Series Continuity Error / Marvel Universe

Given that there are thousands of comics set in it and hundreds of writers working on it, Marvel Universe is prone to continuity inconsistencies.

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• In an issue of Alpha Flight, speedster Northstar is suffering from a disease since Pestilence, that storyarc's bad guy, kissed him. Problem is, said kiss won't happen until the following issue. (Northstar's illness was originally intended to be AIDS, because, you know all gays have AIDS, and you can get it from a kiss on the forehead).
• In Peter David's Before the Fantastic Four: Reed Richards, the Egyptian Sphinx is briefly possessed and moves around like a living creature. This ignores previous depictions of the Sphinx as the disguised time ship of Kang, who was disguised as Rama-Tut. In an interview, Peter David said he was aware of the previous stories, but chose to focus on his own depiction for the sake of this story.
• The original Contest of Champions (1982) had its plot resolved by the writer forgetting what hero was on what team! The event had 12 heroes seeking four pieces of an item and the team with the most won. It was down to The Grandmaster's team of Sasquatch, Captain America and Blitzkrieg and The Unknown/Death's team of Storm, Shamrock and Collective Man. It's down to Captain America and Shamrock as they find the piece needed. Cap makes the lunge, but Shamrock's luck powers allow her to snatch it for the win for the Grandmaster... but, wasn't it said that Shamrock was part of The Unknown's team? Yes, the writer and editorial didn't spot this gaff and allowed it to be completed as is. If not, it would have been a tie.
• Avengers Disassembled:
  • Doctor Strange states near the climax that "there is no such thing as chaos magic." The good doctor has used chaos magic before. Using the terms from the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG, his Arch-Enemy has been a chaos magic master for going on forty years now. Kind of impressive for magic which doesn't exist, right? Then when Scarlet Witch returned to the team during Uncanny Avengers, her abilities were explicitly described as "Chaos Magic" once again.
  • For that matter, the story ignores that the Scarlet Witch already regained her memories of her children, whereas the story treats it as a recent development as an excuse for her to go crazy.
• When the heroes who were presumed killed by Onslaught returned at the end of Heroes Reborn, She-Hulk and The Inhumans were among those who made the jump back to the normal Marvel Universe—despite She-Hulk not fighting Onslaught and Crystal being the only one of the Inhumans who did.
• Stan Lee wasn't good at remembering names. In some early issues of The Incredible Hulk that he wrote, the protagonist Bruce Banner was suddenly called "Bob Banner". Lee handwaved the error by revealing that his full name is Robert Bruce Banner.
  • This one is better remembered than it should be because subsequent Marvel writers, particularly in the editorial Audience-Alienating Era of the 70s, liked to cite it as a "nobody's perfect" precedent when fan letters called them out on their own heinous continuity errors. Marv Wolfman was probably the worst about this; he pre-emptively invoked it in an editor's note attached to a Dracula comic that he knew was going to tie the timeline of The Tomb of Dracula into a Gordian Knot.
• Marvel's Legion of Monsters vol. 2 by Dennis Hopeless and Juan Doe completely depends on continuity errors for its story to work:
  • The plot hinges on the fact that Morbius was supposedly never bitten before; being bitten by a monster in Monster Metropolis started the spread of the virus that lay dormant in his blood. But he was in fact bitten before, by the vampire Hannibal King, no less.
  • In the flashbacks that take place in 1973 Morbius is shown surprised by the existence of pacifist vampires, but by that time he didn't even believe vampires or the supernatural existed at all, thinking they were fictional. The same goes for Dracula, who the flashbacks show he met.
  • The 1973 flashbacks make it seem Morbius had been a vampire for several years by that point and had been trying to cure himself for a long time, even though he was only introduced a year and a half before (in October 1971). The only way this can be explained is if Morbius became a vampire somewhere in the '60s, but this only further enhances the problem (see the Legion of Monsters entry on the Comic-Book Time page for more explanation on this).
  • Morbius is wrongfully described as "an MD with expertise in supernatural medicine". In a 1986 comic—which takes place later in the continuity—he explicitly says the supernatural remains outside his area of expertise.
• When Legion of X ties into the Judgment Day event, it repeats and expands a scene from X-Men Red (2022), in which the mutant Isca the Unbeaten turns on her allies and decapitates Idyll. Unfortunately, the issue uses the wrong character - instead of Idyll, it kills her grandfather (who has the same name and a similar non-human appearance), a character who's only been seen in historical flashbacks.
• The Marvel 1602 "Fantastick Four" sequel miniseries has Shakespeare get inspired by a lady when she yells "And damned be he who first cries 'hold, enow!'", causing him to start looking for a pen, and culminating in her forming a relationship with Shakespeare and writing his plays for him. All well and good as history goes in these comics, given that in the continuity in question continental North America is overrun by dinosaurs, but it does have one minor problem. The line in question had already been written into Macbeth in-universe. In fact, it was one of the first lines spoken in the series.
• Chelsea Cain's Mockingbird retcons the eponymous character's origin to have her obsessively try to get herself powers as a kid, including trying to mimic Spider-Man's spider bite origin. Ignoring the fact that Spider-Man's origins are usually not public knowledge, this goes against the fact that Spider-Man has been established to have only been working as a hero in-universe for 15 years, and thus could only be a known figure when Bobbi was in her mid-teens, at the earliest. In fact, she would be his age or even a couple of years older. It becomes even more complicated when the two are the same age, and even briefly date. This creates a scenario where a child Bobbi is trying to copy a hero that didn't even exist yet.
• Spider-Man:
  • Peter Parker's middle name has been repeatedly stated as "Benjamin", after his uncle. However, one comic short story co-written by Stan Lee himself has Mary Jane call him "Peter Q. Parker". Peter was also Peter Palmer in at least one early comic.
  • Untold Tales of Spider-Man: In the final issue of Untold Tales of Spider-Man #25, Liz Allan and Flash Thompson are at Empire State University as part of Midtown High's week-long visit to colleges around the city. It implied that the two of them are still friends and keep in contact even those they will not go to the same college. In Amazing Spider-Man #28, Liz cut Flash and all their other friends out of her life because she was ashamed of the person she was in high school, a ditzy blonde, and plan to move on with her life.
  • Spider-Gwen: Gwenverse: In addition to ignoring much of the aftermath of the character's previous solo run, Ghost-Spider (2019), the mini series gives an alternate origin of the band that Gwen is the drummer for, "The Mary Janes". Previous runs would suggest the timeline of Mary Jane wanting to form a band with Gwen in middle school, but Gwen's apathy to the idea at the time leading to it not happening until MJ met Glory Grant in high school, in part explaining why MJ views Gwen as a neglectful friend. Gwenverse would change this around in the first issue by having Mary Jane claim that Gwen was the attention seeker who wanted to start a band; Gwen later confirms this to be the case in her own narration the following issue, explaining that she ended up being too shy to actually take the spotlight and pushed MJ into becoming the frontman.
• Ultimate Fantastic Four
  • The very first story arc established Reed and Sue as 21 years old when they first became superheroes. Later issues would inexplicably claim they were no older than 18 at the present.
  • The Maker/Reed Richards shows to Falcon how he keeps his intellect always a few steps ahead of The Children by elongating his brain. That shouldn't be possible or even necessary. To elaborate: in the first run of the series, Sue ran some tests on Reed and found out that his organism was completely mutated; he became a worm-like being with just a core, no organs other than that. And later, Sue's mother remarked that Reed was getting smarter by the minute due his mutation. So in the span of a thousand years Reed would be evolving his genius naturally, and there would be no brain for him to elongate. Perhaps he still retains at least a physical brain of some sort and the helmet makes the process of becoming getting smarter more efficient and guided rather than random?
• In issue #5 of Ultimate X-Men (2001), imagery of The Holocaust is shown alongside Magneto's speech about the genocides and wars humanity has caused, in which he claims his entire family was killed in a genocide. On the other hand, issue #26 depicts a flashback with him mentioning his wealthy American family, with whom he is no longer in touch. Then in Ultimate Origins, it's shown that neither applies: Ultimate Magneto is the son of two Canadian Weapon X agents, both of whose deaths he caused, and was a young man in the '80s to boot.
• The Ultimates: In the first volume, Thor mentions fighting Loki. However, Volume 2 and Ultimate Comics: Thor show that Loki had long been imprisoned in the Room with No Doors and only just escaped in Ultimates 2. This implies that Thor was joking with Nick Fury.
• Uncanny X-Force:
  • The opening page describes Psylocke at age 16, living alone, broke, modeling and nearly going insane when her powers activate. Problem is, Betsy comes from a privileged upbringing, she was an adult charter pilot when her powers began to develop, she wasn't traumatized by them, and oh yeah, she wasn't Asian.
    • This may have been an intentional Retcon to try to do a Canon Discontinuity on the awkwardness of Psylocke being one of Marvel's most prominent ethnically Japanese characters when she was originally white and changed ethnicity due to a body swap.
  • Later in the issue, Storm asks Psylocke if she thinks Bishop is capable of killing a little girl. Literally the last time the X-Men saw him, Bishop had murdered a team of Sentinel pilots, thrown the Sentinels at a group of mutant students, and put a bullet in Professor Xavier's head, all to murder an infant girl. And when that didn't work he seeded the planet with nuclear weapons that are still set to cause an apocalypse in about fifty years' time. However, Psylocke reminds her immediately that he tried to do it before.
• Wolverine: The Sabretooth that died in Wolverine 2003 #55 was a clone, and the real Sabretooth was in hiding. So what was the deal with Wolverine Goes to Hell, where Wolverine beheads Sabretooth's soul and leaves it unable to return to the living?
  • Clones of Sabretooth tend to have their Healing Factor go haywire, hence Mr Sinister not cloning Sabretooth along with the rest of the Marauders. Romulus creates several clones of Sabretooth without mentioning this cloning problem, and we don't know how long they can stay alive.
• X-Men
  • In the final issue of The Dark Phoenix Saga while performing a reverse of their usual Fastball Special on Colossus, Wolverine tells him to put down Phoenix for good, to which Colossus thinks that killing "is something I have never done before." However the arc immediately preceding the saga had Colossus be the one to kill Moira MacTaggert's insane Reality Warper son Proteus^note Though Proteus later turned out to have survived, both readers and the X-Men themselves had no reason to believe otherwise at the time.
  • In X-Men #21, Kwannon, or Revanche, returns in Psylocke's original body, claiming to be the true Elizabeth Braddock, however, Beast and Psylocke refer to her as Revanche before she's introduced herself. Could be handwaved as psychic prescience, but there's no explanation presented in the story.
  • In Uncanny X-Men #178, X-Men #93, and Rogue vol 3, flashbacks show Rogue leaving her family and living with Mystique. While living together, Rogue and Mystique make physical contact, implying her powers had not yet manifested. X-Men Unlimited #4 shows Rogue leaving her family because of her powers activating, sending a boy into a coma, which doesn't explain why she can physically contact Mystique later. In addition, this issue shows the Mississippi River having waterfalls, which are not shown to exist in any other story.
  • Onslaught reveals the X-traitor message that motivated Bishop to travel to the past was created from Professor Xavier becoming Onslaught, however, the wording of the message is different from the original story in order to make the reveal more plausible.
  • The Twelve revisits the The Twelve storyline introduced in X-Factor, but the list of twelve mutants differs from the original story. Possibly handwaved as the Master Mold malfunctioning.
• X-Men and Excalibur claim Mojo and Rachel Summers are unique beings in the multiverse with no alternate counterparts, though there are stories with alternate versions of Mojo and Rachel Summers.