Retcons, revamps, and revisions.

So, the new Bionic Woman series bowed last night and it’s a pitch-perfect example of how to “mature” up a concept while simultaneously losing what made it fun or interesting in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, the 1970s Bionic Woman is no great shakes: it suffers from lethargic pacing, questionable scripting, and a massive case of villainoftheweekitis, but it’s got charm and wit and a very 70s feminist message that worms its way in while tapping into its core audience’s interests nicely. (That would be, for the record, Lindsay Wagner being very attractive and able to punch people through walls.)

The pilot for the new series grims the entire affair up, adding portions of ER-level melodrama while letting Michelle Ryan exercise her tear duct control. While I do understand the need to show that having three of your limbs and an eye destroyed and replaced with cybernetics isn’t a run-of-the-mill sort of procedure, I quickly tired of the ham-fisted coping and introspection moments and wanted more movement, more something.

The uncomfortable, poorly-shot Matrix-light fight scene wasn’t it, by the way. Not even my fanboyish tendencies in regards to Katee Sackhoff made that interesting Neither was the “Jamie discovers her abilities” sequence, especially the building-leaping that was lifted part-and-parcel from the first Spider-Man movie.

After watching this (and deciding to not bother at all in the future,) I found myself thinking about “mature” superhero revamps, retcons, and retellings that worked versus those that didn’t. Miller’s Batman: Year One and Daredevil: The Man Without Fear both hold up quite well for me, as does Alan Moore’s mid-line redefinition of Swamp Thing and Grant Morrison’s heart-breaking journey on Animal Man. I’ve said before how nicely I thought Ellis’s Iron Man repositioned the character and while I may not be its biggest booster (mostly due to my own preferences when it comes to the character) Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America has been startling in its effectiveness. And really, no discussion of “looking at the original superhero material in a new light” is complete without Marvels, Busiek and Ross’s slightly-metafictional take on Marvel’s Silver and Bronze ages that functions beautifully as its own work or as a supplement to what the readers had seen before.

What hasn’t worked? Probably any iteration of Aquaman where there’s a gimmick of some kind: long hair, beard, hook hand, dead, back from the dead, etc. Morrison made decent use of him in JLA in the 90s, but it still seemed goofy in its grim nature, like a child with a very sharp stick telling you to stay away from his prized Tonka trucks. There’s a way to make Aquaman work, and it’s not by having him growl and act like Namor Jr.

Identity Crisis opened up a can of worms that I still find distasteful, almost three years after the fact, and not just because of the rape. Now, Dr. Light, who certainly is no slouch when it comes to powers, is tied into a single, personal act that is going to get brought up by less competent writers until the end of time, turning something that should be horrifying and monstrous into a cliché, weakening the initial impact and dulling the reader’s senses until they only respond to larger, more horrific acts. Kingdom Come has a lot to answer for, but I’ll just say that my Superman would never give up or think gulags were a great idea and I really wish they’d stop shoehorning Earth 29 or whatever into the “real” DCU.

Failures also include the varied attempts to bring the pulp-style heroes to the modern age: the wretched Green Hornet comics that NOW put out in the 80s and 90s spring to mind, along with DC’s Doc Savage series that went from the affable incompetence of Marvel’s take on the character to out-and-out drop-kicking of the mythos for no reason besides showing that they could do such a thing. The Chaykin-and-company take on The Shadow, however, is the exception that proves the rule: brutal, blackly funny, and spun out of the original material just about perfectly. You can take The Shadow as is, or ignore it entirely and the older stories remain untouched.

So, I guess the revamped Bionic Woman was good for something: 600+ words of rambling! What have been your favorite revamps / remodelings of existing characters? Your least favorite?