Retconning My Retconning

I'm trying to get a LOT of ducks in a LOT of rows with the history of Doc Stalwart and his comic series. I keep moving things around and revising (even editing things I wrote three years ago), to get all of the various pieces to line up. For example, I changed the release dates (by about a year) for the Bronze Beacon storyline... because I realized the title of the series, "Raider of the Lost Art(ifacts)" would be a year before Raiders of the Lost Ark was released... so it wouldn't make sense that the creators would have created a pun for a movie that they didn't even know was going to be coming out...

I also moved the "Death of Doc Stalwart" storyline back three years as well (I originally had it around issue 200.. now it's in the 240s), because it didn't make as much sense where I had it. I also had two 'death' storylines in relatively close proximity, and decided to merge them into one. In its place at issue 200, I added the wedding of Doc Stalwart and Augury, since this would have been a big event (and I've never even mentioned who she was or when they got married - and that would be a big event in the comic). I also realized (after paging through my collection of Fantasic Four 21-40 in glorious black and white) that there was a LOT of melodrama and romance in those issues, so having a love story is an important element of borrowing from the source material.

There are a lot of moving parts here... but it's coming together.

The OTHER thing that I really, really like is that I'm linking events together - so when Doc's Secret Lab goes rogue (remote controlled by Simian Prime) and starts flying towards Simian City, Doc has to crash it into the ocean to keep it from falling into Prime's hands... and then it later is found by Lord Lamprey, and Doc has to go fight him in the ruins of his old HQ that is now a submerged wreck. The events in the story influence later events, which I saw as one of the things that gave Byrne's run on FF (my model for all of this really) such a great internal consistency. You never knew when something that happened 20 or 30 issues ago was going to suddenly come up again and matter in a new way.