By Jonathan Edwards

God this book sucks. So hard. This issue finally touches on the “retcon” premise this book, and it makes something clear. You absolutely have to go into this book knowing the premise for it to make any semblance of sense. Otherwise, you’ll hit the third issue, and the resetting time concept will come completely out of left field (and, not in a good way). But despite all that, the premise also isn’t wholly accurate. Retcon isn’t so much the “reboot of a comic book miniseries that has never existed” as it is the events right before said reboot has always happened in the previous iterations of this universe. Of course, it’s possible that time is meant to always reset to the first panel of the first page of the first issue, but the exposition here suggests it goes back much further than that. And when I say exposition, I mean there’s a lot of it. In fact, Retcon #3 is practically nothing but exposition. Too bad none of it has any emotional impact since it’s trying to make a point of how “different it is this time,” but we never saw any of the previous attempts, so that doesn’t end up meaning much if anything.