So another comic which made its way into my hands because I randomly snagged it off my friend TD’s floor while hanging out at his house was What If …? (vol. 1) #31.
Why did TD have this particular comic? I have no idea. Sadly, I don’t remember as much about me and TD’s conversations about comics as I remember the comics themselves. Maybe we didn’t discuss them all that much! We were only twelve, and although that’s everyone’s personal Golden Age of comics appreciation, said appreciation probably didn’t extend very far beyond “that was cool”. As the years went by, these seminal memories accumulated more and more import in my mind, and I was able to articulate what they meant to me and why. But how that comic wound up in TD’s room I haven’t a clue. Maybe he was a Hulk fan, or a Wolverine fan, or both. Much like the X-Men in general, in 1987 Wolverine was a very popular character and he was steadily building the fanaticism in his fandom every month. Maybe TD just liked the fact that the title of the issue contained the word “KILLED” and thus promised the kind of cartoony violence that any red-blooded tween boy, particularly one with penchants for heavy metal and superhero comics, craved. Maybe it was totally random, because believe it or not that was a thing that happened in the 70s and 80s, before the collector boom, before investment comics, before the cover prices wildly outpaced inflation. Kids just wound up with random comics, impulse buys at the drug store or at rest stops on the way to grandma’s house, or hand-me-downs from older brothers, cousins, uncles, etc. Since this comic was from 1982, that’s entirely likely.
I’m trying to puzzle this out a bit here because What If …? Was an inherently weird, niche series. In all these prior posts I’ve been exalting the virtues of a shared superhero universe with meaningful continuity and the feedback loop between the readers aware of (or constantly exploring and deepening their knowledge of) the history that informs the current storylines, and the writers creating those new stories, built atop the foundations laid down before. Anything goes, up to and including mortal mutants using magic lightning darts to teleport to the far-off realms of the Aesir and fight the God of Mischief, BUT … the one thing a writer can’t do, because a faithful reader will balk at it, is ignore the past, or pretend things went down a different way. That’s the price you pay, that’s the trade-off: you can have freedom from consequences, hitting the reset button at the end of every story, which opens up every storytelling possibility imaginable but leaves everything feeling a bit weightless and inconsequential. (This was basically the model for Superman and Batman comics in the 50’s, for example.) OR, you can accept narrative interconnectedness, which makes everything feel more important and substantial, yet prevents you from violating laws of logic and causality.
Much as the architects of the New U should have, we might then reasonably ask: is this a problem in dire need of a solution? Dire, certainly not, not in the sense of demanding a retooling of the House of Ideas’ entire publishing model. But Stan Lee (allegedly) decided he would address it via a new series, which is how the world got What If …? It was an anthology series, each issue a self-contained story which focused on a different character or team. Existing Marvel characters, I should hasten to add, so it wasn’t a completely disconnected side project. But it was set outside of the proper, main Marvel continuity. It was a place where stories could be told which were otherwise precluded by the overarching narrative logic of Marvel comics, consequences be damned. As the cover way up above indicates, major characters could be killed off, but only for the duration of that issue’s story, while in the “real” series that character kept on having adventures. If a reader really did want the flipside of what Marvel offered, a story where absolutely anything could happen but nothing ultimately mattered, What If …? was the place for that.
That’s the high concept, but there’s a lot more to it. It actually both was and wasn’t connected to Marvel continuity. Like many an anthology series, What If …? had a host/narrator, a cosmic character introduced in the Fantastic Four: the Watcher, who observed all events on Earth but did not interfere. What If …? revealed that the Watcher not only observed the Marvel Earth but infinite parallel Earths where variant realities played out. So if you considered the Marvel Universe to encompass the multiverse of divergent timelines, then as it turns out all the What If …? stories are in continuity after all.
Also, to be honest, ‘anything could happen’ needs to be qualified a little bit. Because by and large (though there were occasional exceptions) the stories in What If …? used the existing Marvel continuity as a jumping off point, the better to leverage their IP and their brand. So the titular questions weren’t going to be anything like “What if the U.S had nuked Germany in World War II?” or “What if the dominant form of life on Earth was gigantic psychic centipedes?” The focus was admittedly more narrow, re-telling tales of the Marvel superheroes but leaning hard into outcomes that wouldn’t have been possible in the main continuity because they were too disruptive of the status quo: teams dissolving, romantic pairings breaking up, character death, even end-of-the world catastrophes. Very cleverly, What If …? continued to reward the faithful readers, because the altered re-tellings had extra resonance if you were already familiar with the original story, and could spot the differences. The feedback loop was still in play. Not to mention, for someone like me who was a second-generation reader coming into the ongoing story two decades on, these What If …? stories served as mini history lessons, as the Watcher’s narration always recapped what had happened in the main continuity before launching into the twist that changed things on a parallel Earth. The series provided an entertaining way to dig a little deeper into the all-important historical continuity.
On top of which, it all served to prop up the grandeur of Marvel continuity overall. Not only did everything that happened in the ongoing series inform every other thing that would happen later, with consequences and repercussions, but through the lens of What If …? certain events were shown to be crucially pivotal. There was a strong for-want-of-a-nail vibe in What If …?, where every premise-establishing question was answered as “well if that had happened, then this would happen next, and because of that, then this would happen” and so on and so on until a seemingly small change had brought about a totally different conclusion.
Confession: I cannot, off the top of my head, remember the plot of the issue of What If …? I read in TD’s room. I do not recall the answer to the question on the cover. Well, except note that there are two questions on the cover, and it was the backup story in that issue that well and truly blew my mind and stuck with me all these years and made me a die-hard What If …? fan for life. “What if the Fantastic Four had never been?” goes back to the very beginning of the Marvel Universe and posits a world where Ben Grimm is just a little too bitter about transforming into the monstrous Thing to willingly join the other three as a superheroing team. In fact, he decides to vent his frustrations on the world in increasingly hostile and violent ways. Reed, Sue and Johnny still don uniforms (with a 3 on the chest rather than a 4, which is a cute touch) and their number one job is to stop the Thing’s rampage. It all comes down to a final showdown in New York City, with the military called in as backup. The military brings along a couple of scientific experts: Tony Stark, who cancelled his trip to East Asia to be there, and Bruce Banner, who misses the first test of the gamma bomb. The battle in New York is epic, disrupting business as usual and generally causing street-clearing panic. As a result, Don Blake can’t get to the airport for his trip to Norway, and Peter Parker bails on going to the radioactivity demonstration downtown. Finally the Fantastic Three deploy some giant gizmo in an effort to neutralize the Thing, but it backfires, and instead it permanently removes Reed’s, Sue’s and Johnny’s powers. Again, this is a backup story, so it goes by quick, yet it still manages to pull off this brilliant bait and switch, where at first you think “the FF had never been” refers to the fact that on this world they were the FT (Fantastic Three) instead and Thing was a bad guy. But by the end, the “never been” is even more profound, because the Three have been depowered. PLUS, did you catch all those cameos? Which totally disrupt the origin stories of those characters, preventing them from going through the events that would generate their own heroic personas? If the Thing had decided to be a bad guy, then not only would the world have no Fantastic Four, it would have no Iron Man, no Hulk, no Spider-Man and no Thor. BOOM.
For all of the reasons I’ve hit on here, I proceeded to seek out a lot of What If …? comics over the years. I eventually bought a Watcher action figure which still stands atop one of my bookcases, and I even own some pop history books which play with real world developments using the “what if” framework, and I doubt I would have been interested in those kinds of mental exercises if comics hadn’t led me there. The trick about that train of consequences, though, was that in the late 80’s What If …? comics were hard to come by. The series only lasted 47 issues and had ended in 1984, so they weren’t available on the newsstand at the convenience store. Next post I will delve a little deeper into how I overcame that particular obstacle.
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