Retconning Sexuality vs New Characters
One of the usual comments whenever a comic character comes out is “But why don’t they just make new LGBT characters instead of changing old ones” and figured I’d kind of explain why, at least, I support changing old characters.
(For this discussion I’m going to use Marvel examples because I spent hours doing the pictures for Marvel and don’t want to spend time doing DC too).
The overarching reasons essentially come down to this: Comic characters ride on their old popularity more than people seem to think. And it needs to be acknowledged the role nostalgia plays in comic sales. If it didn’t Marvel wouldn’t go to great lengths to keep bringing back dead characters from the silver age to the 90s, create a timescale specifically to avoid aging their characters, or continually hearken back to old events regularly. DC wouldn’t force Batman into every book under the sun because he has the name recognition.
For every new character that succeeds, such as Kamala or Miles, dozens disappear into the annals of small Marvel wikia pages. And even those, most really build upon legacies of those mainline heroes.
With that acknowledgement also comes the problem - most of these characters are white, heterosexual, Christian (and occasionally Jewish). And have been for decades upon decades. Over the past twenty years, there has been a lot of work done to try and rectify this and have even a semblance of representation for the various groups that read comics.
Someone on Reddit put it best “Marvel/DC are fundamentally about fanfics of fanfics of fanfics”. And like fanfic writers, they are constantly making changes to keep up with the audience. A lot of comic stories are very outdated, and writers update them.
We see this in all aspects of characters, not just their sexual orientation and race. If Reed Richard’s was written like Stan Lee wrote him, accusations of sexism would be commonplace. Deadpool was basically Slade Wilson, but Marvel, until a new writer came along and changed his personality. The X-men are going through a dramatic shift, a rejuvenation, as they are reinvented after years of being shit on. Cates has recently retconned tons of Symbiote lore and his run is great.
Comic characters are constantly being reinvented to keep stories fresh and interesting to the audience. The difference for what is a central aspect of a character and “forcing change” is time. Northstar wasn’t always gay. He wasn’t allowed to be gay, no character was at Marvel for a long time. He was retconned. Rictor was retconned. Shatterstar was retconned.
These are some of the oldest, most high profile gay characters at Marvel. And they were retcons. But since it has been some time since the retcons (Northstar now 30 years), they are just parts of the characters.
I want to use a visual. This is art by the wonder Luciano Vecchio. It's fanart, but it’ll serve the purpose of an example. It's not a complete drawing of every LGBT character in marvel, but it has enough to illustrate the point.
Now I’m going to grey out all the character’s that weren’t originally gay. This means, the characters that either weren’t allowed to be gay (because of Marvel editorials), or were reinvented as LGBT by later writers. You’ll notice immediately how so many of the big recognizable LGBT characters are greyed out. Deadpool, Valkyrie, MAC, Loki, Rictor & Shatterstar, Northstar, Moondragon, etc. Even poor little Tong was retconned in by Fraction. Nor was Karma established as a lesbian for many years after her debut. Mystique and Destiny, despite having subtext, were only confirmed to be lovers in 2019.
Now I’m going to take out the alternate universe versions and “implied characters” (aka, characters that were implied to be LGBT but not confirmed till much later). Herc is gone (despite being historically bisexual, Marvel insists he is straight in 616), Jessica Drew is gone, Colossus (who is hard to see), is also gone. Daken is really the big “implied” character. Despite kissing a man in his initial run as part of a ploy (and then killing him), Daken’s sexuality wasn’t more explicit for several years until Dark Wolverine, and wasn’t confirmed until 2011.
Next I’m going to illustrate the “new character” problem. I’m going to grey out all the characters that have less than 40 main appearances. Why 40? It is arbitrary, but the idea is that its enough appearances that means the character has probably been used by multiple writers (though not always the case, such as Vivsector who was basically used almost exclusively by Peter Milligan).
And you see that almost all the characters are now grey. Even this list of 15 characters (Billy, Teddy, Karolina, Bling, Morph, Phylla Vell, POD, Toni Ho, Angela, Anole, Victoria Hand, Graymalkin, Vivsector, Striker and Doop) come with their own caveats.
Striker, despite meeting the threshold, hasn’t made an actual comic appearance in 5 years, and almost all his appearances were in Avengers Academy (with cameos in other series like Young Avengers). Doop is a complete joke character. Victoria Hand was a Dark Reign character that died 8 years ago and will likely never return. Angela, if you count her real-world circumstances with spawn, is technically a retcon. Even Anole, who has the most appearances of any LGBT character that started LGBTA, has basically been a cameo in recent years.
And this is the inherent problem with the “well just make new characters”. They have. Several times. What happens to the majority of them is that the second the writer is done with them, they are tossed aside. Why?
Because they don’t have the history to propel them forward. The history that Marvel and DC have based their entire business model around.
