Turns out there's another Cassian Andor who was actually born on Fest and this comic is about how he met K-2SO.
This thread came out of the cemetery. Several of the posters on this very page probably haven't posted for years.
This comic being potentially retconned is the most interesting thing about it, and honestly I don't find that particularly interesting either, yet it will likely be immortalized forever in the lexicon of the side of the fandom that obsessively tallies every retcon since the buyout and damn well will make sure you too remember. What an odd fandom culture we have developed in the past decade or so where the existence of a retcon is more interesting for the fandom than the actual stories being retconned or doing the retconning. I cared about the Kanan retcons because I cared about the Kanan comics, yet in my experience most of the people talking about the retcons seem to have not read it at all, and that's a rather consistent pattern.
Ahahah yah I will admit I'm not too sussed about it but even when she show was announced I was like "Yep, that comic is going away." I could only search for it because it's the only thing released that has "Cassain" in the title! Like I said, from another poster years ago, it can just be seen as a byproduct of the reprogramming
Honestly most people making a big deal of it were probably just reacting to a YouTube video they watched.
I don't even remember the context of this comic issue. I just remember not thinking it was very interesting.
Just dropping my own two cents. Basically just repeating what I said in the One Canon thread. Spoiler My theory? Cassian recovered K-2S0 from Ghorman, reprogrammed him, then lost him and had to recover him a second time. That's my retcon.
Spoiler I've been wondering when the "live action retconned a comic book, tiers are back!!!" outrage would drop. Or maybe that's just reserved for when Filoni does it? Anyway, the "based on a true story" paradigm makes pretty short work of this as it does with most apparent discrepancies. As was Cassian's past on Fest, one story or another is simply apocryphal. Perhaps Cassian decided it wasn't a great idea to spread around the fact that he was on Ghorman during the massacre and created the Wecacoe story to explain K2's origin. Or perhaps the Wecacoe story is the true one, with Andor showing us a "revisionist" version of the tale. (At least one reference book I've found, Ultimate Star Wars New Edition, directly references the Wecacoe tale, while the Rogue One Ultimate Visual Guide references it indirectly by stating that Cassian did the reprogramming himself. Of course, they both also mention Fest...) Alternately, it's trivially easy to make both stories true - the droid we see reprogrammed at the end of "Welcome to the Rebellion" isn't "our" K2, but a different KX droid. Cassian later puts to use what he learned from the droid programmer on Yavin when reprogramming K2 later on Wecacoe. Future material might not allow for that interpretation, but it works fine for now.
Technically, the episode never called the droid he recovered K2, did it? Maybe a personality component from the one in the comic was used to finish reprogramming the one in the show, and the comic one got borked offscreen? I'm not losing any sleep over this one. Clearly Lucasfilm never stopped using the canon tiers behind the scenes.
While that is true they also have gone out of their way to connect to other forms of publishing (Dark Disciple for instance) so it really is a case by case basis. But yes the tiers never went away and the whole everything is equal really is just a marketing line.
Spoiler As contradictions go, it's not enormous; the fact that we'll time jump before the final three episodes makes it easier to smooth over. I would imagine the retcon back in the day would have been: "After K-2SO's successful reactivation following his retrieval at Ghorman, Andor and General Draven sent the droid ahead to infiltrate what was expected to be a middling Imperial force on Wecacoe. K-2 was to stage an arrest of Andor as cover while two rebel agents hacked into the guts of a decommissioned Imperial warship in hopes of retrieving Imperial security protocols. The droid found that the Empire had a stronger presence on Wecacoe than expected, however. Thanks to a security update initiated by his base layer of Imperial programming, the droid reverted to arrest mode, causing trouble for Andor when he arrived. In order to avoid being detained, the team were forced to partially memory wipe K-2 and flee before completing their mission. During their escape, Andor was able to cordon off K-2's base Imperial programming. The mission proved to be a fruitful reintroduction for the pair as the update included the Imperial security protocol they had wanted to retrieve in the first place."