Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-4548390-20151220053632/@comment-61022-20160314195855

So if there is correlative evidence that suggests that the Skully seen in Weirdworld is the 616 Skully and the flashback he has doesn't fit with his established origin, I would hardly call that "ignoring continuity".

Kind of deflates your selective continuity argument if they are making references to Shock Troop (who appear in a plot from 1993) yet ignoring Skully's origin was first told in 1975. If they were being selective about his origins they wouldn't have mentioned Shock Troop at all, because as far as obscure stories go, nobody is going to remember a Quasar storyline from the 90s. If they are randomly choosing to ignore some of the character's past history, it seems backwards to ignore an origin story and run with a minor storyline.

When I made my original post I wasn't aware that they were establishing him as the Earth-616 Skully. If it is as you say and it's been the 616 Skully the whole time, why is the immediate conclusion that they're retconning his origins? If you look at the Weirdworld story from the context it is told and taking all the other evidence into account, all it looks like is that when Skully is referencing being dumped in Weirdworld, it wasn't not a reinvention of his origins. If Doom was clouding everyone's minds to the true nature of Battleworld, then obviously he's not going to recall anything that happened before. So clearly his past is untouched, he's one of the survivors of the multiverse. He ends up in the Kingdom of Manhattan and gets dumped into Weirdworld. He doesn't remember his past because Doom didn't let anyone really remember their past.

The only thing about Jim Skully that they have intentionally retconned is all reference to him fighting in the Vietnam War, or at least reference to it. And that's a typical Sliding Timescale issue that happens all the time. Instead of Vietnam he just fought in a "conflict in Southeast Asia", which hardly overhauls the origin of the character.

With all due respect this is less a situation to blame a writer for "ignoring continuity" whenever something cannot be readily explained when perhaps being less critical of the people writing the stories and being more observant of the long running narrative is in order.