Thread:Arise Etrigan/@comment-1257201-20161212005625

I noticed that you are making edits to character pages to remove out-of-universe material (e.g., ). Thanks for doing this!

Two questions. First, I agree that it's good to remove things like "During the events of Crisis of Conscience", but I was thinking that when you do this, you could add a reference footnote (either to the arc, or better, to the issue number) in which this took place. Otherwise valuable information could be lost. I often find the bio pages lead me to interesting stories I want to read, and then I get frustrated when the bio doesn't tell me which issues each event occurred in.

(My apologies if you are doing this already! I have only read your Catwoman edits, not all of your page edits.)

Second, if OOU material is removed, how are retcons dealt with? On the Catwoman page, it states as a "fact" that "Selina started out as a prostitute". This was true in 1986-1994 continuity, but it was no longer true after Zero Hour (as shown in "Catwoman: Year One" and as stated by Denny O'Neill at conventions). At the end of the paragraph, you do have a sentence explaining this in "in-universe" style. But I'm wondering if a retcon, by its nature, needs to be discussed in out-of-universe style? Year One didn't just erase her history as a prostitute: it replaced it with an (implausible) story in which Selina posed as a prostitute, carefully preserving all the scenes of Selina in Batman: Year One while erasing large chunks of the 1989 Catwoman miniseries from continuity entirely. I think that an explanation of this retcon would require OOU material. Thoughts?

(To make things more complicated, it's possible that by the mid-2000s the writers of the Catwoman books had reinstated her prostitute history. I read almost none of Catwoman Vol 3, so I have no idea.) 