The Road Not Travelled: Let's Read Marvels WHAT IF...

[Octopus Prime]

On the one hand, I’m delighted with the synergy that we get a Spider-Man story just immediately before a new Spider-Man movie hits theatres, but since about a third of this series has been about Spidey, it’s not exactly like we were playing the long odds on that happening.

Uatu ain’t wasting time with the preamble this time, and it’s not a particularly lore-dense story he’s establishing either (which is pretty ironic, given a long enough view of history); back in the 70s one of Spideys More enduring C-list villains The Jackal (who I was surprised to learn back then was A Guy with Claws, and not a Furry Green Goblin like he is now) was a genius at genetic engineering and cloning, and particularly obsessed with Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy; and wound up cloning both of them in order to A) Kill Spider-Man and B) Marry Gwen.

Even setting aside that as a clone she was only days old, she was, like, 18 years old and he was in his forties so eww.

Anyway, Spidey hears about this, doesn’t like the idea of being cloned, or his dead girlfriend being cloned and then marrying a middle aged guy and a fight happens; Peter wins and the clone dies (neither of them were bad guys, but assumed each other was an evil clone because they live in Comic Books) Jackal sacrifices his life to save Clone Gwen who heck’s out of New York because trauma, and that’s the last anyone heard about Spider-Man having a clone.

Buuuuuut, as Uatu says, the two Peter Parker’s were pretty evenly matched, and it was more a fluke than skill that lead to G1 Peter winning; so What if Not That?

To the books credit, it does do a good job of keeping the events here kind of ambiguous as to which Peter Parker actually won the fight. It also tries to keep that mystery going a lot longer than it needed to; well after the readers would have pieces it together themselves so it makes Peter look like a complete idiot; but he had a stressful day, so we can let that slide.

In any case; the fight resolved in largely the same way; with the Jackal dying and Clone Gwen leaving town, but in this timeline Spidey doesn’t toss his unconscious twin into a smokestack in order to cremate him (I’m pretty sure smokestacks aren’t hospitable, but I don’t think you can dispose of bodies in them); he locks him into a Cryogenic Suspension tube, but not before noticing that the second Peter is a few years older and a bit bulkier than he is. And assumes that Jackal just made a very slightly more grizzled and beefy Spider Man in order to give him an edge.

Then he leaves the warehouse so Aunt May wouldn’t worry about him.

And wouldn’t you know it? Aunt Mays house is empty (but, oddly, still partly furnished), which confuses and frightens Pete, but not so much he can’t get a good nights sleep in an old recliner.

The next day, Pete heads to work and is surprised to find that he’s apparently good enough friends with the assistant editor of the Daily Bugle to call him by his first name, that Betty Brant has apparently been married to Ned Leeds for a few years. At school he’s suddenly shot forward a few years and people he’d always avoided like Liz Allen and Flash Thompson consider him to be a good friend. And he’s being hassled by villains he’s never heard of, like The Kingpin.

J. Jonah Jameson is more the same than ever.

Now, by this point, you might assume “aha!, it was the clone Spider-Man who won the battle and replaced Spider-Man classic, and therefor he has no memories of the last few years of Spideys life.”

You would think this because you’re quicker on the uptake than Peter Parker; who is working under the impression he got his bell rung a bit too hard fighting his clone and when Jackals lab exploded, and he has selective amnesia.

So Pete tries to jog his memory by looking through a box of mementos of Gwen Stacy and her untimely death (coming to the conclusion that he must have liked her more than he suspected) and failing to fully convince anyone he doesn’t have amnesia, and also still being menaced by The Kingpin.

Not counting the genuinely excellent art, the Kingpin stuff is easily the highlight of the issue; Clone Spidey has *absolutely no idea* who this guy is, and Kingpin has no idea why Spider-Man isn’t trying to fight or arrest him or anything.

Eventually, gradually, and in the grand fullness of time, Pete begins to suspect he might not have amnesia and goes to the ruins of the Jackals lab, where he finds the doctors notes about his breakthroughs in rapid cloning, realizes that he has no memories from when after the (not yet evil) Miles Warren took a blood sample from him and puts 2 and 2 together to realize he is the clone; and he flash-froze the original Spider-Man!

So Clone Pete heads back to the freezer to thaw out G1 Pete, briefly considers letting him die so that he’d be the only Spider-Man and then decides against it (proving Clone Pete has a better moral compass than the original) and fills him in on the situation, apologizes for freezing him solid and then asks why a very heavy looking mafioso guy hates him so much.

G1 Pete says “Oh that’s the Kingpin; he’s a gangster and hates me”. And the two of them head off to beat him up together.

I want to stress that while he’s done a lot of terrible things over the years; Kingpin hasn’t done anything wrong in this issue. A few attempts on Spider-Man’s life, sure but that’s kind of part and parcel with their relationship. Fisk just told Spider-Man to go to Coney Island so they can fight and for no damn reason whatsoever, both Spider-Men agree to do just that.

They only have one costume between them, so G1 Pete fights the Kingpin while Clone Pete fights all the gangsters in his civvies (it was generally assumed that Spider-Man and Peter have a working relationship but aren’t the same person).

Pete and Pete realize they make a pretty good team when fighting alongside one another, and having additional Spider-Men around would really help with his just absolutely terrible work/life balance that’s been a problem for the entire run of his existence; and they decide to partner up.

There are no problems to having Spider-Man clones around!

Oh and there’s an Inhumans back up story again; Blackbolt decides to move his whole damn country into a hole in the ground with Kirby-tech helicopters because a little girl didn’t want to build a new city in an existing hole in the ground.

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!
Hmm…

Doesn’t ring a bell, no. I think that Gwen Stacy clone comes back as a vampire or something.

NEXT TIME:
He did the best he could at what he did!

 

[Jeanie]

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!
Hmm…

Doesn’t ring a bell, no. I think that Gwen Stacy clone comes back as a vampire or something.

I thought it was as a symbiote or something goofy like that.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Reasonably sure that Ultimate Gwen Stacy died and came back as Carnage,and Present Day Gwen Stacy has her universes version of Venom, but I think Clone Gwen Stacy became Carrion?

 

[Olli]

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!
Hmm…

Doesn’t ring a bell, no. I think that Gwen Stacy clone comes back as a vampire or something.

I'm not sure if you're joking here, but there have been at least a couple of Jackal-created Peter Parker clones in canon, including one going under Ben Reilly and another as Kaine Parker. Ben eventually took the moniker Scarlet Spider, although he's been filling in as official brand Spidey too. Kaine's been more evil, probably because they gave him an Evil Name, but I think he's swinging between heroism and villainy.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I was one hundred percent joking

 

[Felicia]

To the books credit, it does do a good job of keeping the events here kind of ambiguous as to which Peter Parker actually won the fight. It also tries to keep that mystery going a lot longer than it needed to;

Yup, that sounds familiar.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I’m just completely blanking on any similarity this story has to any future Spider-Man lore

 

[Adrenaline]

The joke is that the 90s clone saga is one of the most infamous comic book stories of all time

 

[Beta Metroid]

Reading through '70s Amazing Spider-Man, it was kind of surprising how significant the Jackal was, frequently being the schemer behind other villains' actions. When the Green Goblin was dead, Jackal had a claim to being a top-three Spidey villain.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Probably not a coincidence that they wound up looking alike too

 

[Octopus Prime]

Written by Rich Margoopolis
Art By Bud Budiansky
Inks by Mike Esposito

Well, not gonna lie here folks, the title story is one of the weaker What Ifs we’ve had so far. It’s also a story where the inciting What If event seems completely divorced from the consequences; but I guess “What if Wolverine Killed the Hulk” is a better tagline than “What if Wolverine Accidentally Killed Some Random Guy”.

It’s also the first story where changes from the 616 aren’t just spun off from one story, and it’s a completely irreconcilable timeline. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back in the 70s, the Hulk travelled to Canada and fought a big werewolf-man called Wendigo. And, because Marvels Canada has a… surprisingly advanced and vicious response prepared for superhero shenanigans, the news that there are TWO unstoppable rage-monsters at large gives Pierre Trudeau all the clearance he needs to release Canadas greatest weapon against them; Codename WEAPON X: The Wolverine! Wolverine is short tempered and scrappy, but he realizes that of the two monsters, it's the big furry guy who eats people that's the actual problem, and he teams up with Hulk to stop it. They start to scuffle a bit, but eventually Hulk wanders off because Hulk just wants to be left alone, and Wolverine would eventually get drafted into the X-Men, where he had a career of intense popularity and became a surrogate father to just about every female teenage hero the team ever associated with.

BUUUUUUUT, What If Wolverine didn't want to call the fight a draw and he just hacked Hulks noggin' clean off because his dander was up?

Well... Hulk died is what would have happened.

These leads to a brief scene of superheroes all over the world mourning the loss of their friend; the nuclear rage monster they tried to beat up or imprison every time he showed his head and... is then never mentioned again for the duration of this story.

A few weeks later, Wolverine is enjoying a day off in a bar, as is custom for him, and he gets into a brawl, and winds up forgetting that he has claws and winds up stabbing a guy entirely to death by accident. It's kind of like when you're looking everywhere for your glasses and don't realize you're wearing them.

Realizing he's in actual trouble for totally killing the hell out of someone, Logan goes to his commanding officer, and the leader of Alpha Flight Mac Hudson (also known as the Canadian Iron Man! Guardian! Or Vindicator! Or Major Maple-Leaf! I think a couple of those are jokes!), who informs him that there's a pretty big difference between dispatching an enemy combatant during a clandestine military operation and... stabbing a yokel in a bar, and there's nothing he can do.

Wolverine responds with dignity and grace;

Or like he was just told he couldn't get a puppy for Christmas even though he promised to take care of it.

Anyway, Wolverine doesn't get ten feet outside the secret Department H compound before he's scooped up in a spaceship piloted by Magneto; leading the... saddest Brotherhood of Evil Mutants line-up I think I've ever seen and one I don't think ever properly existed; consisting of team mainstay The Blob (impossibly dense body makes him invulnerable), Unus the Untouchable (also invulnerable, but with a far sillier name), Mastermind (hypnotic illusions) and Lorelei (not the one from Thor, this one I've never heard of before; she can paralyze dudes, and dudes alone, with her hypno-voice).

Magneto heard all about Wolverines... umm... stabbing some guy, and figures "This is the kind of talented mastermind I need in my corner" and then asks him to join the X-Men, then betray the X-Men, and in return he... won't mind Logan stabbing some guy in a bar. And Wolverine doesn't have a lot of job prospects and has no idea what an X-Man is so, sure, why not?

As it would happen, the X-Men have an even gentler requirements for joining than the Brotherhood does, and the fact that Wolverine is a Mutant is all it takes for the Professor to welcome him with open arms and let him on to the team. The X-Men line-up here, incidentally, is the Classic 5 of Cyclops, Jean, Iceman, Beast and Angel, which it definitely was not when Wolverine fought Hulk.

Also; this happens;

Anyway, the X-Men welcome Wolverine, and he quickly becomes friends with everyone, which briefly makes him reconsider his deal with Magneto about betraying and killing them all but he also figures "Nah, screw it" and disables the Mansions security grid; letting the Brotherhood in anyway.

So a big fight breaks out between the X-Men and the Brotherhood; and Logan betrays his employer for his friends, and the X-Men win because everyone except for Magneto isn't particularly dangerous, and Wolverine realizing who he was working for, up and stabs Magneto entirely to death when his back was turned; and with his dying breath Magneto uses his powers to make Wolverine stab his own face until he died from it himself.

Poetic justice, and also the artist doesn't think to draw any kind of injuries on Wolverine as he recites his own deathbed soliloquy.

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!
As established in Immortal Hulk (time and time again), killing the Hulk does not accomplish much; at best it gives you a brief window where the Hulk will not be bothering you (followed by a window where he will be bothering you quite a lot, for the duration of your life),and he was killed a LOT over the years. Wolverine was also hypnotized and coerced into joining much worse organizations than this particularly lame incarnation of the Brotherhood, and it's pretty much a given that every time Wolverine and Magneto fight, Erik is going to make use of the fact that WOlverine has metal bones. So I'll give this a provisional "Yeah, it happened, kinda"

Our second story is What if The Fantastic Four Had Never Been (written by Roger Stern, With pencils by Alan Kupperberg and Inks by Frank Giaccoia, and a writing credit to Bill Mantlo) and HOO BOY, this was one What If-ass comic book, taking place on the most important day in the Marvel Universe, to boot.

Starting off with YET ANOTHER recap of the FFs origins (Astronauts, Cosmic Rays, Science-Adventure Team Protects Earth) as delivered by a... admittedly pretty cool looking Uatu (this time his facial features are all over emphasized so he looks less human, and all the shadows on his face are either star fields or absolute darkness; like in the animated series it's honestly one of the best looks for the guy I've ever seen).

This time, however, Ben isn't quite as eager to join forces with the guy who turned him into a lumpy monster, and his fiancé who just outright dehumanized him to the extent he became forever known as The Thing. He angrily leaves the rest of the FF then and there wishing to be left alone.

Incidentally, because this is explicitly the First Issue of Fanastic Four version of Ben, he looks like a weird orange lump-man instead of his traditional Big Rock Guy appearance, which was an intentional decision but it still felt weird every time there was a close up on his face.

Anyway, the remaining crew of the Marvel-1 still decide to be Science Adventure Heroes and brand themselves as The Fantastic Three, and a few months later, they encounter the first kind of threat that would require somewhere between a Fantastic Two and Five to resolve; the Army (specifically General Thunderbolt Ross) need their help to deal with a raging radioactive monster-man approaching New York and, it is, of course, The Thing.

Also noteworthy that they never call him Ben in this story; he's just The Thing.

The General wants Reed, working alongside a few other contractors (Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, of course) to work together to build a weapon capable of defeating The Thing; who in this timeline is VASTLY stronger than he was in the 616; traditionally his strength was measured at a vague but impressive "a dozen men", here it's "hundreds of men".

Also, as the characters and narration boxes helpfully point out, Stark had to miss a flight to Vietnam and Bruce had to abandon the test firing of a new Gamma Ray bomb he was working in order to deal with The Things rampage; meaning that this reality was denied the creation of both Iron Man and The Hulk.

Thing, incidentally, is already in New York, but cleverly disguised in one of those big Trench Coats that seem to perfectly disguise anyone who can't pass for human, but he accidentally bumps into a woman (in fact, Alicia Masters, who doesn't factor into the plot at all) who is then startled, causing everyone to assume that a Large Man in a Trench Coat attacked her (based on her loudly shouting "Oops, I'm sorry") which sets off Things temper and causes him to go on a rampage.

It's implied that besides greatly increased strength, the Cosmic Ray exposure also gave Ben a greatly reduced temper.

Anyway, Alicia is frightened of the rage she felt in this weird big lumpy mans heart and runs away (another divergence, in this reality Alicia never meets and falls in love with Ben). Furthermore, Bens rampage through the city disrupts traffic all over the city, frightening young Peter Parker enough to put off seeing the radiation experiment that a particular spider wound up joining (so no Spider-Man either) and blocking traffic keeping Dr. Donald Blake from catching a flight to Norway (so no Thor either).

So by this point, Thing is on a full on rampage and terrorizing the city enough to warrant full on military intervention, and in the ensuing melee, the World Famous Baxter Building is also demolished, and the Cosmic Ray cannon that Banner, Stark and Reed were working on needs a few minutes to charge up, so Reed tries to buy time with the rest of the team to try to reason with Thing, calling him Ben and everything. And it allllmost works, but Thing still has too much of a hair in his craw and he lashes out at them, knocking Sue and Johnny unconscious (Reed reacts to one much more strongly than the other) and leading him to come to blows with his former best friend.

Luckily, this leaves Ben open to a blast from the weapon once it's fully charged, and the shock of it knocks everyone out as it wipes out every trace of Cosmic Ray energy from its target.

Bad news; it was Reed who was actually in front of Ben at the time so he got the brunt of the blast, and Johnny and Sue took splash damage, so they're powerless; and Ben absorbed the lost Cosmic Rays becoming even stronger still; and now we don't have a Fantastic Four.

At least this took the fight out of Ben for a bit, who calms down and decides to leave while everyone is still blinded by the sheer amount of dust thrown up by the weapons fire, and unconscious from the resultant shockwave, and as he leaves he says he never intended to hurt anyone, but people take one look at his monstrous face and assume he's a deadly threat, so he's just going to avoid humanity from now on.

Also he... wrecked a whole lot of cities on his way to New York, which he then demolished, so he's not really standing on any particular moral high ground here.

Also, as Uatu notes; this particular branch of the Marvel Universe basically has no Superheroes now but still has no shortage of super *villains* and alien conquerors and the like so... y'know... rough days ahead.

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!
Bens quit the team before, and often because of issues with him being a rock-man. Most notably in the 80s he left to live on Battleworld for a while where the Cosmic Ray that affected him reversed himself and he became human, and not long after that when they returned and turned him into a big pineapple guy. He also lost them again in the 70s and had Luke Cage replace him. Most recently, Ben and Reed received a vision of the future, where Ben finds out something about his transformation and Reeds relation to it that brings them to blows that apparently ends with Reeds death, but details are yet sketchy

That's as far as Marvel Unlimited has gone with that particular story, so if you're further ahead than me, keep it under your hat, please.

NEXT TIME!
Please, call me Mike

 

[Büge]

The X-Men line-up here, incidentally, is the Classic 5 of Cyclops, Jean, Iceman, Beast and Angel, which it definitely was not when Wolverine fought Hulk.

SLIDING TIMELINE

 

[Adrenaline]

Why wasn't that the lineup? I thought it was basically intact with a few extra members when the comic went dark before Giant-Size in 1975, and Wolverine fought Hulk in '74.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Havoc and Polaris were on the team; and I'm also pretty darn sure that Magneto was a baby in the period between the semi-cancellation and revival

 

[estragon]

Havoc and Polaris were on the team; and I'm also pretty darn sure that Magneto was a baby in the period between the semi-cancellation and revival

This gets complicated!

Magneto was turned into a baby in an issue of Defenders that came out after X-Men was cancelled and just a couple months before Wolverine's first appearance, so that's mostly fine even without any doing any complicated justifications beyond assuming Hulk and Defenders issues weren't in perfect synch.

During the X-Men's cancellation, they continued to appear in a number of stories as guest stars, mostly with whatever members the author wanted to use, primarily Cyclops and Jean. It's kind of suggested in a few of these that they're a bit on-and-off as a team at this point, so as long as they've not explicitly saying "We've never met Havok and Polaris," I don't think this is a huge deal relative to how the team was portrayed between cancellation and Giant Size X-Men. Havok and Polaris are also portrayed as away from and not really sure about rejoining team in a Hulk issue during this cancellation period, so it's easy to make this work.

However, where it really might not fit is that Beast became grey and furry and then later blue and furry soon after the X-Men was cancelled. Also, unresolved story beats from this transformation in Amazing Adventures were concluded in the Incredible Hulk, 20 issues before Wolverine's first appearance in that same comic. I don't see any pictures of Beast here, but if he's not furry that could be where it falls apart. HOWEVER, he was also doing this thing a lot where he wore a rubber mask to pretend to not be furry, so you could even squeeze that in on a no-prize type of technicality, unless there's a scene where he has a thought bubble like, "I'm definitely not wearing a rubber mask to hide my transformation!" (There was a lot of very silly rubber mask stuff, until he joined the Avengers and Blue beast become the status quo. There's definitely a cancellation period story where blue Beast shows up with the X-Men though, in the fairly well known Captain America story where the villain is heavily implied to be Nixon...)

But basically the team is portrayed so inconsistently during this period that there's a degree to which not feeling like everything quite lines up is arguably the most accurate approach!

 

[karzac]

Honestly, even if he had that thought bubble, I'd be kinda more inclined to think that he was wearing a rubber mask to hide his transformation. Why even have the thought if you're not doing it, you know?

 

[estragon]

That cracked me up and makes me feel justified for spending time double-checking a lot of these issues and release dates to investigate this, thank you.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I love this thread

 

[Octopus Prime]

Mark Gruenwald and Greg LaRocque are on the most prominent names on the credits page, but I got no idea who did what.

Hooooo boy, kids. If there was any lingering doubt we weren't into the Everyone Dies era of What If, this should put them to rest. It's also the first story that felt too compressed, despite having a double-length page count. Also, once again, the thing in the title card isn't really that important to the story. It happens, but feels pretty incidental.

ANYHOW, Uatu once again has to quickly summarize a pretty lengthy arc, but luckily, it's a much easier to follow one than Dark Phoenix or whatever the hell was going on with that Scarlet Centurian story; in a dark future where Earth was conquered by the Badoon (basically the Cardassians from Star Trek, except green), a file clerk named Micheal Korvac was abducted and experimented on by Badoon scientists looking to exploit latent superpowers in humans. Unfortunately, the lessons of Pokemon The Movie didn't last until the 31st century, and they didn't stop to think that physically and emotionally torturing and experimenting on someone in order to make them vastly more powerful could possibly backfire; and their experiment worked and created a being with potentially infinite cosmic power; and the ability to level himself up by stealing the power from anyone he kills.

So... that sucked for everyone in the future.

Pursued by the futures incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Korvac escaped to the past, where he managed to give himself a real big power-up (and a much needed makeover) by ripping the power cosmic out of Galactus' ship, and for good measure, murdering The Collector (a godlike Elder of the Universe, with some severe hoarding issues) and falling in love with the Collectors daughter, Corina. Korvacs ultimate plan was to prevent a future where the Badoon could come to power, and figured the best way to do that was to completely subjugate the entire universe to his single will, and started tracking down and murdering gods in order to steal their abilities. The Avengers get wind of this, along with the time-displaced GotG, and they launch a joint attack on Korvac (weirdly choosing to live in a fairly nice suburb instead of a spooky cosmic fortress or something). Korvac wins easily, but sees that his girlfriend is starting to have some second thoughts about the extent of his goals (and the murders. Mainly the murders), and realizes he's become a bigger monster than the Badoon were; and releases all his stolen pwoer; resurrecting everyone he killed and then disappearing from the universe entirely... until the next time someone thought to use him for a story.

But maybe Corina doesn't mind all those murders. Maybe she's weirdly supportive of her boyfriends hobbies.

My headcanon for this, as the explanation isn't stated, and given everything else that Korvac does in this story, his power set and his general megalomania, is that he just bulldozed her mind entirely before the final battle so she couldn't have expressed anything not in full support of him even if she wanted to.

Anyway, without someone to imply to him that the total ego-death of the universe might be bad; Korvac effortlessly murders one of the strongest Avengers teams to ever exist; and then resurrects them as his mindless, loyal servants. Then he consolidates his power by erecting a barrier around earth keeping extra dimensional beings and time-travelers away from Earth (good call, as Odin and Zeus were *really* mad that a glowing purple man just murdered their sons), and then killing off any super-beings on Earth powerful enough that they could conceivably threaten him (like Phoenix, Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer).

As his last act, he sends his Avenger Thralls to the Moon in order to kill Uatu himself; just in case he decides to stop Watching and start Do-ing.

Uatu is prepared for them (can't do much without the Watcher noticing it, it's right in the name), and decides to scramoose back to his Homeworld; Korvac is wielding power the likes of which the universe has never known; and the entire Watcher Collective is going to be out of work if they don't come together to stop him *immediately*. Unfortunately, every single Watcher takes the "Do Not Interfere" part of their job description MUCH more seriously than Uatu does, and figures watching a completely empty universe would be much easier, so they unanimously vote to stay out of it.

Besides, Earth is the center of a universal turmoil of some kind every month, it's hard to keep getting worked up about it.

Uatu doesn't accept this and decides to go complain to the manager; conferring with an assortment of THE most powerful entities in the whole of the multiverse;

That text is a bit tiny, so we've got:
The Living Tribunal: Enforcer of YHVHs will upon the multiverse
Galactus: Devourer of Worlds
Order, Chaos and The In-Betweener: repsentatives of the balance between... Order and Chaos
The Gardener: Manipulator of all natural life
The Shaper of Worlds: Guy Who Builds Planets and is Half Box
The Grandmaster: Pro-Gamer
The Stranger: Honestly never been sure on what this guys deal is.

Also, not quite sure if the artist kind of fumbled drawing Kirby Krackle, or if this conference room room for Cosmic Deities is full of soap bubbles.

Regardless, the Cosmic Beings are much more appreciative of the threat Korvac possesses (as a point of comparison; The Living Tribunal did not consider Thanos snapping half the universe out of existence to be a big deal, but Korvac terrifies him); so they agree to a multi-prong attack on Korvac and his minions; Galactus and The Gardener will attack directly, hoping a show of force will intimidate him, The Grandmaster and Shaper will go to Korvac directly to try to reason with him, and The Stranger and In-Betweener will go for some god-level subterfuge to try to manipulate him.

And it all goes... really badly.

Korvac sends the upper-tier of Avengers out to fight Galactus and the Gardener directly, actually managing to win (Captain America steals the Ultimate Nullifier from Galactus' ship and threatens him with it, and Galactus tries to call his bluff, since that's how everyone deals with Galactus and he's sick of it), but dying in the process. Korvac doesn't bother mourning their losses because with the deaths of Galactus and the Gardener, and the aquisition of the Nullifier, his power has reached a new level. Also he killed the High Evolutionary off panel and sucked all the cosmic energy out of his hat which... y'know...

Weird but okay.

The Grandmaster uses the only play in his book and tries to manipulate Korvac into a contest to decide the fate of the Earth, spends too long trying to explain the rules, and Korvac gets bored and incinerates him mid speech, The Shaper... notices the way this plan is going and decides to join Korvac instead of fighting him.

In-Betweener tries to kidnap Corina, thinking she is the way to his heart, but fails because of the Shapers treachery and the Stranger... just throws the whole damn moon at Korvac.

Throwing an entire friggin' moon at someone is usually a good way to stop them from bothering you, but Korvac is cooking with gas, and disintegrates it, causing a new ring to form around the Earth, and also... turning The Stranger into a cloud of babies (...wha?).

At this, and noticing that Lord Chaos has shrunk to nearly nothing while Lord Order has grown immensely, the Living-Tribunal starts to really panic and decides to just cut his losses and one-ups the Stranger by throwing the GOD DAMN SUN at Korvac directly like he was Sephiroth, rationalizing that destroying an entire densely populated planet is a small price to pay to get rid of Korvac.

And, much like when Sephiroth does it... it doesn't really do any real lasting damage; oh it definitely annihilated the rest of the solar system, no mistake about that, but Korvacs power was so immense at this point that a mere supernova doesn't even scratch him. The Tribunal sees this, grabs his suitcase, and leaves that universe all together, with a quick "He's all yours guys, I got a plane to catch".

And now it's the Watchers turn; as he's been busy since getting all the Cosmic Beings together; he's visited Every Single Living Thing in the Universe into one infinitely massive army and is going to threaten Korvac with that; and while Korvac realizes he's strong enough to fight anybody, he's not quite strong enough to fight *everybody*. So he decides to... fix that;

He casually rips the lifeforce from everything left on the Earth, up to and including a few Celestials that were just hanging around, being mysterious; and also Corina (he comments that he's not doing that because she offered her life out of love, he taking it out of Hate for the universe) and grows to such a massive scale he's sitting on the Earth like a Beachball; then stares out at Uatu and his assembled army.

Uatu tries to reason with Korvac; he can do anything, total universal annihilation doesn't help anybody...

And Korvac raises the Ultimate Nullifier...

Merry Christmas, Kids!

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!?
Up to and including the total annihilation of the universe, yeah, a lot of the stuff in this did wind up happening. Most notably a lot of the Korvac saga, and this version of it, wound up getting recycled about a decade later in the much more popular Infinite Gauntlet story, the concept of all the upper-tier Gods joining together to protect Eternity came back in Al Ewings excellent Ultimates series a few years ago, and Secret Wars kicked off properly with Eternity being killed and the multiverse dying with it.

Also, the Infinite War movie had someone being really mad about a moon being thrown at them, but I don't think that's a reference so much as it was something really cool to do with a moon.

NEXT TIME:
Bedazzling!

 

[Jeanie]

Korvac came back in Avengers Academy about ten years ago when Corina accidentally came back to life and fought all the Avengers again. He also recently returned in the Iron Man series, I want to say the one Jason Aarons did after the Dan Slott run, I'm not sure about the details of that since I haven't read it because I don't really like Iron Man solo.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I was vaguely aware he came back for Iron Man but I also don't read that so...

I'm sure its fine, and largely based around Tony screwing things up and not asking anyone for help

 

[Adrenaline]

It's written by Christopher Cantwell of Halt and Catch Fire, and actually the story involves Iron Man recruiting a team of allies including War Machine, Hellcat, and Frog-Man.

 

[Octopus Prime]

And now I’m interested

 

[Octopus Prime]

Well, after the complete and utter annihilation of an entire universe, the erasing of every heroes origins and… umm… too many Spider-Men, I guess we were due for a couple of stories where everything works out fine, actually. Give or take some historical revisionism and also an off-screen apocalypse.


Kicking things off with What If Dazzler We’re the Herald of Galactus written by Dan Fingeroth, with Art by Mike Vosburg and Jon Dagostino. A story spun out from… probably the weirdest weekend of Allison Blaires life… up to that moment at least.

The Disco Dazzler (probably best known for her appearance in the X-Men arcade game) is a mutant who has the power to absorb and redirect sound and light through her body; she has no interest in a career in either the supply or prevention of crime, so she mainly uses this power to make her music performances really cool. Unfortunately, she lives in a comic book, so crime fighting is inevitable. She was also entirely disco themed for the first few years of her existence even though that trend had long passed before her first appearance.

Anyhow, not too far into her brief solo book, Dazzler was involved in the most one-sided superhero fight of all time when she was attacked by Klaw, a guy made of hardened noise. And since she absorbs and is empowered by sound; she completely absorbed him and got a big power-up, which caught the attention of Galactus, who needed an extra pair of hands to deal with one of his more uppity Heralds, Terrax. Dazzler and Terrax fought, she won, and Galactus took Terrax back as Herald hoping he’d learned a thing or two about humility and Dazzler was sent back to Earth being kind of confused about everything.

But what if Galactus was mad and not disappointed that his fourth try at making a herald worked out the same way all his previous attempts had?

Well… it’d go a little something like this;

Galactus decides that if Terrax wants to wield the Power Cosmic with complete impunity, it’s only fair he also be thrown into the depths of a black hole for eternity, so he can’t make a mess out of the universe with it. Then he notices that Dazzler is still standing around and says “Well, I still need a Herald, so… you”. And before she can say “No thanks” or “What?” Or “Who is this weird big purple man?!?” he imbues her with the Power Cosmic and informs her that the dinner-bell is ringing and Big G is REAL HANGRY.

To be fair, Galactus does sweeten the pot by promising to never eat the Earth if she hurries up and finds another planet for him to scarf down on. Which is also kind of an implicit threat that Earth is next on the menu otherwise, I guess.

Also, disappointingly, Dazzler doesn’t get a cool Herald of Galactus redesign when she becomes Cosmic; you’d expect fiery hair at the very least, or her jump suit to become stars or something. No, she just gets a glowing aura and that's all.

Anyway, after the company mandated period of grieving for her life as she knew it to be over (about five minutes, then Galactus tells her to stop moping), Dazzler realizes the perks of being the cosmically imbued Herald of Galactus (immortality, space-flight and super-heightened reflexes and senses) and decides to fix his diet; by only feeding him planets rich in life but devoid of sentience.

Luckily, the universe is teeming with vegetarian options for people who eat biospheres, so this goes great (she can’t bear to watch him eat though as Galactus eating a world is still pretty horrific). He even comes to like his freegan diet by rejecting a vegetable world she’d picked that did have sentient life by accident (wasn’t counting on talking plants when she picked it).

So centuries pass, Galactus falls in love with Dazzler courtesy of her new diet for him (this is a weird work dynamic) and Ms. Blaire winds up saving more planets by merit of steering Galactus away from the worlds he’s have eaten normally than any dozen Avengers teams could have, and everything is GREAT.

Except… the Wanderers, the vast (vast) nomadic armada made up of the survivors of all the worlds Galactus devoured in the past, still exist. And they all still have a real hair in their craw about him genociding their species before starting his new paleo diet.

The Wanderers consider Dazzler to be guilty by association for Galactus’ crimes, even if she is arguably the most blameless Herald Galactus ever had, and also reveal that they finally got their hands on a weapon capable of threatening a Herald; the found the terrible axe of Terrax, after Galactus blasted him, and worked on turning it into a battery for a Power Cosmic cannon!

Just being winged with the Axes power is enough to nearly kill Dazzler, and when Galactus sees what happened to his lady-pal he gets real steamed. And while the axe might have enough power to hurt someone who possesses the Power Cosmic, Galactus is Power. The axe has no effect and he responds by annihilating the entire Wanderer fleet with a of his hands.

When Dazzler recovers she learns what Galactus did, and is so horrified by his actions that she abandons him to return to Earth, where she learns that thousands of Years passed since she was there last (time loses meaning when you’re immortal and invulnerable) and the planets a barren wasteland now. So she decides to forgive Galactus for… umm… completely wiping out the stragglers from the worlds he'd destroyed before and returns to him.

It's a super unhealthy relationship, but still better than letting Galactus gobble up planets with impunity.

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!?
It's occasionally revealed that Dazzler is deceptively powerful, but she's never had any designs on being anything other than a rock superstar, let alone a Herald. Parts of Galactus' hand of this story has been replicated a few times, however. Him setting aside his whole "beyond petty emotions like anger of jealousy" thing because he was REAL cheesed off and he opted to obliterate an entire solar system in a fit of rage was one of the capstones to the Annihilation crossover and him swearing off inhabited worlds and forming a deeper connection to his Herald was a part of the origin for Cosmic Ghost Rider (granted, this was more because they were in an alternate future where Thanos had already murdered most of the universe, so most planets were uninhabited anyway).

I'll give it a "Provisionally happened"

Our second story this issue is What If Iron Man was Stranded in Medieval Camelot (written by Steven Grant, with art by Don Perlin and Bob Layton), which even Uatu admits is a weird question to be posed, but he's a Watcher, so he Watched it.

Anyway, as Back-issues of Iron Man would have it, Tony and Dr. Doom got into a scuffle back in the day, involving Dooms time-platform, and they wound up in Camelot, as the war between King Arthur and Morgan Le Fayes war was nearing its conclusion. Both Tony and Vic hated it there, and decided to team up to combine the tech in their respective suits of armor to build another time machine to travel back to the good ol' present day, where there's more soap and penicillin.

But, of course, Dr. Doom is a bad guy (ask anyone except Victor), so maybe he didn't obliging help Iron Man get back to the present day with him; maybe he just stole the parts from Tonys armor and then hightailed it back to his own century all by his lonesome!

Maybe That's Exactly What Happened in this What If!

So Vic steals a whole bunch of the particularly useful components of Iron Mans suit, leaving him vastly less powerful than he would be otherwise and with greatly lowered power reserves (the armor is solar powered, but it has no batteries, so it has to be a real sunny day for him to do anything more complicated than walk around with it) and then scrams back to the Present, leaving Tony marooned in the distant past. But even a garbage Iron Man is MUCH better equipped than the combined army of Camelot, and all the Barbarian hordes on Morgan La Feys payroll, and after single-handedly stopping a viking band from attacking a town, Tony is inducted into the Knights of the Round Table; as Sir Anthony: Knight of Iron.

Tony is kind of bummed about it being impossible to travel back to the future because he's stuck in a time before toilets, let alone chrono-particle colliders, but makes the most of it; since Camelot has pretty good wine (this was before he went on the wagon) and lots of cute girls (because, even without millions of dollars, he's still a millionaire playboy), and he injuries frying vikings from the sky with Repulser rays.

You'd *think* Thor would have issues with the sheer amount of vikings he's blowing up, but it never comes up.

Anyway, as it turns out, Tony blasting the hell out of her army is all part of Morgan La Feys long-con plan; Camelots defenses wind up being entirely Tony Stark-focused; so she plans out her army to attack in full on the day of a solar eclipse, and arms her son Mordred with a mystic dagger (made from a shard of Excalibur, no idea how she got that) capable of even slicing through Iron Mans armor. So, without the sun, Tonys armor won't work, and with the knife, Mordred deals catastrophic damage to its circuits disabling it permanently. And without their champion, Camelots armies are completely demoralized and beaten back with ease.

Recovering in Camelots hospital, Tony starts working without rest to try to get a reasonable facsimile of his Armor Lab built with Medieval Technology (say what you will about Tony, but he works well in a cave with a box of scraps) and eventually manages to rebuild his armor enough to be able to join the fight to defend Camelot; and while he succeeds he doesn't get to the battlefield before King Arthur and Morded manage to kill one another (though Arthur gets the enchanted knife away from Mordred so his forces can't use it again), and with his dying breathe, King Arthur names Tony to be his successor, since he's the only reason Camelot lasted as long as it did.

So Tony becomes King of England, winds up conquering most of Europe and the empire he founds lasts for a thousand years.

Which... umm... isn't... great.

Don't brag about your imperial colonialism, Tony.

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!
He didn't stay there, but in Jason Aarons Avengers run, Tony winds up being sent back in time to Caveman times by Mephisto and he still manages to make a working Iron Man suit out of ice and rock. I'm still not sure if that was the stupidest or coolest thing Tonys ever done. Probably both.

NEXT TIME: Set a course for WACKINESS!

 

[Olli]

Tony also ended up in medieval-ish Vanaheim in Avengers Prime

 

[Felicia]

​

So centuries pass, Galactus falls in love with Dazzler courtesy of her new diet for him (this is a weird work dynamic) and Ms. Blaire winds up saving more planets by merit of steering Galactus away from the worlds he’s have eaten normally than any dozen Avengers teams could have, and everything is GREAT.

Even among cosmic gods beyond human comprehension, the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Okay, out of every What if I've covered so far, this is the one I'd been most apprehensive about; with rare exception any comic written in the early 80s or earlier that tries to be a goofball comedy is dire. And every time I scrolled past this cover, I thought of Not Brand Eech and shuddered inwardly at what was sure to follow.

So imagine my surprise that this was actually pretty solid and had some decent gags in it?

Anyway, since this comic is entirely one-panel gags (sometimes Entire Page Long gags), it's impossible to properly recap; so here's a few highlights

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!?

Sure, why not.

NEXT TIME!
Cleaning out the Fridge, again

 

[Felicia]

"Spidey Intelectual Stories" seems ahead of its time. Reminds me of some Vertigo comics I've read. Or maybe some issues of Miracleman.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I had a genuine lol at the Moon Knight one

 

[Octopus Prime]

Twice in a row did I go into a What if with a certain set of expectations, and twice in a row were they shattered. Just... not in a good way this time. This is another set of three stories, with the through-line of "Dames are hysterical! Except cat-ladies. They're fine."


First off is What If Elektra Had Lived (written and drawn by Frank Miller, which did nothing to challenge my views of him as a creative type), which is really only notable for the bonkers framing story; instead of Uatu narrating to the reader about the way 616 continuity went, and the way it would have went otherwise, he's talking to Matt Murdock directly; just after having buried Elektra following her death at Bullseyes hands. He's wearing a raincoat on a soggy day, while Matt is sitting very sadly staring at the ground, talking about how much happier he would have been had his girlfriend not been fully impaled by an assassin

It's absolutely wild; does Uatu do this all the time? Does he just have a grudge against Matt?

It's far and away the most buckwild idea presented in this comic.

Anyway, as history had it; after her general affection for her boyfriend and his friends got in the way of her lucrative murdering career (specifically the parts where she had to kill aforesaid friends), professional assassin Elektra Natchious was instead targeted by her former boss (and mainstay Daredevil/Spider-Man villain, The Kingpin, and ultimately killed by her replacement, Bullseye. And Matt was sad about this because women exist solely to be murdered and thus make our hero sad on their behalf in Frank Miller comics.

BUT! What this comic supposes is that perhaps Bullseye was felled by a prison-guards bullet during an attempted jail-break and so never had the chance to fight Elektra to the death.

So yeah, there's no cathartic reversal of fortune that lead to Elektra saving herself in this one; Bullseye does not appear in this reality because some guy dunn put one in his brain-box.

Anyway; Kingpin is still disappointed by Elektra not obliging him by murdering the people he would like deceased, so instead of one really skilled super-assassin, he just sends bucketloads of crappy cannon-fodder assassins, figuring that, y'know, one would have to get lucky, sooner or later.

They do not; we're treated to an underwhelming montage of Elektra just tearing through them. One of them meets the same fate she herself did in the 616, which would have been nice if it weren't some nameless random guy instead of one of the main antagonists responsible for her death.

Matt eventually finds Elektra in his apartment, beaten and bloody but very much alive, and she explains about her whole "I'm a hired mob assassin, but my former employer turned on me because I refused to kill your dopey comic relief friend" thing, and Matt says "Well... huh... how about that." and then they collectively decide to leave New York and get married and start a new life in Greece under fake names. Which, as Uatu explains to a grieving Matt means that sure he'd be happy living with his loving wife in a tropical island far from their troubles, but New York would be down one out of many dozens of superheroes.

So... you know... chew on that, Mr. Murdock.

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!?
Elektra is one of those characters who has died and come back to life a lot. Not to the ridiculous extent some characters can brag about, but often enough that her being dead doesn't really mean a whole lot. One of the perks of being trained by a demonic ninja cult with resurrection rituals, I guess. If you mean "Does Uatu make it a point to put on a rain coat to taunt grieving people at funerals, I don't think it's come up, but the dude has to do something to keep himself busy.

We also have a short back-up story in the middle here to further flesh out a story-point that... really did not require further elaboration, but, well, we had some pages to fill; The Cat People (didn't see the credits, no idea who made it), which is... well.. it's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, except with cats instead of apes, and set in wizard times, instead of the Vague Future. A wizard figured out how to cast a spell that turned his house cats into furries, and all his wizard friends were really impressed and wanted to cast that spell themselves, but the cat people, as it turns out, were too horny for each other, and not horny enough for wizards, so they were all put to death. The last two cat-people responded by poisoning with wizards with what turned out to be the bubonic plague, and to atone, they left to form their own secret settlement which they repopulated with fewer magically created cat-people, and eventually their work would wind up creating the magic ritual that would empower the Avengers' second best known furry member; Tigra. And she's kind of relevant in our third story...


What if Yellowjacket Had Died (written by, Alan Zelenitz with art by Mike Esposito and Greg Larocque) is, honestly, really similar to an earlier What If (specifically one of the stories in the Nova What If way back in #15, and I think this was a bi-monthly book, so... reasonable to say they just forgot). It also takes place not too long before The One Thing Hank Pym is Known For, which puts this whole story in a kind of weirder light.

ANYWAY, as you may recall if you were reading Avengers issues in the early 80s, the team needed some new blood after their most recent round of lay-offs, so the core team of Cap, Iron Man, Thor and The Wasp had their ranks bolstered by the aforementioned Tigra and also Yellowjacket, the superhero identity Hank Pym uses when he's... not... in the cheeriest head-space. Case in point, he immediately verbally abuses his wife, who outranks him in the team (she was the Avengers' leader at the time) and also at home (she's independently wealthy thanks to her extremely popular clothing line) and she's so mad at him that she refuses to go on the Avengers' next mission to stop a mutant villain called the Elf Queen (no relation to the Goblin Queen, genuinely unsure if she ever appeared again). Hank is not good at being a superhero most of the time, and this is no exception, as the weapons in his suit malfunction and he winds up shooting the Elf Queen in the back just as Cap talks her out of attacking the city. The Queen responds by throwing an entire truck at Hank, which Janet saves him from as she decided that protecting people from a rampaging villain is more important than her husband being a complete ass.

WELL, what if Janet didn't make herself the bigger person (metaphorically) by making herself the smaller person (literally) and showed up in the nick of time to save her husband?

Well... Hank Pym would have been smooshed to death by a truck is what would have happened.

Janet is... the only person moved by the tragic truck-smooshing of her husband (the funeral is only attended by her and the priest, which proves that everyone in the MU thinks about as highly of Hank Pym as I do), and in inconsolable when she hears a news report about her husbands death which implied that Hanks death was a result of him screwing up and shooting an already neutralized threat in the back and not that he tragically died in the service of defending the city from a dangerous threat.

To be fair, she's grieving pretty hard, and wasn't really there for the part of the fight where that is precisely what happened.

Janet can't find the Elf Queen (who vamoosed as soon as she realized who she just killed), and despite the name, the Avengers aren't really that concerned with revenge, so she decides to honor Hank Pyms memory the best way she can; by putting on a sexy cocktail dress, wandering through a dangerous part of town, and then absolutely flattening everyone who threatens her with her bio-electric Stingers and Pym-Particle enhanced super-suit, under the assumption that beating up Any Criminal is about the same thing as beating up the actual criminal who wronged her.

Word gets back to the rest of the Avengers about Jans hobbies (doesn't take long; her beating the absolute hell out of random muggers makes the papers, and she's making it a point to let everyone know that it's her doing it), and they threaten to suspend her status of an Avenger if she doesn't ease up on... y'know... the super-powered brutality and entrapment. And Janet responds by saying "Well, maybe you shouldn't have implied my jackass husband shot someone in the back because his suit was trash!"

Which, again, is literally what happened.

Luckily, a building caught fire, so the Avengers go off to help with that so they don't have to deal with the increasingly awkward Janet situation. Watching the rest of the team imperil themselves trying to rescue people from the burning building makes Janet feel small (as do the Pym Particles she's using), and when she opts to sit back and watch when Cap is nearly knocked out by some falling debris as payback, only for Tigra to injure herself saving him she realizes she's really not processing her grief properly, and announces she's leaving the team until she's worthy of joining it again.

Which is... probably a better outcome for Janet than when Hank had stuck around with the team, honestly.

BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?!
I believe Hank is surprisingly under-served in terms of comic-book deaths. At present, however, he's about as dead as I've seen any superhero ever be (had his soul ripped out of his body, and then devoured, by a Cthulhu that lives inside the Soul Gem, his mortal husk was assimilated by Ultron, and was consequently annihilated by Galactus, who then proceeded to devour the planet he was standing on. It was a busy day), and his funeral was sparsely attended there, too. Janet gave a eulogy of "Welp... he got rid of Ultron for a bit, I guess?".

NEXT TIME: The Worlds Comic Magazine