In general, I try to follow the rule of improv, which is, ‘Don’t negate.’
I will often try to bring my spin to a character, but my goal is very rarely to negate that character’s history. I want to incorporate that stuff. If something genuinely sucks, I usually ignore it, rather than say it didn’t happen.
Exceptions to this are relaunches, where the goal is to try to restart the character without decades of history. But my preference is to keep the character intact.