This is hilarious.

What If? #1 (...Spider-Man Joined the Fantastic Four)

This issue, the start of all of Marvel's various "What Ifs?" titles, is based on the events of Amazing Spider-Man #1, of course. As should be obvious, it extrapolates what might have happened had Spidey been made a member of the FF. Needless to say, there are some nits.

The covers to the Fantastic Four comic Parker looks at in AS-M #1 and What If? #1 are different. The former shows what appears to be the entire FF on the cover. The latter shows only the Thing. Also, Parker in What If? refers to it as "the authorized comic book". In the original he does no such thing.

Speaking of the Thing, Benjy's appearance in What If? hews closer to his Seventies physical appearance, rather than the way he looked in the early '60s. Johnny's hairstyle is also more modern than it should be.

The whites of the eyes to Spidey's mask are colored red on page 16. This error is repeated on pages 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25 and 31.

On page 31, panel five, Spidey says, "'Course, I could as a dopey question like, just how do you hunt for an Invisible Girl?" I believe he meant to say, "'Course, I could ask..."

The bulk of this story is an extrapolation of events from Fantastic Four #14. Many of the nits listed for that issue hold true for this one. (Which is a roundabout way for me to say I'm not relisting them. )

In What If? #1, the Thing says of the giant octopus, "If I saw 'im in one of them comic mags the Marvel people put out about us..." In the original story, he only says, "If I saw 'im in one of them comic mags..."

"It's clobberin' time!"

I've just been browsing comic.com's gallery of What If covers, mostly out of nostalgia. It's amazing how many of these storylines actually did happen, later, in the canonical run. Of course the stories unfolded differently, but the premises are the same. For example:

#2: What if the Hulk had the brain of Bruce Banner. Happened in Peter David's tenure after the grey Hulk storyline.

#30: What if Spider-Man's clone had lived. Unfortunately, it happened.

#12: What if Rick Jones had become the Hulk. Happened prior to Peter David's run and he got rid of very quickly.

#37: What if the Beast and the Thing had continued to mutate? Not exactly the same, but the Thing did mutate again later (when we got the She-Thing as well).

#45: What if the Hulk went berserk? Surely, that's happened.

#24: What if Gwen Stacey had lived? Granted not the same thing, but they sure brought her back enough times.

I'm sure there are others involving characters I am not familiar with.

On another note, it's interesting What If's repeated themselves. There are at least two different What If's involving Conan in the 20th century, two of other characters finding Thor's Hammer, and two of Uncle Ben living. There's also a What If of the Invisible Girl marrying Namor, which is how What If #1 ended (well, not marrying off, but going off with him anyway).

IIRC there was one issue where they did two different storylines about Sue giving birth to a second child.

A while back I was reading issue 56, What if the Avengers lost Operation Galactic Storm, (part 2) & one thing that stood out was how different What Ifs were to the regular books.

For the most part the regular Marvel universe has the writers on the side of the heroes, so no matter how bad things get the hero usually manages to survive, sometimes improbably.

However with the What Ifs the treatment is quite different. Here the writers are against the heroes & they die in situations they would have survived in the normal books. Sometimes in highly improbable ways.

Makes sense, though. Each story was supposed to be a one-off, self-continated universe in a way. Writing a what-if that would continue on would be kind of odd. They needed to close the stories completely. Now whether tragedy was the best way for that or not is another matter.

But they didn't really close stories did they? Yeah, some stories ended with dead characters, but there were other characters left alive who could continue on.

The What If involving the Atlantis Attacks storyline ended with super-powered serpents eating everyone in that universe then moving on to other universes.

They even had a (IIRC) 4-part storyline where the Watcher gathered people from different What Ifs to fight some multiversal menace. (Not the snakes).

It's not the possibility of killing a character off that bothered me, it was more the slaughterhouse mentality of the writer. Just killing characters to kill characters. The whole struggling to save yourself/others is missing.

To use a Star Trek reference they are treated like redshirts ("He's Dead, Jim.") rather than main characters ("After three hours of working on him I realized that I could save his life by reversing the polarity of the neuron flow").

It's not the possibility of killing a character off that bothered me, it was more the slaughterhouse mentality of the writer. Just killing characters to kill characters.

Okay, I see your point. But doesn't Trek also have a lot of alternate reality stories in which the writers always kill off one of the mains before everyone either returns to their home universe or timeline? I guess they just can't resist the chance killing off someone important and not having to deal with the afterwath.

Never knew about the multiple-issue What ifs. They came out not long before I decided I was too old and too cool for comics (and after moving to a new neighbourhood with no comic-reading classmates).

Yeah Trek has done that.

Another problem is that sometimes the Marvel writers took an idea which really needed more than an issue or two to tell, so there was a sense of rushing.

I remember when I thought I was too old for comics. Only kid my age (that I knew of) still reading comics, feeling self-conscious, worried what others would think. Was around 9 months before I came to my senses and said to hell with what others think. Was years before I filled the holes in my Warlord collection.

What If The Avengers Lost Operation Galactic Storm?, Part Two What If...? #56
NAN. At the end of the previous issue (which I don’t have) the Kree won the Kree-Shi’ar war, & the Earth was destroyed. Now it is several years later & the survivors of the Avengers & the Shi’ar Imperial Guard have banded together to fight the Kree.

Nightside & Vision have captured some valuable data from the Kree and are taking it back to their base, however the data modules were damaged, they have no other way to store the data, but Vision suggests that he could be used to store this data, & doing so erases his mind.
... why exactly would it do this? Vision presumably has more than enough memory for a lifetime of memories (rather like a human) so why can’t he just read the data and store it like anything else?

A last-ditch attempt is made to attack Hala, the Kree homeworld. Amongst those fighting the Kree is Nova, Galactus’ herald.
Okayyyyyyyyy, Nova was originally an Earthwoman, so why didn’t she just lead Galactus to Hala the next time he was hungry?

Apparently Wonder Man’s alleged immortality is vulnerable to disrupter fire.

Glom bites a female member of the Kree Starforce in half.
I assume the Kree Starforce is made up of Kree superheroes, so the fact that she is offed in just 2 panels really doesn’t say much for her fighting ability. Guess she was picked for the team cause she looked hot in that red Captain Marvel style outfit.

Okayyyyyyy, all that data that erased the Vision’s personality is being carried on a tiny CD-Rom sized disc. Yeahhhhhhh...

That data was the Kree Supreme Intelligence which now wants revenge so it destroys the Kree Empire.
Why not just destroy Emperor Ael-Dan who betrayed it and keep the empire around?

And its quest for revenge overloads its systems erasing the Supreme Intelligence forever.
Buh-bye. Shame the Kree don’t believe in backing up.

For some odd reason the writer decided to have something resembling a happy ending. It comes with the revelation that Wonder Man’s mind has been transferred to the Vision’s body. Oddly enough Wonder Man’s body looks to be in better shape during the transfer than it looked when he was blasted earlier. Maybe if they’d left him alone he would have healed completely?

Death toll
Page 1. Everyone who was on Earth, obviously. We also see the bodies of Iron Man, Hercules & Sersi.
Page 7. The Black Knight gets blasted & he dies sometime before page 10.
Page 8. Smasher apparently sacrifices himself to save the others.
Page 10. We find out Vision’s mind has been erased.
Page 17. Wonder Man’s body is blasted.
Page 18. Mentor is killed.
Page 19. Female member of the Kree Starforce bitten in half.
Page 20 Impulse sacrifices himself to kill all but one of the remaining Kree Starforce.
Page 21. Electron(?) apparently kills the last member of the Kree Starforce.
Page 24. The Kree Empire & the Supreme Intelligence are destroyed.

I definately agree with the rushed pacing. I can't remember specifics, but I remember some long jump-cuts, maybe in the one about the Invaders staying together or the following one about Cap not vanishing in WWII.

Thought I had posted it here, but I can't find it.

A while back I was looking at a What If...? tpb & the Watcher is explaining the concept of parallel universes & one scene shows Spidey & an arm with a blue sleeve & comments that no one is sure if this ever happened or not.
I cracked up because I realized it was a ref to Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man.

Funny. Maybe, just maybe, funnier than this cover (which would be even funnier without the 'All Humor Issue' blurb):
http://www.comics.org/coverview.lasso?id=50912&zoom=4

For the past few years, Marvel has been putting out one-shot issues of What If, and this year is no exception. There will even be an issue 200 of the series coming out soon.

I think they started doing one-shot issues in 2006, there were six put out that year, and then six the following year, and they were put together in a trade paperback.

I like many of the What if titles, and the fact that Uatu the Watcher is the narrator of the story, as he is the overseer of the Marvel Multiverse. Of course, he does not have as much authority as the Living Tribunal, who wields considerable power over the Multiverse, but even it answers to the mysterious higher being known as the One-Above-All, who is basically a fictional portrayal of Christianity's God. I am not very religious, but in this context, I can totally understand.

Also, I wonder if Marvel and DC will ever collaborate again, they way they did with the DC Vs Marvel and JLA/Avengers miniseries, as well as some various one shots that were put out in the last decade.

Perhaps they no longer wish to do that anymore, I'm not sure.

Actually, I meant to say that Uatu the Watcher is the overseer of the primary Marvel Universe, otherwise known as "Earth-616". But the Living Tribunal is the one entity in Marvel that does oversee and arbitrate the entire Multiverse. And while there are versions of the cosmic entities Death, Eternity, Infinity, and Oblivion for every individual universe, there is only one Living Tribunal.

Of course, like I said before, the One-Above-All is the absolute final authority on everything in the MM. He/She/It is Omnipotent, Omniscent, Omnipresent, and Omniversal. And he is "the supreme being of the Omniverse", according to the Marvel Comics Database.

"He never started, and he's never gonna end. Can you dig it!" - George Carlin, "God", from 1974's "Toledo Window Box"