Love them or hate them retcons have been big part of comic book story telling.
This thread is for discussing your favorite retcons. Let's try not to fall into the trap of discussing the painfully horrible ones.
#1 for me is Hickman's take on SHIELD's history:
A close second is Brubaker's take on Bucky's lethal role during WWII and becoming the Winter Soldier.
Comments
EDIT: Double checked and the story does indeed take place on Earth-616. Bendis also used Da Vinci in New Avengers.
In fact, the Clone Saga gave me my favorite Marvel character of all time, Ben Reilly.
I meant Elektra's first appearance. It basically is an addition to DD's origin story, don't you think? At that point DD had already had some significant relationship history built with the Widow and Karen, but with Elektra's first appearance Miller basically retconned DD's whole romantic past with his first, greatest and most tragic relationship, and that's informed the entire title ever since.
During the 70's Steve Englehart run on Captain America & The Falcon, all of Cap’s appearances in comics during the 1950s we retconned. Rogers was still presumed dead so the US created a new Cap, William Burnside, who became so obsessed with Captain America, he surgically altered his face to look like his idol and legally changed his name to Rogers.
Didn't it bring the Agents of Atlas into the mainstream Marvel 616 timeline? (+ a bunch of other stuff I can't remember right now).
It should... just because it is awesome.
Maybe not the "Greatest" of retcons... but still a fun read.