Reimagining the Artifact in Comic Books.
The following have their own pages:
Other Comics
Grant Morrison
Grant Morrison loves doing this.
- In their JLA run, Morrison brought back such goofy stuff as Aquaman's Silver Age imp sidekick Quisp in a way that fit the tone of the new title.
- Seven Soldiers was a project whose entire remit was to take dated or underused old characters and re-imagine them for today.
- All-Star Superman is almost nothing but Reimagining Artifacts from the 1960s and 1950s stories.
- Batman (Grant Morrison) has a bunch of these, as part of their quest to make everything canon.
- Morrison's unconventional take on Robin with the character of Damian Wayne deserves special mention. Where many fans have previously taken the very concept of a Kid Sidekick with a grain of salt (see above) because of the obvious dangers of the superhero profession, Damian shook up the classic Batman/Robin dynamic in that he was a scarily competent fighter who was raised as an assassin from an early age, and he could be even more deadly in the field than Dick Grayson, who served as the Batman to his Robin.
- Morrison also brought back Bat-Mite, who was a thoroughly Silver Age thing that wasn't used beyond that point if not in some kind of Mxyzptlk story or something. Morrison reimagined him as the drug-fueled guide to Batman on his journey in "Batman R.I.P." However, it's also played with in classic Morrison fashion when Batman actually asks Bat-Mite if he legitimately is an imp from the 5th dimension or just a figment of his imagination. Bat-Mite answers him by saying that the 5th Dimension is imagination; given their strange behavior and power, he may be telling the truth here (and future content seems to confirm it.)
- The Club of Heroes that Batman belonged to is reimagined as a kind of parody of the Legion of Super-Heroes; they were formed by a bored billionaire who wanted a club of heroes of his own, and Batman never even showed up to their first official meeting, and the club disbanded after that. The Bat-Man of Zur-En-Arrh, in the same arc, goes from an alien named Tlano who weras a gaudy red, purple and yellow Batsuit and lives on a planet where humans get Superman's powers to a backup personality Bruce Wayne has in case of psychological attack, with the loud outfit demonstrating the confidence that Zur-En-Arrh has. The name is also changed to a corruption of Thomas Wayne's last words.
- On a more general note, Batman's aversion for alcohol, at least as far as The Silver Age of Comic Books had it, was originally part of his goody-two shoes personality. Now, it is part of his fear of losing his physical and mental edge if he drinks, so he has good reason to prefer milk.
Other Writers
- Jughead from Archie Comics wears a whoopee cap
on his head: a type of hat made from a fedora turned inside-out with the brim cut into a crown shape. It was an actual fashion in the 1940s amongst young boys, and was meant to signify Jughead being immature for his age, but fell out of style and the significance was lost. Later readers were more likely to assume it was something like a Burger King crown, especially with the comic's more stylised art. The 2015 reboot introduced a new meaning behind the hat: Jughead was a wealthy boy who wore a fedora until his parents lost their money due to being swindled by a water bottle company, after which he cut up his hat into the familiar whoopee cap. - Don Rosa did tons of this in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
- IDW's Transformers works do this frequently, reimagining old gimmicks from the franchise's early years.
- Combiners are treated as a Fantastic Nuke, with the Autobots having to pull out of Earth when the original combiner is abducted by the Decepticons, who naturally want their own.
- Micromasters are an attempt by the villains to re-create Cybertron on another world, and aside from being smaller and more energy-efficient they are incredibly manoeuvrable, agile, and numerous, what with there being a whole planet of them.
- Headmasters are the result of several thousand years worth of tinkering and stealing by their creator, and the final result is much more efficient and deadly than the average Cybertronian.
- The first Pretender managed to ravage Cybertron, and all the ones after are still portrayed as powerhouses and credible threats, resistant to things that would normally be serious threats to a Transformer.
- The Dinobots choose their out-of-place alternate modes in order to survive on a prehistoric Earth where the conditions are hazardous to them without protection(borrowing the concept from Beast Wars), and quickly become attached. Their designs are also reimagined to look more like real dinosaurs, complete with scale alterations as needed (meaning the member who turns into a brachiosaurus is now head and shoulders over everyone else).
- Action Masters, the Transformers that didn't transform at all, are Cybertronians who have renounced transforming for religious reasons, even having the mechanisms needed to transform removed surgically, for which they have faced a lot of prejudice, including at one point being the instant suspects in a terrorism case.
- The existence of Cyber Cyclops characters in a race of sentient machines is horrifyingly explained as a form of punitive mutilation called "Empurata" where their faces were removed and their hands chopped off, and they were left with just a singular optic and unwieldy claws. Because it was only supposed to happen to criminals, they were publicly humiliated and shamed for speaking against the corrupt government, while also shoving them straight into the Uncanny Valley from a Cybertronian perspective.
- Titans like Metroplex and Fortress Maximus are not just really really big Transformers who turn into cities, but are inexplicable relics from an ancient age who served the founders of Cybertronian society, and are considered borderline divine/mystical beings.
- Those who have extra "superpowers" like Skywarp's ability to teleport, Soundwave's psychic powers, or Trailbreaker's forcefield generation aren't just built that way; they are "outliers", essentially the Cybertronian equivalent to Marvel's X-Men, born with these abilities for unknown reasons.
- Similarly, the incredible strength and resilience of the likes of Optimus Prime, Megatron, or Grimlock are explained as them being "Point-one percenters", extremely rare sea-green sparks that when implanted inside a body, supercharge them.
- With the Revolution mini-series establishing the Hasbro Comic Universe, they've done things to some of the other franchises- ie. M.A.S.K. is a sub-division of G.I. Joe (which in turn is now a division of the Earth Defense Command, from the G1 Transformer cartoon) designed to combat the Cybertronians, rather than just a team of good guys taking on bad guys (VENOM being led by the breakaway Miles "Mayhem" Mannheim, who had earlier been in charge of MASK, and prior to that was the "Sea Adventurer" in Joe Colton's Adventure Team).
- The Decepticons' name in the IDW continuity wasn't, at least originally, an open proclamation that they were the bad guys; it was because their rallying cry, back when they were rebelling against the corrupt Senate and the repressive Functionist caste system, was "You are being deceived".
- Whereas in the reboot Transformers (2019), it is an open proclamation that they're the bad guys. Previously known as the Ascenticons, one of several political parties on Cybertron, they used a variety of shady and underhanded means to grow in influence. The term "Decepticon" was first used as an insult by Sentinel Prime condemning their methods, but when Megatron launched a surprise coup, he turned it into an Appropriated Appellation to rub it in the Autobots' and the Senate's faces that he was able to keep them in the dark for so long about his real ambitions.
- The Shadow Hero is a Revival of the little-known 1940s superhero the Green Turtle, and provides in-canon explanations for many of the more peculiar aspects of the character, such as his unnaturally pink skin, Stripperiffic costume, and curious turtle-shaped Living Shadow.
- Bebop and Rocksteady were created for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) to serve as Shredder's Dumb Muscle, and with the show being comedic and primarily aimed at kids, they were soon Flanderized into being so dumb that they were barely functional and the Turtles outwitted them at every turn, making you wonder why Shredder kept them around for so long; other continuities tended to ignore them as a result. Then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW) came along and had them just dumb enough to serve as Comedic Relief Characters while playing up their Super-Strength to the point where they are almost impossible to defeat.
