadn't been. For example, DC STILL seems to have forgotten that Green Lantern John Stewart is part Guardian!

Some might say that in a perfect world, editorial staffs would be able to keep their books tidy and never need to ret-con. But without ret-conning, Superman and Batman would both be close to a hundred years old (assuming they were 20 or 30 at the time of their first appearances) or at least 45 or 55 (assuming they were 20 or 30 at the time of "Crisis n Infinite Earths").

Part of me likes the rich history of the DC Universe. But another part of me would be very interested in seeing the industry stay in real time and just reboot the universe every 20 years or so. Guess that's what things like the Marvel "Ultimate" universe are for.