There’s a lot of reinvention going on in comic books these days in an attempt to keep the medium fresh and broaden its readership. Take for instance the embellishment of the origin of Captain America in Truth: Red, White & Black mini-series that Marvel (between them and DC Comics, they control something like 80% of the comics market) published in the fall of 2002. For those not in the know, and how could this be? Captain America, created by legendary comics artist Jack Kirby and writer Joe Simon, came about in the early days of World War II as our government sought to create a platoon of super-soldiers under the auspices of Operation Rebirth.

As these things go, Dr. Reinstein (an obvious nod to Eienstein), the scientist who created, and only one who knows, this process was only able to transform one candidate -- the sickly, but patriotic 4-Fer Steve Rogers before being assassinated by a nazi agent. As the brilliant man lies dying in the suddenly Triple H-like physique of Rogers, who’s already cold-cocked the axis spy, the lad swears to be the symbol to rally our country.

In the Truth by writer Robert Morales and artist Kyle Baker, the story is the backstory to that day when Steve Rogers becomes Cap. Taking its cue form the cruel and racist Tuskegee Experiments -- wherein uninformed black men were injected with syphilis to study the untreated effects -- this mini-series posits that the then segregated Army beta tested black soldiers, to sometimes horrible results, first in an effort to perfect the formula before trying it out on a white candidate.

Months before the first issue hit the stands, the comics blogsphere or some would wag geekasphere, was abuzz about this take on the character’s universe. "It’s par for the course that when you announce something controversial, the people who come out of the woodwork first are people who have something negative to say," opined Axel Alonso, the editor of the Truth quoted on WhitePrivilage.com, an anti-racist site.

More recently in 2004, the DC mini-series Identity Crisis by best-selling thriller novelist Brad Meltzer and artist Rags Morales (no relation to the other Morales), also garnered much attention (and sales) as it reinvented and subverted relationships among the Big Three, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and a whole host of other heroes of the Justice League of America, the JLA. Essentially a murder mystery, the complex plot is set in motion when someone burns alive in her own home the pregnant Sue Dibny, wife of Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man.

Identity Crisis delved deep into the sometimes contentious relationships among these costumed heroes. The story explored the characters as individuals with often conflicting worldviews and motivations, but united in solving the murder of a colleague. A detective story in which other murders are committed and facilitated, and the revelation of nasty deeds buried in the past forever alters these stalwarts’ futures.

Invincible, an ongoing series created by Robert Kirkman and Corey Walker and drawn, mostly, by Ryan Ottley, and published by the indie Image comics company, reconsiders the tropes of Superman and Spider-Man. Mark Grayson is not quite as nerdy as, at least as he was originally envisioned by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, Peter Parker, aka Spidey. But in that vein he is the typical teenaged senior in high school, Americana U.S.A. Only his old man is a much adored faster than a speeding AK-47 round super-hero. And as Mark matures, his powers of flight, super strength and invulnerability are coming on strong too. He dons a costume and a name, with ideas of joining his dad in his world saving adventures.

Like Superman, Mark’s pops, Omniman, is a black-haired, barrel-chested matinee handsome alien from another world. For a while, it looks like father and son are starting a franchise on super-villain butt-kicking and looking cool in flight formation. Then a group of super-heroes, not unlike the JLA or Marvel’s Avengers, are slaughtered in their HQ by an unseen bloody hand. It’s later in the series that the evildoer is revealed as Mark’s dad.

Unlike Superman who has adopted Earth as his own, Mark’s dad is not an exile from a dead world but has always been on a long-term mission. He is the advance guard and murdered the other heroes to pave the way for an invasion by his fellow Vultrimites, who are super powered like him. This sets the stage for a father and son many-pages battle that only two super strong dudes could have, coupled with more Freudian undertones than a Mamet play.

Recently Bullet Points has come along, another mini-series from Marvel done by TV writer J. Michael Straczynski and illoed by Tommy Lee Edwards. This tale is based on a single incident that like the fabled flutter of a butterfly’s wings, reverbs through time; a biologist named Abraham Erskine is gunned down the day before a fateful day. Erskine, who, as Wikipedia informs, is the retconned "Dr. Reinstein" that Kirby and Simon created in Cap’s first appearance in 1941.

The term refers to the adding of new information to "historical" material, or deliberately changing previously established facts in a work of serial fiction. In the modern Marvel universe, Reinstein is the code name for Emil (or Abraham in this semi-non-continuity mini-series) Erskine.

At any rate, Erskine is asasinated by a bund member named Schuller at a military airfield on his way to mix and admister the super soldier formula. For security reasons, only he knows the recombonent recepie and thus the rail-thin Steve Rogers doesn’t become Cap but undergoes a painful grafting operation to become a ‘40s-era Iron Man. Peter Parker (his Uncle Ben is an MP killed by Schuller when he guns down Erskine) becomes the Hulk and so on. Stracynski is not merely playing musical costumes with the characters, as this has been done before, but composing an alternate reality as he reimagines familiar characters in unfamiliar situations.

Hill and Wang, a prose imprint, recently released the graphic novel bio of Malcolm X with the second book due on Ronald Reagan. Now that’s two different audiences for sure as this is a kind of reinvetion of the Classics Illustrated approach to real historiacal figures.

And so some comics are recasting themselves in an effort ot capture the interests of not just the drooling fanboys inhabitng the Comic Book Guy’s store on the Simpsons. Is all this retconning working? Well walking up to the doors of the Golden Apple comics shop the other day I saw two uniformed LAPD cops strolling out. Maybe they’d come to take a report of some brigand swiping a valued first editon? Nope. One was carting his bag of comics. With their nines bristling on their gun belts, they got back in their black and white and drove away.

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