The DCnU panel at the 2011 San Diego Comic Con. Image Source: Grizzly Bomb.
I've already commented on DCnU in terms of the demographics of anticipated readers here, and comics archetypes here. DCnU also reveals a disturbing, and very Millennial, treatment of history and time. The Internet has completely transformed our understanding of both. This is because computer systems allow any historical source to be ripped out of context and juxtaposed with something that popped up yesterday. Even before the Tech Revolution, the idea grew in the 20th century.
The most
famous use of real life retcons is in Stalinist-era USSR, when apparatchiks who fell out of favour were erased from photographs, which I have blogged about
here. It was used in South America in the 1970s, when political dissidents
'disappeared' and their identities were wiped off the face of the earth, as though they had never existed. In
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell had his protagonist employed in rewriting old newspaper articles to erase records of people later deemed undesirable by the state. This critique of oligarchical collectivism spawned his famous
INGSOC line:
"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
Now, I'm
not saying that the core messages in DC's fictions have anything in common with murderous dictatorships. Rather, I am suggesting that the use and abuse of history has become widespread across cultures and political spectrums in the 20th and 21st centuries. It used to be that the past was sacred. What had been done could not be undone. It could be reinterpreted by historians, but only within reason and in well-sourced and well-defended arguments. Given Orwell's communist critiques, it's tempting to put a political spin on this - socialists call for revolutions, liberals like change, conservatives cling to the past. But the dangerous Postmodern notion that rewriting or erasing history brings money and power is seductive to all who seek them.
