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The Road Not Travelled: Let's Read Marvels WHAT IF...
- Thread starter Octopus Prime
- Start date
We’ve got a Chris Claremont story and that means we’ve got a lot of Chris Claremont stuff, as Chris Claremont (and also George Caragonne and Rod Ramos) ask us What if The Phoenix Had Lived.
Actually, looking t the credits box, George is credited with the plot and script, so maybe Chris was just there because it uses phrases like “As inevitable as death” and “Mind, body AND SOUL” constantly.
Anyhoo, this here is another two parter and its, again, riffing pretty heavily on one of the better Volume 1 stories (albeit adjusted to fit the retcons about Phoenixs nature) and it’s also… easily in the running for the darkest What If stories.
Anyhow, as Canon would have it, one day Jean Grey was having a hard time piloting a space shuttle through a solar flare and the strain she put on her psychic abilities trying to keep the ship intact caught the attention of the godlike Phoenix Force, which gave her a big honkin’ power boost; which was great in the short term since, empowered as Phoenix, Jean was able to save the universe by repairing the cracked M’Kraan Crystal and bad Long Term, as Jean was eventually mind-whacked by the illusionist Master Mind who tried to convince her to give Evil Hedonism a try leading to the creation of the planet destroying Dark Phoenix. Then Jean elected to commit suicide rather than risk losing control as the Dark Phoenix.
Then it was later revealed that Phoenix was actually a God posing as a human rather than a human wielding the power of a God, so Jean was technically in the clear for those genocides as she was unconscious in the bottom of a river, healing from massive solar radiation damage.
Anyhow, What if The Guys Who Wanted to Kill the Dark Phoenix Were Better At Their Job?
Good news is that they’re not really overachieving in that category; they just knock Phoenix out rather than killing her. This is partly because of a courtesy to the X-Men who helped save the Shi’ar from their insane former emperor D’Ken and partly because when Phoenix repaired the M’Kraan Crystal she poured part of her own life force into it and the Shi’ar were worried that killing her would undo those repairs and imperil the Universe all over again. So instead of an execution, they elect to surgically remove Jeans X-Gene and access to her telepathy (and with it; her access to The Phoenix Force)
And from a Super Hero Comic Book Standard, this doesn't result in much of a change to the status quo; in the 616 Scott mourned Jeans death then hecked off to Alaska where he met his fiance/wife Madalyn Pryor; a woman who had no super powers and was otherwise exactly like Jean in all ways (grossly simplifying things in a way beyond the scope of this story). In this story, however, things go down a very different path; for one thing Scott moves to Arizona instead where he’s happily married to a depowered Jean.
Well, he’s happy, Jean is… excessively not, judging from the vast number of cigarettes all around her and the sleeping pills she’s strongly implied to be trying to kill herself with. Seems that when the Shi’ar de powered her, they weren’t just giving her a slap on the wrist for her genocide, they also made sure she *firmly* remembered that she killed billions of innocent people and resquiggled her brains so that every time she falls asleep she relives all her atrocities commited as Dark Phoenix.
Luckily, Cyclops doesn’t have long to worry about the dangerous mental spiral Jean is on, since, like, two seconds after realizing that Jean has a lot of sleeping pills for someone who hates going to sleep and her lack of telepathy means she lost her primary means to interacting with the world, Magneto appears, blows up most of their house and says “Good news; this is one of those times when I’m also an absurdly talented engineer;I can give you your powers back!” And yoinks her off to a rebuilt Asteroid M.
Jean, to her credit, isn’t actually swayed by Magnetos offering of restoring his powers. Timeline is pretty fuzzy, admittedly, but this one of those periods when Magneto is pretty much pure evil as opposed to a guy who has a pretty justifiable distrust of humanity or a monster seeking atonement, and Jean figures that he probably has ulterior motives for trying to restore her to a state of Godhood.
Also the rest of the X-Men reach Asteroid M and a big fight breaks out while Jean has a pretty fierce internal debate about whether it’s worth restoring her mind and body at the risk of reawakening Dark Phoenix. Eventually she decides not to and destroys the machine Magneto built to restore her. However, much more significantly, her powers started coming back WITHOUT so much as touching the machine since, again, this version of Jean is quite literally a God Incarnate, not a person, even if she isn’t aware of that fact, and even Shi’ar science can’t put that particular cork back on the bottle.
Regardless, intentionally rejecting her power winds up being pretty good therapy for Jean who gets over that suicidal ideation pretty much completely and happily settles into the No Powers, Helpful Support Staff for the Xavier Institute; eventually taking over as Headmistress and the leader of the New Mutants, and gives birth to a l’il scamp that is Rachel Summers.
Riiiiiiiiight up to the point where the Secret Wars happens, (Jim Shooter, ruining everything again); and while in the 616 there was a kind of time-blip thing going on so the whole Secret War happened over the course of, like, an afternoon for everyone not involved in the fighting, in this universe it took place over the course of several weeks. Reasonably sure that’s me just no-prizing a minor plothole, however.
Anyway, while all the X-Men and New Mutants are off on Battleworld Jean is left home alone with her baby which wouldn’t be too big of an issue since most of the people who hate those teams were sent there as well. All except one; Jason Wyngarde, Mastermind; the very guy who trying to psychically manipulate Jean into being Dark Phoenix, and got his brain shredded in retaliation when the full scale of what a bad idea that was came to light.
Seems ol’ Jimmy Win never properly recovered from having his consciousness expanded beyond the limits of the universe and he’s been holding a grudge against Jean ever since. And, because that’s not quite bad *enough* it seems that being given entirely too open of a mind means that he is *much* more creative with his ability to create mind-breaking illusions which he’s happy to torture Jean with; convincing her she’s gone to hell where she’s being slashed apart by demons, burned to a crisp and eaten alive by bugs, while being forced to watch her friends and family subjected to the same punishments; up to and including seeing her infant daughter getting impaled by rusty spikes.
No discretion shots either; that’s all fully on panel.
Then we get ourselves ANOTHER little twist after Jean points out that Mastermind still has limits to his power and this is a bit beyond them and he admits that yeah, that’s well beyond Jason Wyngardes power but that’s not who’s got their hands on the steering wheel right now; it seems that Dark Phoenix blowing Masterminds soul apart left a spot perfect for the malevolent psychic demon The Shadow King to claim squatters rights and take over his body so he could have a corporeal form again.
And because this ain’t The Shadow Kings first rodeo when dealing with psychic mutants, he decides to be prudent and just shoots Jean stone dead with a normal ass gun rather than try to duel her for supremacy on the Astral Plane like he usually does. He also steals Rachel with the intent to groom her into being a perfect host body for him, and then leaves because… well… nothing else to do here.
But, again, this isn’t Jean Grey; this is a Capital G God made of meat and bone (or Fire and Life Incarnate, as the book reminds us a whole bunch of times) and after Shadow King leaves, all that Fire and Life leaves her husk and rebuilds itself a new body with a confused jumble of thoughts of both Jeans life as a human and the Phoenixs existence as a cosmic entity of raw flame and power and, thinking Jean would probably try to usurp it if the truth ever came out, vaporizes Jeans still comatose real body before leaving on a quest to get revenge on the Shadow King.
And Uatu says “Oh crap; it’s a god committing first degree murders now. That’s… maybe worse than second degree planet-killing?”
TO BE CONTINUED…
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Withholding full judgements until the stories done, but near the end of the issue when Jean and the spirit of the Phoenix and commune with one another in a strange astral plane it seems very much to be the White Hot Room that I think Grant Morrison introduced in their run of X-Men, like 15 years later.
Also in one panel, The Shadow King looks a hell of a lot like a Critter, from Critters.
We’ve got days of the futures which have past, presented when George Carragonne and Rod Ramos tell us What If The Phoenix Rose Again
The cover has a slight hint of the direction this story is going.
Anyway, after a two page recap of important context (mostly summing up the previous issue, partly summing up Phoenixs origin); we’re off to the races… and wrapping up the cliffhanger ending from the previous issue in record time.
Phoenix, having some real identity issues in being unsure if she’s a firebird goddess incarnate or a woman who tapped into cosmic power, tracks down the Shadow King to Muir Island where he’s used the islands Mutant research technology to turn the infant Rachel into an adult so he can possess her.
And Jean says “Oh… nah” and incinerates the Shadow Kings astral body and rearranges Rachel’s molecules until she’s a baby instead of an adult. This is all over in, like, two pages.
Jean says “Okay, little slip up there but I gotta make sure to not use my vast cosmic energy anymore.”
And so she does for what the caption box tells us is 8 years (Rachel still seems to be a toddler, however, but everyone is wearing their Jim Lee era costumes, so… make of the timeline as you would) when we get another plot line popping up that was briefly inferred in the previous issue, but you’d be forgiven for missing it.
Seems that anti mutant sentiment had been percolating in the background, as it does every few years, and the new President, who rode in on a platform of racism thanks to the assassination of Senator Kelly, has decided that Mutant Registration is definitely a law he should sign into legislation.
Jean pays attention to the news and says “Well… can’t have that” and zips off to the White House and brain-blasts him to remove all the racism from his perosnality.
This immediately gets him assassinated by his constituents; gun-toting mutant hating militia, and replaced by the unnamed Vice President; a guy who hates Mutants even more and immediately puts the Sentinel Program into full effect, and the new incarnation of Master Mold immediately takes over the country since… we’re doing Days of Future Past now and you’re going to get a bit of Terminator in the stew when you’re cooking with that spice.
Furthermore, based on hearing Rachel saying she had a bad dream that her mother turned into a fire bird, Wolverine decides Jean must have gone Phoenix again and tries to nip that in the bud by stabbing her a bunch as soon as she walks in the door.
He's correct but a *wild* leap based on the available evidence and kind of uncharacteristic way for him to treat her.
Luckily “several knives” are pretty far under the water mark of things Phoenix has to worry about being threatened by, so NBD, but she does elect to leave the X-Men because being repeatedly stabbed by Wolverine ruins the team dynamic a bit.
And, like, a minute after she leaves, the Mansion is attacked and destroyed by an army of Sentinels.
Seriously, they practically pass each other by; it’s not clear if this was a deliberate move from Jean or not.
Anyway, DoFP largely proceeds from here, but on an accelerated timetable. Half the X-Men died in the initial attack, most of the less impressive Mutant population shortly thereafter, and most of the super powered community along with them, and Master Mold and the Sentinels rule over the country, Skynet style.
Then Jean decides she’s done sulking over being stabbed a couple of times by the also-ran in her love triangle and opts to rejoin the X-Men, now hiding in an abandoned Sentinel factory along with whatever other survivors they could scrounge up, and, after quickly assuring them that, yes, she’s wearing red and gold instead of green and gold but she’s regular Phoenix, not Dark Phoenix, she’s welcomed back on the team.
And with several big guns, in the form of Jean and Magneto who was apparently sitting things out for the past decade, restored to them, the X-Men launch a plan to destroy Master Mold and cripple the Sentinel army; which also leads to the deaths of most of the remaining X-Men, but Phoenix lives after single handedly destroying the entire legion of robots and Kitty flings herself into Master Molds head and telefrags his brain, which is *pretty boss*. So the world is saved.
Then Destiny, who inexplicably survived all of this despite pushing 100 years old, tells Phoenix “Well… thanks for stopping all this stuff I really should have seen coming. But there are *zero* potential futures where you stay on Earth and don’t wind up incinerating the planet. And that’s the best case scenario.” And Jean says “Yeah, I thought as much” and leaves the planet to go off to… wherever Gods go when they’re off the clock.
Omnipotence City I guess?
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Provisionally, at least. As stated, this is largely a retelling of DoFP (albeit with a comparatively happier ending), and this whole two part story was somewhat revisited in the recent Jean Grey miniseries where Jean tries to figure out if any of the instances of her accepting or rejecting the Phoenix Force over the years would improve things, and many of the stories in that series had echoes in this.
NEXT TIME: It’s another silly jokes issue, which are hard to recap so… *something else*, I guess.
Well we’ve had a few two parters, so why not go for the gusto and see how the What If format works for a five part story arc, though I think the only connection is the framing device as we see in Time Quake: What If The Fantastic Five Invaded the Negative Zone?
The credits list David Cullen, Jean-Marc Lofficier and Roy Thomas as writers, but as of late, I've come to discover that Roy might have been following Stan Lee in terms of taking credit for other peoples work and it really doesn't feel very Roy Thomas-y so I suspect this might have been one of those times. David also handled the pencils.
First, as always, a brief recap to provide the necessary context, courtesy of Uatu. But this time it’s… not about setting up this story, and it’s not brief. Uatus complaining that his job of “watching Space TV” and “Nothing Else” is harder than it looks because there’s infinite parallel realities and each of them spawns an infinite number of other parallel realities and so on, so he has a lot of channels to watch even if he only has to pay attention to a few of them, sometimes. But, making his job easier (albeit in an oppressive, genocide-y way) are the Time Keepers, masters of the Time Variance Authority, and their
Recently Immortus had turned into a statue after trying to circumvent the process by marrying the Scarlet Witch who was one of the most significant Nexus Points of all, which doesn’t seem relevant to this story but they kept bringing it up so I’m assuming it’s important.
Anyway, while Uatu is busy reciting several Wikipedia articles worth of Marvel Time Travel Rules, the Time Keepers look up and say “you know we can see you, right?” and invite Uatu over to watch what they’re up to.
If Uatu is surprised to be directly involved with one of the stories he doesn’t show it, and figures “okay, as long as I don’t have to interfere”, but he sure does talk a lot during the movie, which is pretty disruptive if you ask me.
Anyway, the Time Keepers are sore over Immortus’ whole… being turned to stone and cast into limbo thing because that means they have to get involved with editing history to ensure their own ascension directly. And they’re also not great at it, and have the Watchers same “Watch But Not Interfere (in a way anyone notices) dealy, and that translates to them watching a reality they hoped to eliminate and trying to figure out the least they could to to ensure its destruction.
And with all that set up, time for the story on the cover of the comic! Which requires even more set up and context, since this is a continuation of the Fantastic Five stories previously covered in What If! You know; the ones where Reed offers Spider-Man a paycheque in exchange for some extra help superheroing; eventually driving Sue from the team and into Namors hands, who turned her into a fish man’s wife, which drove Reed insane with jealousy and caused him to build a Fishman killing genetic weapon, then repent for trying to commit Genocide and that caused Johnny to vow revenge on Reed and Namor alike.
See Uatu; that took one paragraph made up of a couple of run-on sentences, not 8 pages!
Anyway, apparently Johnny calmed down (give him five minutes and he forgets what he’s doing) and Sue eventually left Namor (her emotionally available hunky fishman hisband) in favor of Reed (who is none of those things and is also a war criminal in this continuity) and they had a kid, but, owing to… a *lot* of genetic weirdness and Cosmic Rays involved in the kids conception, both Sue and l’il baby Franklin are both dying, and the cure lies in the heart of the Negative Zone.
Long time readers may recognize this as the exact same setup as one of the FF Annuals (I want to say #6?) except Spider-Man is around. And it, indeed, is pretty much exactly the same story. In fact, it goes smoother as Spider-Man gets separated from the group and meets Annihilus (THE LIVING DEATH WHO WALKS!) and yoinks the Cosmic Control Rod off his neck when he realizes it’s a weapon of unfathomable power and not just a cool thing on Annihilus’ armor.
He then meets up with the rest of the FF, struggling with the traps and monsters in Annihilus’ fortress (there’s some fun banter) and Reed says “Oh dip, that’s exactly what we were looking for, thanks Spider-Man” and they head back to the Positive Zone, to use the Control Rod to save Sue and Franklin before they can die.
At this point, back in the framing device, the Time Keepers say “damn, doing nothing didn’t help at all!” and decide to escalate the situation by appearing before Dr. Doom and informing him that Reed Richards just got a source of cosmic energy that can bestow unlimited power and immortality.
That gets the ball rolling.
So Doom appears right the frick out of nowhere in the Negative Zone and yoinks the Cosmic Rod back from Reed in order to strand the FF in the Negative Zone then go back to Earth enjoying vast cosmic power and semi-immortality… only to then get blindsided by Annihilus as he wasn’t aware there was also a psychopathic bug man in play, and the two of them, along with the FF start playing hot potato with the Rod which is, of course, when a *fourth* party makes themselves known in the form of a huge, ghostly figure that calls itself The Whisperer appears before Doom, stops time and offers some pretty important information about what's happening.
Specifically that Doom was tricked into intervening courtesy of the Time Keepers and nobody but NOBODY manipulates Doom and also that Reed needs the Rod to save his wifes life and, whatever else Doom might think of him, Reed is a super genius and Sue is basically the only thing that keeps his head on straight (see, for example, the previous Fantastic Five story where knowing that Sue was happily married to another man made him give the go-ahead on MER-MANSLAUGHTER) and if Reed lost his wife and unborn child like this, he'd probably estroy the planet in his grief.
And Doom agrees that, yes, a simpering dolt like Reed who is careless and full of grief and rage is... probably not a great combination and he elects to give the rod to Reed to spare the world this fate; thereby proving what Doom knew all along; he's the single greatest hero the world had ever known and nobody appreciated him for it; just as he and Annihilus fling themselves into the destructive rift that everything in the Negative Zone is slowly drifting towards.
So Reed gets the Rod, hightails it back to the hospital and saves Sue and Franklins life, and at the end of time Uatu says "See? Watching And Not Interfering Is harder than it looks, ain't it?" and the Time Keepers say "Well, okay, that was one reality we failed to annihilate, but we still got four more", leading us to PART 2!
And also, as spotted by Uatu, but missed by the Keepers (always bet on the king when it comes to Watching, baby) the Whisperer reappeared just before Doom fell into the all destroying void and yanked him away to safety for reasons AS YET UNKNOWN!
Then we get a big ol splash page showing that this is part 1 of a five part story, and that it may have real consequences for the 616 Marvel Universe! Which is kind of the opposite of what people were reading What If for!
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Well, yeah, as noted, except for Spider-Man and Doom being around, this is practically a panel for panel retelling of an extant FF story. I'm not sure if the Time Keepers working to keep the human race specifically on as tight of a leash as possible was revealed previously, but it was a major plot point of Kurt Busieks Avengers Forever.
NEXT TIME: The Time Quake continues as we get Extra Sets of Space Guys!
Not gonna lie, you’re closer than you’d think.
We’ve got a tremendous villain downgrade, a continuation of a story I forgot about and nobodies favorite space heroes as Timequake continues in What if The Cosmic Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy Were Defeated By Korvac?
We’ve again got L’officier and Thomas on writing duties and Dave Hoover is on pencils. And he does a good job! Well above the average for this era of Marvel. It’s also much more clear which parts of this story Roy Thomas wrote since the narration boxes are much more plentiful, much more word heavy, and full of unnecessary information.
Anyway, we are, once again, dedicating, like, a quarter of this issue to recaps, since Uatu has to explain the Timequake story thus far (the Time Keepers exist at the end of time and are trying to keep an even hand on the tiller of history to make sure a future where they rule over time comes to be) and why they have to get involved directly (Immortus sucked at his job of doing that for them) and the previous issue (they tried to kill a prenatal Franklin Richards, but failed). Also Uatu noticed a creepy cloaked guy called The Whisperer recruit Dr. Doom for a hithertoo unknown reason.
Furthermore we also get a recap of the story this is a direct sequel to (Vision, upgraded by the sentient supercomputer Isaac, became a cyber god and ruled over Earth for the next several centuries, eventually forming a team of Space Heroes called the Cosmic Avengers, featuring the future descendants of Iron Man, She-Hulk, Human Torch and Captain America).
And yet furthermore still, we also get a recap of Micheal Korvac; a technician from the 30th century who, after being enslaved and tortured by the alien Badoon in that future, wound up getting a *very* ridiculous looking cybernetic upgrade (a large box that replaced his legs, and an eyepatch) and then got kidnapped by a succession of Godlike beings because “future cyborg” is a helpful guy to have on your payroll, even if he looks incredibly silly.
Later he would learn he also had Mega Man powers and proceeded to start murdering gods in order to take their abilities and became a time travelling hyper being that took the combined efforts of multiple centuries worth of Heroes to defeat, but for the purposes of this story he was plunked out of history by the Time Keepers when he was just A Guy With A Box For Legs.
So yeah, that’s, like, half the comics page count laying out all that and it’s not surprising that the rest of the book is incredibly verbose.
So the Cosmic Avengers (henceforth; Avengers) are chasing down and shooting up an unknown spaceship that’s come close to Earth and, as soon as they board they’re ambushed and knocked out by the crew, the Guardians of the Galaxy!
This is, of course, the even at the time forgotten original guardians of the Galaxy, not the one with Quill and Rocket and Groot and all them. We have Vance Astro (20th century Astronaut who got Buck Rogers’d), Martinex (ice guy), Charlie 27 (Big Guy) and Yondu (Micheal Rooker in the MCU). And, leading them all is a guy who is half man and half box, Micheal Korvac.
Korvac explains that he was trying to head to the 20th century so he can start munching on Gods and thus get a sweet pair of getaway sticks, but the Gods of Time (as he calls the Time Keepers) said “Oh… nah, alternate future for you” and plunked him into this timeline, and also he had some hypnotic control over the GotG, which he doesn’t really elaborate on beyond bragging that he did that.
Anyway, since Korvac isn’t just half machine, but from yet farther in the future when Box technology has advanced centuries, he is uniquely suited to attack and dethrone God, meaning Vision, and co-opting the human race. He also then hypnotizes thr Avengers as he did the Guardians because… makes more sense than not doing that. And with the Avengers help and the Guardians’ muscle, Korvac is easily able to get on to the colossal space base that is Visions mainframe.
Incidentally, Visions hollowed out the moon of Deimos for his personal base, like he was in Doom.
The bases security is no Match for the combined teams and is quickly wiped out, and Korvac plugs his giant box into the giant box port that Vision had installed… just in case someone wanted to plug an enormous box into his cpu.
It’s a Universal Super Box input?
Anyway, Korvax was right that Box from the 30th Century is a better computer than a 6th generation AI merged with super computer built by alien gods (I mean… i wouldnt take it as a given.) and starts to consume the Vision programs, and with it, full control over all technology of the Earth.
Luckily, Vision is able to get an SOS to the Future Nick Fury (lots of needless narration boxes explaining why Future Nick Fury looks and talks like Regular Nick Fury) and, after the Whisperer pops in to also explain that, yes, Korvac taking over earth is Bad Actually, he deploys SHIELD to retake Deimos.
He also realizes that the Avengers and GotG are being hypnotized so he fiddles with the Unhypnotize Button on his space gun to free them all from his mind control.
Unfortunately this took too long and Korgac ate Vision, turning the bases security robots against them (“he’s turned the bases Meks into… MURDERMEKS!” Exclaims She-Hulk. “Meks means robots!” Explains Craig in a narration box).
Luckily this is a comic written partially by Roy Thomas and that means a lot of text boxes explaining rather than showing, what the heroes did to solve this problem; Korvac might have overwhelmed Vision but him and his silly box are sitting, like, right there, so Iron Man plugs himself into Korvacs stupid box and cancels out his programming. This kills Korvac and frees Vision, buuuut Vision has also been pretty much lobotomized so… umm… he’s still dead.
But that just means that Humanity is free to do whatever it wants without a 200 year old, benevolent AI god in charge of infrastructure. To which everyone says “Eh, he was kind of a dork anyway” and at the End of Time thr Time Keepers say “Sweet! Vision was the guy we were trying to kill!”
And while they’re celebrating, Uatu notices The Whisperer popping up again and stealing Iron Man away.
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Again, no idea how to quantify that for this storyline, but I can’t think of any examples for the contents of the issue itself.
NEXT TIME: WHAT IS A MAN?!?
Fun fact: Technically the original Guardians of the Galaxy are from an alternate universe with its own reality designation, so after the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, the comics introduced the 616 version of Yondu, who you might be shocked to learn is much more similar to the Michael Rooker character than the original.
Timequake continues as we’ve got a rare Double What If, a surplus of demons, a weird double standard for villainy and some truly baffling lettering as we learn What If Wolverine and His X-Vampires Conquered the World!
Which is explicitly not what they do. The title on the cover of the comic is what happens.
Same writers as the rest of this story but this time the pencils are from Mark Pacella (who is trying to be the middle ground between Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and, honestly, pretty good for this kind of story) and letters by Janice Chang and… I have to call that out because if you notice the letting at all somethings wrong. Had to reread some pages multiple times to figure out who was saying what where.
ANYHOO, several pages worth of recapping Timequake so far and specifically the set up to this story; which was a little while back in What If where Dracula turned the X-Men into Vampires, Wolverine in turn, killed Drac and took over as lord of the undead, then The Punisher solved the problem in what Uatu claimed was “in his inimitable fashion” but which was “shooting a lot of guns” which I feel like a lot of people can do.
ANYWAY, as said this is a rare Double What If, so What If Wolverine killed Frank prior to him getting his hands on the special anti vampire spells that Dr. Strange has on hand.
For context of the overall Timequake story, it’s Jean Grey who is the Nexus Point of this story, which is weird since Jean is presently a vampire who is technically not alive, so perhaps the Timekeepers are actually looking for… Madalyn Pryor, who very much is!
Furthermore since this is based on Inferno, she’s sporting her “Technically Not Naked” Goblin Queen outfit and is hanging out with her clone-dad Mr. Sinister.
Interestingly, Sinister seems to be in Flamboyant And Catty mode for this story, even though it was written decades before that was his standard. He also has normal teeth instead of shark teeth.
Anyway, after yelling “I tell you, daughter Dracula has spoiled all my plans!”, Sinister scampers (literally scampers) out of his creepy underground lair to solve this mutant vampire situation himself, heading to Dr. Stranges Sanctum Santorum in order to steal the Darkhold from within it, leaving the run of the house to his clone-daughter. And, unbeknownst to him, her new bestie, the horse headed gargoyle and aspiring demon overlord Nastir’h. N’astirh? Nastyroth? Narsty?
Bad Horse.
Anyway, outside of a multi page fight against the now vampiric X-Terminators (which the captions note is a much more appropriate name now) Sinisters plan apparently goes off without a hitch and he will not be appearing in the story again for a while, instead we follow Maddy as she and BAD HORSE decide that if dads out of the house they can get into the metaphysical liquor cabinet and decide to crack open the gates of The Hell of Limbo and flood the streets of New York, which was already dealing with mutant-vampire plague, with a brand new plague of demons.
Despite the captions insisting this is terrible, we’ve already established that New York is basically uninhabitable so… hard to accept it as being that much worse.
Not agreeing that this is a lateral move is Wolverine, who still wanted there to be humans around on the grounds of needing to eat, so he gets off his Sexy Lady Encrusted Vampire Throne and leads his X-Pires into battle against the demon hoards of Limbo.
Which goes swimmingly since the X-Men are pretty good at handling demons in general, and now they’re blood crazed apex predators with super powers.
Maddy and BAD HORSE see their entire army get wiped out and collectively say “Well, crap…” and start wondering what their next plan will be when their next plan kicks down the door and turns Bad Horse into a skeleton as repayment for offering up some backsass.
It’s Dormammu; Faltine Lord of the Dark Dimension! And since Dr. Strange is dead, the magic that keeps him from just waltzing in and taking over the Earth no longer applies. And since the X-Vampires are exhausted from fighting the demons of Limbo, he’ll have a real easy time overwhelming him with his *own* army of Mindless Ones.
So he does. Maddy decides to stick around and not provoke the godlike Fireball Wizard with the inexhaustible army of mindless destroyer constructs and obliging downgrades herself to Chief Henchman status.
So the Mindless One army runs roughshod over the XMen Vampires (comics are fun) and then Mr. Sinister reappears, having completed his sidequest off page, holding the Darkhold and makes a deal with Wolverine; Sinister wants to be undisputed master of the Earth, and he can’t do that if the planet is subsumed by the Dark Dimension and reduced to rubble by nonsentient killing machines. So he’ll use a spell from the Darkhold to embue the (remaining) Xpires with enough magical juice to enter Limbo and save the planet from Dormammu and Maddy, but they then have to *stay off* earth. Otherwise he’ll read the Anti Vampire Spell from the book and kill the Xpires and solve the Dormammu problem some other way.
Wolverine agrees since if you can’t trust Mister Sinister, who can you trust? And, weirdly, he was telling the truth this time; and the now Magically empowered Vampire Mutant Army tears into Hell for a big ol Final Boss Fight.
However, while the XMen are cooking with vampire powers and also magically augmented with the power of the Darkhold, there’s still only, like, four X-Men versus Dormammu, Madalyn Pryor and the combined forces of the Dark Dimension and Limbo, so it’s still not quite a fair fight. Luckily for what are technically the least bad guys, The Whisperer appears again to tell Jean “Y’know… you’re not really putting all your cards on the table in this fight right now…”, and she admits that no, she’s not, but only because she doesn’t want to risk losing control of her power and going Dark Phoenix again.
However she’s also a vampire who is now empowered by the Vile God of All Evil so… umm… lateral move, so she grasps the power of the Phoenix Force, which gives her a big honkin’ power boost that she uses to turn Maddy and Dormammu to ash, and, true to his word, Wolverine says “Okay so… can’t go back to Earth so I guess we just rule Limbo now?”
And back on Earth Sinister just cooks up another Jean Grey clone because third times the charm.
And meanwhile again, the Whisperer reappears and plonks Vampire Wolverine out of reality because he’s… been doing that.
Uatu turns to the Time Keepers and says “Well you screwed up breaking history for your own ends twice, bet you feel foolish now!” Only to turn around and see there’s only two Time Keepers instead of three, so… maybe they were right about destroying reality to keep themselves alive.
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
As noted last time this story came up, pretty similar overall to Marvel Zombies, especially the later series that took the idea and went far goofier with it
I don’t think Dormammu ever attacked Limbo, but he did have a big story arc a couple of years ago where he pivoted to hassling the Guardians of the Galaxy using the Mindless Ones as an invading army and attacked the non-Earth planets of the Galaxy.
NEXT TIME: Snakes in the Brain
He rides across the nation, the thoroughbred of sin
He got the application that you just sent in
It needs evaluation, so let the games begin
A heinous crime, a show of force
A murder would be nice of course
I’ve stopped including screenshots because discord stopped being viable as an image hosting service, but I do have to include this one as it illustrates both; Sinister Literally Scampering Away and the terrible lettering; enjoy it until it disappears everywhere except the server where I keep these things!
We’ve got multiple What Ifs interrupting each other and a lack of a proper examination of the story promised on the cover as Thomas and Lofficer and Marshall Rogers and MC Wymen not only fail to bring the answer to the question of What if Thor Had Become a Minion of Seth, they don’t even raise the question in the first place.
But first, recaps of Timequake so far; going so far as to even have Uatu be tired of this storyline (“In case you’re wondering, yes, we’re still here…” is not the most thrilling opening line to a comic). Where, again, the immortal Time Keepers are trying to ensure they will exist at the end of time by erasing pivotal Nexus Beings from alternate timelines. They’ve managed to kill one of four, which wasn’t enough since it caused the Time Keepers to start vanishing, and a weird cloaked figure is abducting different characters from those realities.
Anyway, three of four Nexus Beings are accounted for and that just leaves Odin. But specifically an Odin from The Time Odin Fought a Big Snake! Aforesaid Big Snake is the Egyptian God of Death, Seth who decided to wage war on Asgard because… he’s a bad guy and that’s a Typical Bad Guy Decision in Thor comics.
I should state that this is Seth, and not Sett, who is also an overwhelmingly powerful snake-god of death and destruction. This one is more of a guy with a snake motif than a Cthulhu made of snakes.
I thought it was about the Conan one and was kind of excited because that was one of the better issues of What If volume 2.
Anyway, Seth attacked Asgard kidnapped Odin after squeezing him a bunch and Thor and his buddies The Warriors Three (sans Volstagg but plus Sif) mounted a counter attack against Seth, his army of Snake Demons (who look a lot like Cobra Troopers from GI Joe) and… erm… Grog the God Crusher.
Which, clearing up farther confusion, is not Gor the God Butcher; he was still a good 15 years away from being created; this is simply a large man with tiny armour.
Anyway, after being assured that Asgardians are merely *very* hard to kill, not immortal, most of that attack team gets killed by the Snake Demons and Grog, except Thor who reaches where his dad and Seth are waiting… only to find he’s too late; Odins got himself a tummy full of Mind Control Juice and Seth now controls him. This does not come up again in the story despite the title and cover really implying it should.
Also, more significantly, turns out Seth is working with Loki, who supplied the Mind Control Potions (he explains that he’d rather take over Asgard without being beholden to anyone else for help but, well… as long as he gets to take over Asgard in general… whatever, beggars can’t be choosers). Then Thor gets clonked on the head and wakes up in Seth’s dungeon, alongside Karnilla the Norn Queen, who is also hanging around for some reason.
She also doesn’t factor into this story in any capacity beyond being threatened by sexual violence by Grog the God Crusher because this is a comic from the early 90s.
Anyway, now a quick intermission where the other Main Gods of Various Pantheons, like Zeus and Quetzecoatl, and Yu-Huang and… umm… Mephisto (?) are convening deciding that Seth attacking and dethroning Odin is the kind of situation that demands a swift violent response. Which also feels like it should be a major plot point for this issue and also never comes up again.
Also Vishnu kind of looks like Reginald Vel Johnson.
Anyway, the reason most of these plot lines come to nothing and, indeed, the story on the cover doesn’t happen is because there’s a surprise jailbreak in Seth’s dungeons courtesy of the demonically empowered Mutant Vampire King Wolverine, The Future Iron Man of a Cyber Utopia and… Standard Issue Dr. Doom who collectively free Thor, stab the *hell* out of Grog before he can sexually assault Karnilla (she still has no lines of dialogue, this comic is gross) and also kill Lokis sycophantic minion before the Whisperer appears again and explains he’s been snatching people the Time Keepers have *not* been focusing on in order to build a team of Multiversal guardians to help stop them.
This is also the first time the Whisperer has appeared in a place where the Time Keepers can notice him, and they comment that there’s certainly something familiar about him but don’t know what.
Anyway, with Thor in tow, the team storms Seth’s throne room and a big ol’ Comic Book Fight breaks out; Wolverine and Doom fight Loki (turns out Cthon + Dracula + Wolverine > Asgardian + Frost Giant, update your spreadsheets accordingly), Thor fights Seth (pretty easily, weird he had such a hard time before) and Iron Droid fights a PROTECTROID; a robot weapon from the Time Keepers arsenal as he’s realized that two counterparts have now vanished so there’s really no room for subtlety now if he wants to remain alive.
Anyway, the good guys (well half them are, at least) win and the last Time Keeper evaporates… and the Whisperer removes his cloak to reveal himself to be Immortus!
Turns out that when the Time Keepers imprisoned him in Limbo until the future time when they would need him again, they forgot he, y’know… could travel through time. Which is precisely why they hired him in the first place. Furthermore he was also imprisoned in the specific part of Limbo he had total control over. So the whole imprisoning thing really didn’t accomplish much; it was like giving a kid a time out but not taking away his video games.
Anyway, the moment Immortus was able he started a campaign of revenge against the Time Keepers by making sure four Nexus Beings would be free and ensure that the Time Keepers never come to pass (I should stress they still haven’t explained why this is the case) and he started collecting his own team of agents to make sure the Time Keepers failed to save themselves. And now that they’re dead, he’s free to, as he puts it, “Become the soul master… if TIIIIIIIIIIME” before whisking off to parts unknown, and the What Ifvengers all say “Well crap… I guess we should have asked literally any questions about this, huh?”
Meanwhile, outside of time, the (literally) faceless bureaucrats of TVA try to work out if this is a problem they should be concerned about, and also lament that they’re bureaucratic drones so they are literally incapable of having any ideas that would stop Immortus and the impending Time Quake he’s about to unleash.
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Yep! And much more successfully the second time around; Whisperer/Immortus’ whole plan was largely the basis for the Winnick/Beddard series Exiles although being a slow burn mystery over the course of several dozen issues means it had more time to cook rather than making everyone involved look kind of like idiots. Also, not in the 616, appropriately enough this was the premise of the finale of the first season of the What If Disney + series and the TVA deciding “Are… are we just cool with temporal genocide now if the bosses are dead?” was the whole plot of Loki.
NEXT TIME: Interference
Timequake comes to an... honestly pretty solid conclusion as this time Gavin Curtis and Ian Aiken are the artsists who ask us What If The Watcher Saved the Multiverse. And honestly, kind of down on the whole Timequake storyline and this is not a proper What If at all, but damned if it's not a fun story.
So quick recap; the Time Keepers, the godlike beings who rule over the end of Time and try to make sure history doesn't get too unspooled were all aflutter because their chief agent to that end, Immortus, wound up betraying them and decided to become the God of Time instead; via the convoluted means of letting four people, infused with time altering Nexus Energy, who can drastically affect the course of destiny to go free. Then, disguising himself as the cloaked "Whisperer" he assembled a team to help him exacerbate this situation making sure that the Nexus Beings exist long enough to destroy the Time Keepers by messing up history. This worked; the Time Keepers are no more and Immortus stole the remaining Nexus Energy to become an entity of Pure Time sweeping over the universe, resetting events whenever they don't go precisely the way he wants them to and wiping out entire dimensions.
This is a real irritation for the TVA; the faceless bureaucracy that makes sure time works correctly. And the fact that the Immortus Wave (as it's now known) is breaking apart the entire multiverse means they have to do something they've never considered before and... do anythino. SO they call in Uatu since he was there for this whole storyline so far so he's the most experienced person they could find to solve this problem.
You can really tell that Uatu is just dumbstruck at how ineffectual the TVA is as a governing body; he has a cosmic oath that binds him to Watch and Not Interfere, they elevate that to an artform. You can almost hear him say "Cripes, is this what it's like when other people deal with me?"
Incidentally, while the rank and file of the TVA look like mannequins, the executives all look like Mark Gruenwald.
Anyway, after a lot of filibustering, the Executives realize that, as per comic book narrative logic, they must already have the solution to the problem well in hand; the group that Immortus already summoned, and who were all annoyed at him for doing so; Iron Man, Thor, Dr. Doom and Wolveracula; now known as The Time Titans.
This is not a group that ever went on to exist again, because as it turns out, "Four guys against the combined armies of Limbo and a living time paradox" is outrageously one sided, even when that team has 300 years worth of Stark tech, Dr. Doom, a Demon Mutant Vampire Wolverine and Thor. Every time they even start to make a little headway into attacking Immortus' fortress, Immortus resets the battle so they're back where they started until his forces eventually work out how to overwhelm them. It's kind of like Live Die Repeat, except for the bad guys.
So after watching the Time Titans fail and die a few too many times, Uatu says "Friggin' screw it, history is abut to come undone, I'm calling this an "Interfere, Don't Watch" situation and tells the TVA what to do to solve the problem. Turns out the organization has access to a Satyr9 Symbiont; a parasitic poison that will feed on Nexus Energy (named after Queen Satyr9, from Captain Britain/Excalibur); so all they have to do is convince Immortus to ingest it when he was a young man *prior* to getting his first time machine and starting an almost impossible to untangle cross time empire; and Uatu even tells them how to do that; by chucking a Fantastic Four team from another What if Universe.
And because Corporate Suits just absolutely can not help but meddle with things that would otherwise work; they chose the wrong group; who are absolutely incapable of convincing the future Nathanial Richards (pre Kang/Immortus/Rama Tut/Centurian/Iron Lad/Victor Timely/whoever else) to ingest the Symbiont for the sake of not quite rearranging history.
To be fair, four strangers suddenly appearing in your garage telling you to drink poison because they're the alternate universe version of your... however many Great-Great Grandpas add up to being alive 1000 years ago and they're worried that when you're an old man you'll become a Time Quake is a really hard sell. Especially when the one making that weird-ass claim doesn't share any of your DNA, due to brain-swapping into another guys body.
That was in GLengary Glonross, I think.
Anyway, Proto-Immortus ain't having none of it and he has his first-draft robot guards immediately kill the absolute holy hell out of the FF.
They're like, *wow* dead.
Johnny gets his entire head removed by a spike on panel.
So the TVA decide to follow this plan up by saying "Well... we have to send the FF to solve the problem so let's send EVERY FANTATSIC FOUR TEAM IN THE MULTIVERSE! One HAS to work!" and Uatu responds by calling them a bunch of idiots and making them do his original plan; get the Fantastic Four team that was basically the Challengers of the Unknown instead of superheroes!
This time the plan works, since this FF has no powers their DNA is completely human so Immortus can do the Year 3000 version of an Ancestry.com test and learns that, yes, Reed is totally his Late 20th Century Grandpa. And furthermore, Reed also proved he knows what he's talking about since he was smart enough to know how to disable all of Immortus' robot soldiers. Also; they don't leave anything to chance and just forcefeed him the Symbiont because politeness doesn't matter so much at the moment.
So that works, the Immortus Wave is immediately wiped out (Satyr 9 is powerful enough to supersede Marvels usual time travel rules that way) and Uatu throws up his arms in frustration to show these Non Interfering posers how it’s done in the Big Leagues.
And then the Time Keepers come back! And then they immediately melt and are replaced by a second set of Time Keepers, because the original set were actually the Time Twisters; their evil counterparts and that’s why they were trying to kill so many people, usually the Keepers are more Neutral. Thats because this story needed at least one more baffling unneeded plot twist.
They all say “Thanks for saving the Multiverse, Uatu!” And Uatu leaves yelling “Don’t call me again!” While the TVA directors all congratulate each other for a job well done, despite that bald guy constantly trying to butt in.
BUT DID IT HAPPEN
Well… yeah this is actually canon to the 616. Retcon canon, but canon. It’s a Therefor not a What If
The “let’s just send wave after wave of Fantastic Four at the problem” thing popped up in Exiles, where that series equivalent of the TVA sent wave after wave of Wolverines at a problem. Didn’t work any better there either.
NEXT TIME: The *other* reality threatening disaster the Marvel universe was really worried about in 1992
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It’s really jarring to go from a present day comic where there’s, like, three lines of dialogue per page to this
Okay, so we've hit a bit of a gap in Marvel Unlimiteds What If coverage and we went straight from issue 40 to 49, but it's a pretty good one to come back to as we see some pretty spurious instances of power corrupting and a bunch of semi-nude ladies when Ron Marz and Scott Clark reveal What If The Silver Surfer Possessed the Infinity Gauntlet.
Scott Clark, incidentally, does a really good job with the art in this one; feels enough like a mix between Starlin and Perez' work that it really slots in nicely with the actual Infinite Gauntlet story. More than makes up for the fact that the story itself is kind of disappointing.
As for the story itself, we're kicking off from one of the... wilder and more dumb instances of the Infinite Gauntlet storyline; wherein Thanos, having stolen the power to dwarf any force in the universe, proceeded to destroy fully half of all living things, murdered a bunch of heroes who opposed him and dethroned all of the upper tier of Gods all in the effort to impress his prospective Spooky Goth Girlfriend, Death. Part of the effort to stop him involved the Silver Surfer holding back, waiting around for Thanos to raise his arm at any point during the fight and then yank the glove right off his hand. A stupid, stupid plan that completely failed to work and really threw the strategic thinking of Marvels greatest minds into question.
But heck, What if It Was a Good Idea Afterall?
So... yeah, Norrin yanks the Gauntlet right off Thanos' hand, easy-peasy and immediately declares this war to be far more finite than previously implied. Thanos tries to get it back with all the effort of saying "Hey! Give-it!" and Norrin saying "Nah" and deciding that since he's technically the master of Space anyway (He's the sentinel thereof, at least. So... sure, judicial jurisdiction at least), he might as well also be the master of Time, Soul, Reality, Power and Mind as well, and puts the Gauntlet on himself. And the first thing he does is immediately undo all the murders Thanos committed, and eradicating Terraxia, the gender-swapped Thanos-clone who was totally into him that he made to make out with in order to make Death jealous of him.
Some... some parts of the Infinite Gauntlet hold together better than others, narratively.
Norrin also realizes that since he wields the power to destroy the Gods themselves, he probably should have a couple of people on hand to act as advisors; and naturally appoints Adam Warlock (the space Jesus who pointedly Never Ever Wants to Do Anything to Get Involved Ever) and Thanos (who just, quite literally, murdered half the entire universe to impress his girlfriend). He also tells the assorted upper tier Gods, like The Living Tribunal, the Inbetweener, the Celestials, Galactus and whoever else happened to be nearby that just because the universe is under new management, that doesn't mean they're out of a job; and instructs them to go right back on to... doing whatever it is that embodiments of fundamental forces do when they're not incarnating.
He also specifically tells Galactus that there's no hard feelings for the difficult-to-discern number of years he spent as his minion and herald and not to be jealous because technically the Surfer is his boss now. And Galactus says "Y'know how you were just some guy before I reforged your entire being out of a fraction of my power? I am *really sure* you aren't up to the task of being God."
And then Thanos and Adam Warlock share a look.
Anyway, Norrins second order as God is "Fix Up this Dump", which he does by first replacing Thanos creepy skull temple with an idyllic garden, and then removing all sources of unpleasantness from the universe; there's no more sickness or disease, plenty of food and resources and no more war or strife. Everyone is enjoying some generalized peace and contentment.
Thanos is particularly agahast when ,as a result of this, Norrin also makes Death look like a beautiful ethereal woman instead of a creepy-goth semi-skeleton lady. Not sure if this is because Norrin is upsetting the natural order or because of Thanos' weird horny hang-ups regarding the grim reaper.
Anyway... off to Hell.
Norrin decides that he should really let Mephisto know that there's been a change of management and he's God now, so he should really consider getting on board with how things are going to change with their professional relationship as arch enemies and maybe we don't really even need a hell anymore. To which Mephisto reminds him that he is quite literally (sometimes, depending on the writer) the Devil, and "Opposing God in all Ways" is, like, 100% of his entire job so a (very brief) fight breaks out, ending with the Surfer obliterating him with a snap of his fingers.
And apparently "Just up and killing the devil" is a step too far for both Adam Warlock and Thanos and they agree that Norrins power has gone to his head. My own read is "Respective Power levels notwithstanding, why hasn't anyone done this before now? The superheroes all know the devil is a real guy, why is this the first time this was tried?"
Anyway, Thanos and Adam Warlock head off to Doctor Strange, since he and the Surfer go way back to their Defenders days and try to work out a plan to overthrow Norrin because "Killing the bad guy from the bible" is apparently an instance of breaking bad while Norrin demands a bit of personal time while he works out what he should do now that Hell is closed for business and how to make people take him seriously as God.
And the best he can come up with is to decide that it's apparently a height issue so he uses the unlimited power of the Infinity Gauntets ability to manipulate the universe to make himself 30 feet tall.
Sidebar, but I have never been completely sure what their relationship status is beyond "true love" and also whether or not she's dead or alive. I always assumed the Surfers life on Zenn-La was hundreds of years ago, but sometimes she's still around, sometimes she's been reincarnated, sometimes Zenn-La is long gone, sometimes it's easily accessible. Not sure if the Surfers inability to return is a Can't or a Won't situation.
Anyway, the relevant part is that Shalla-Bal is the only person Norrin wouldn't mind spending eternity with, so he bequeaths half the power of the Infinite Gauntlet to her to make her his equal in terms of being the omnipotent ruler of the universe... which was the plan, since she apparently also has an issue with his decision to murder Satan (which, again, ethically seems just fine to me), and the two of them have a big flashy superhero fight.
They're both now planet sized, and he's a shining form of angelic grace and she's a Very Large Woman Wearing Lingerie, which kind of undercuts the cosmic scale of this battle between Gods somewhat.
Anyway, after a bit Surfer realizes that, even if they both possess half the power of infinity (there's some tricky math for you) he's still beating on his wife and that's a much worse look for him than being Very Tall and murdering satan, so he instead turns the power of the Gauntlet back on to itself and destroys it and the Infinite Gems contained within it, but not before Un-godding himself and Shalla-Bal. So they go on to live an idyllic life on a garden planet he'd created earlier, with Norrin restored to his former human (Zennlavian?) form and Shalla-Bal still in her nightie. And Adam Warlock goes back into the depths of the universe saying "Don't call me again" and Strange goes back to his full time job protecting Earth from the Supernatural and Thanos looks at the wrecked Infinite Gauntlet and says "Ah nuts."
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
"What if we let someone who doesn't suck use The Infinite Gauntlet this time?" has been the basis of dang near every consequent Infinite Gauntlet story, and it usually winds up going poorly in much more understandable ways than in here. Additionally, Jason Aarons Avengers run concluded with all the superheroes fighting and killing Mephisto, but nobody had any problem with it in this case. Presumably because there was an infinite number of Mephistos so killing a whole bunch didn't matter.
NEXT TIME: Yes?
We’ve got some authorial revenge and a lot of violence as Simon Furman and Geoff Senior as us What if Deaths Head 1 Had Lived?
You may, reasonably, need a lot more context for that hypothetical than usual this time around. And Uatu is… not bringing his A Game to omniscient narration. Luckily Deaths Head is a character I love so I wasn’t personally out to see this time around.
Without getting too inside baseball, owing to differences in how British as opposed to American, comics are published, Marvel UK needed more, shorter stories and sometimes that lead to creating their own series. Some, like Captain Britain, wound up being more or less popular and making it up to being important parts of the main 616 stories. Deaths Head wasn’t quite as much of a success but was a really fun character; kind of Marvels equivalent of Judge Dredd; a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi action comic about an incredibly violent android
But What If Minion Sucked At Killing Deaths Head?
Turns out that Minion, for all its ridiculous power and the fact that it brags about having 105 distinct personalities allowing it to accommodate any kind of battlefield condition (a lot; bragging about how much personality he has is his only personality trait), it apparently just plum forgot that DH has a teleporter. Which it uses frequently throughout his own comic to explain how he gets where he goes so easily, and this is no exception, leaving just before Minion can kill him. Minion does, however, take the opportunity to kill and assimilate Reed Richards who was hanging around for... I'm sure are easily explained plot reasons that Uatu didn't explain and aren't in Marvel Unlimited so I have no context for them.
Then, as in the 616, Baron Strucker the Fifth sneaks up on Minion while he's distracted and downloads his own personality into Minions body (so now he has 107, including Reeds) and transforming him into Charnal, and finally catching us up to the cold open; the grim rain soaked streets of Manhattan in the year 2020.
In this case, you don't want to be out and about in Manhattan in the year 2020 because the employment rate for android mercenary killers is at an all time high rather than the more historically accurate reasons why it was a terrible time and place to be in.
The lady in the trenchcoat and who look s LOT like Jean Grey, is, in fact, Dr. Necker, the robotologist who created Deaths Head in the first place and, annoyed that DH really doesn't like taking orders or respect her even slightly, decided to dedicate her life to trying to decommision him and build a replacement that will help her in her generalized Evil Mad Scientist plans. She probably sounds like she'd be the major villain of the series, but it was much more episodic than serialized so she really didn't come up that often. The kid is Spratt, who insists he's Deaths Heads assistant and best friend, DH disagrees with this, frequently leaves him for dead and, at best, uses him as an expendable errand boy.
Anyway, Dr. Necker has come to DH to ask his help since the unstoppable murder-cyborg that already nearly killed him has just turned into a MAGICAL unstoppable cyborg that is obsessed with murder and since DH was only Almost Killed by Minion, that means he's, by far, the best candidate to stop him. And if Charnal successfully kills everyone, DH would have a much harder time finding clients.
DH sees the logic in this and, after fixing up his teleporting time machine, heads over to the Modern Day 616 to get some reinforcements, correctly surmising that there's an abundance of superheroes who would be eager to either avenge Reed Richards' death or else to save the beleaguered people of 2020 who are caught in the menace of an unstoppable scourge. If they have time after stopping the killer cyborg.
This sales pitch works, and soon the rest of the FF, Captain America, Namor, War Machine and Luke Cage (?) travel with DH to the future to fight Charnal; which they then immediately proceed to do because he's a brightly colored cyborg who is blowing up everything in sight and screaming about how many personalities he has and how unstoppable he is, and the next 15 or 20 pages or so are just Fight Scene.
Or more accurately, "killing spree" since, on top of an absurd level of strength and durability, Charnal has the ability to redirect any force thrown against him so the entire team gets absolutely, and graphically, torn to shreds by the cyborg until only Deaths Head is left. And he'd been purposely hanging back while everyone else wore down Charnal. Which still isn't enough and Chanal also beats DH, but hesitates right before being able to land a killing blow, leading DH to exploits Charnals one weakness; that he dies if you chop his head off!
We're then told, though saw absolutely no evidence of it at any other point in the comic including when Charnal was killing the Fantastic Four, that Reed, though absorbed, wasn't helping Charnal and that part of his personality was trying to stop the other 106, leading him to fighting much more sloppily while dealing with Deaths Head until a fatal blow could be struck. So, in the end, Reed apparently died a hero, but, more importantly, Deaths Head secured future clients because he's proven himself capable of beating an unstoppable magic cyborg that was obviously capable of beating some of the Heavy Hitters of the Marvel Universe.
Take THAT, Marvel Editor in chief Tom DeFalco!
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Way fewer deaths, but yeah, kinda. As I mentioned, Tini Howard wrote a really fun Death Head miniseries that brought him back, politely pretending that Deaths Head 2 and Charnal and all that didn't happen. Instead Deaths Head was only mostly destroyed and it took a while for his repair systems to finish building him a new body, and had to team up with Wiccan, Hulking and a mopey Emo Teen Deaths Head to deal with Dr. Necker who built a whole bunch of new and improved models.
NEXT TIME: Stormin'
We’ve got another two parter, and perhaps the everybody-dies-iest What If since that Atlantis Attacks issue when Len Kaminski and Craig Brassfield ask us What if the Avengers Lost Operation Galactic Storm.
Sidebar but hoo nelly, is the art rough in this. I’m not familiar with Craig Brassfields work so maybe this just isn’t him on his A-game but this is a bad looking comic.
Anyway, Galactic Storm is the name of the storyline, as it was the early 90s and Marvel has a tendency to letting the news dictate their stories sometimes. It was largely a retread of the 70s’ Kree/Skrull war but with a much less compelling group of Avengers. And without the Skrulls. Seems that the Kree (who are somehow only Pretty Bad as far as Marvel alien races are concerned despite being a eugenics obsessed expansionist alien empire) decided to go to war with the Shi’ar. And they decided to have their war on the neutral ground of Earth; despite both empires being fully aware that the place is lousy with superheroes who respectively beat them up/save them constantly. The Avengers hear about this and think “Not in our backyard, thanks” and send a peace delegation to try to at least have their war on a different planet, but fail because the exiled Princess of the Shiar and everyone’s (or at least my) favourite evil space bird lady Deathbird snuck into the peace conference and killed the hell out of some high ranking Kree dignitaries.
So naturally this considerably worse timeline kicks off when she fails to commit a major political assassination.
Cap notices Deathbird (she’s a tall woman with feathers instead of hair, giant claws and a suit of armor that’s mainly spikes and tubes, it’s not difficult to pick her out of a crowd) and disarms her before she can kill the Kree leaders. She is then immediately executed for attempted regicide in a time of war.
And, like, she was disarmed but still; fair.
Then the surviving member of the Kree ruling class, Ael-Dan learns that the Kree Supreme Intelligence, the living super computer that governs their species, was colluding with Deathbird to overthrow the government (sometimes Supremor is in charge of the Kree sometimes it’s just really good at manipulating people. The Kree political climate is hard to pin down), and has him deactivated with a code word kill switch. Then he chucks a spear through his vice president because… he’s been killing a lot of potential political rivals over the last few minutes and he’s got a real taste for it.
He also throws spears into the chests of the aides and understaff who undermine him with statements like “The Supreme Intelligence forbade the use of that weapon” or “Did you just stab the vice president?” Or “Why are you arresting Captain America after he saved you from an assassin?”
Ael Dan learned that the best way to cut through red tape is to also cut through the people holding that red tape.
Dans first order of business, not counting impaling a whole lot of people, is to blow up the Earth, which I guess the Kree could just do basically whenever the hell they wanted by pressing a button on their computer.
As an encore he also blows up the Shiar throne world of Chandilar. But that happens off panel and far less dramatically.
So now the human race is down to the half dozen or so Avengers who happened to be on Hala; Captain America (arrested and awaiting execution for… umm… preventing an assassination?), Black Knight (the Dane Whitman one), Sersi of the Eternals, Crystal of the Inhumans and Hercules (all of whom are currently in a Kree concentration camp being tortured to death) and Iron Man and Hawkeye (who are on the run).
Hawkeye realizes that since the Kree are aliens they’ve probably got face blindness for humans, and since Clint Barton and Steve Rogers look really similar even when the comics pencil work is a lot better than it is here, all they’d have to do is sneak Hawkeye in to the Kree gulag, have him and Cap swap uniforms and then Clint can die in Steve’s place!
This plan works since this was one of those times when Hawkeye was the Pym Particle guy not the Bow and Arrow guy, and having Captain America at large for overthrowing a murderous fascist is a much better prospect than the guys whose super power is “gets in over his head and is surly”.
Oh, also, Iron Man fights Ronan the Accuser and blows himself up to kill him. Thats how Clint snuck into the prison but nobody gets too broken up about that.
Anyway, Cap, like, instantly comes upon the Kree resistance who want to overthrow Ael Dan (you do one little coup, and blow up two measly densely inhabited planets and everyone gets all up in your business) and together they infiltrate the camp where the rest of the Avengers are being held, and free them.
Which is about a day late and a dollar short for most of them; Sersi and Hercules were tortured nearly to the point of death and have been viciously mutilated as a result, and they elect to sacrifice themselves to help the rest of them escape.
My no prize explanation for how Sersi could be in that rough of a shape despite “Never being harmed by any conceivable means, and instantly restored if they are being The Eternals whole deal” is that the destruction of The Machine That is Earth ruined her immortality, so her body is rapidly decaying. Certainly makes more sense than what the arts suggestion of “the Kree pulled her hair and therefor now she’s old”.
Anyway, the remaining Avengers and the Kree resistance all manage to escape the planet in a stolen ship where they meet up with the rest of the Avengers who were all headed to Chandilar, but didn’t arrive before that planet was blowed up, as well the Shiar Imperial Guard, who I’m sure are just torn up about failing, like, the only thing people ask them to do.
Next Time: Further storms in the galaxy
We got lots of punching and explosions and not a heck of a lot else in What if The Avengers Lost Operation Galactic Storm Part 2!
This time the art duties were shared by John Czop, Darren Auck, Dave Simons, Craig Bashfield, Frank Turner and Jim Amash. And with that many cooks in the kitchen you know you got a good stew! I mean, it looks way better than the last issue but it’s still rough.
Anyway, Uatu skips the recap of the original Galactic Storm, and the contents of the previous issue, since there’s been a time skip anyway, and all the plot important interesting stuff happened between issues. Anyway, as you no doubt recall of the post directly above this one, the new Kree Emperor, having ascended to his throne by giving everyone in his contact list a free stabbing, and acting a bit Hitlerier than usual even by the standards of a eugenics obsessed expansionist space empire. Then he blew up Earth and Chandilar.
Anyway, a plan worth doing is worth overdoing, so over the next several years, Ael Dan kept the pace going, blowing up quite a few other planets (Uatu himself admits he couldn’t keep track of the sheer number of atrocities he’s committed) all on the grounds that the species who lived on those planets aren’t up to Kree standards for genetic purity, while the survivors are rounded up in internment camps hoping in vain that at least their deaths will be swift and painless. He also gives a lot of speech’s about how great a job he’s doing.
Meanwhile, out on some other planet, the new Avengers, made up of the difficult to ascertain surviving members of the Avengers and Shi’ar Imperial Guard have finally decided to start fighting back against Ael Dan, and infiltrate a Kree science base, stealing valuable data. Unfortunately a bunch more get killed in the infiltration, and the computer they were pilfering gets damaged, forcing the Vision to sacrifice himself to preserve the data by replacing his own personality with it.
This was the White Vision of the early 90s that didnt actually have a personality, so I don’t know why everyone was so upset. It’s functionally no different from having your Netflix queue suddenly disappear.
Anyway, with the data they stole the Avengers opt to attack Hala directly (Thor brings in the armies of Asgard to help the attack, who I guess were just ignoring the galactic genocide thing), and everyone gets in a big ol fight against the Kree space force and the Lunatic Legion and Cap gets into the installation where the Supreme Intelligence was once stored and makes use of that data that Vision replaced his brain with where we learn it was actually a backup disc for the Supremors personality; resurrecting it.
The Supreme Intelligence is real angry that Ael Dan killed it and that the Kree thought they could run their empire without its guiding hand, so it immediately took control of the entire Kree armadas computer systems and immediately forced them to self destruct. Then, off panel and basically not appearing in this comic at all, Ael Dan commits suicide, to further cement the whole Hitler comparison. Also this burns out the Supremors systems so it also dies again.
So with the entire Kree race now dead, Cap kind of assumes control of the galaxy and says “Huh, I guess this kind of makes the galaxy like the USSR. A concept which existed for, like, a year before the Earth got blowed up”.
A Happy Ending?
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Not so much, but kind of. Most of the Marvel cosmic books since… I want to say Annihilation, have had an undercurrent that the Galaxy is still broken and trying to repair itself after the previous galaxy spanning conflict. Usually just as another one comes by to reset things back to zero. Also, the fifth season of the Agents of SHIELD dealt with the future survivors of the Earth getting blowed up living in a Kree run gulag. Also the Supreme Intelligence tried to kill the Kree entirely, like, every time it pops up.
NEXT TIME: Lovers of Loving Love
We’ve got wedding bells and death knells as Kurt Busiek and Ron Randall bring us A What If Wedding Album, featuring Jean Grey and Scott Summers exclusively.
I don’t recall if Ron’s shown up in What If before but he’s good at what he does; drawing really dynamic action scenes and lovingly rendered beautiful people.
So a weird kind of framing device this time as we’ve got Uatu peeking in on Scott and Jeans long awaited wedding, and he’s mainly using off handed remarks from the wedding guests in order to segue into a thrilling (albeit not especially romantic) story from across the multiverse… that all revolve around Jean not marrying Scott. And then everyone dying.
Well, except the first one; What If Scott and Jean Got Married Earlier.
Specifically, they got married just after Uncanny X-Men was out into reprints but before Giant Size brought them back. As it turns out Jean got a book deal and they decided to both retire from the superhero lifestyle in order to promote it full time, and also get married.
The rest of the X-Men agree that, yes, holding down a steady career is probably a better use of their time than fighting robots made for hate crimes and brotherhoods of all moralities and similarly retire from the superhero game.
Charles allows it but is upset because founding X-Men teams is all he’s good at, and he promptly recruits a new one. It’s made up of Storm, Colossus, Aurora, Northstar and Catseye (who is apparently a very large talking cat, kind of hitting the bottom of the barrel, Chuck).
But before there’s a need to get too hung up on how the dynamics of that team works, they’re all immediately killed and eaten on their first mission; to investigate KRAKOA! THE ISLAND WHO WALKS LIKE A MAN.
In the 616, Krakoa let Cyclops escape in order to allow him and Charles to lure more mutants in to create an infinitely replenished larder for itself. Here it didn’t bother, and ate Chuck too, since he tagged along for the mission.
Anyway, supercharged on some rather tougher mutants than he was in the 616, Krakoa is well fed enough to attack Japan in search of more food where Sunfire and the Avengers team up to fight it, eventually killing the monsters and revealing a bunch of X-Men corpses, and at the funeral Scott and Jean think “Ah geez, I hope this isn’t our fault in some ways”.
Which brings us to the second story, as at the Wedding, Warren Worthington (formerly The Angel, currently the Arch Angel, and presently… I think dead?) briefly mentions he used to have a crush on Jean and Uatu does that Leo DeCaprio pointing at a tv thing and says “THAT! LET’S WATCH THAT!”
So we get What if Jean Grey Loved The Angel. If that’s what you’re in for, bad news; they barely appear on panel in this story.
Anyway, in this story Jean falls for the devastatingly handsome multi billionaire instead of the mopey guy, and this denies Scott the opportunity to become the emotional available people pleaser her normally is.
Which sounds sarcastic, but, like, take the Cyclops is No Fun thing people have stuck him with for decades and multiply it by a thousand, that’s Scott in this story.
Scott is straight up a dick to absolutely everyone, and pours himself into his work; being the field leader of the X-Men (going so far as to use his optic blasts to slam a door shut when Iceman has the absolute gall to suggest catching a game on Tv when there’s an entire brotherhood worth of Evil Mutants at large). And between Bobby’s insistently wanting to spend time with his friend and team mate and Chuck faking being injured to see how Cyclops handled being boss without constant mental supervision, Cyclops winds up leaving the team because they’re not taking things seriously enough.
Also Charles gives the Team leader position to Hank McCoy on the grounds that Scott is being a little asshole.
Anyway, Scott winds up joining Magneto and the Brotherhood since they’re at least serious and goal oriented.
Back at the Wedding, Rogue mentions not being surprised, just disappointed, that Wolverine didn’t show up. And Uatu says “Ooooooooh!” And tells us what would happen if Phoenix Married Wolverine
And up to a certain point, nothing particularly different. They specifically shacked up just when Mastermind started manipulating her to embrace her wild hedonistic side, and she said “Hey, a scruffy weird loner who smells like wet tobacco! That’s what I’m into!”. And what follows is… a quick summary of The Dark Phoenix saga
And credit to the artist again, Ron draws the hell out of it without making it a pastiche of John Byrnes original art. Really well done work.
Anyway, the story happens basically the same but with Wolverine replacing Cyclops in a couple of instances; most notably the finale when Jean starts to lose control of herself and revert to Dark Phoenix. Logan just starts angrily yelling at her to calm down and control herself, which has never worked in the history of that phrase being uttered, and she does quite the opposite, is fully consumed by her own omnipotence, and proceeds to destroy the Earth and the rest of the universe.
Then back at the wedding, Scott and Jean say their I Dos, aww
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Scott and Jean, and the rest of their polyamorous quadruple, lived in their own place on the moon for a while, but kept it casual.
NEXT TIME:
Age of A Poppa-clypse
I feel like that story was cut off before it could get going. I mean, "What if Cyclops joined the Brotherhood" is a tantalizing story in its own right.
Way more meat on them bones than “What If Dark Phoenix Again”
We’ve got a writer I dislike putting dialogue over a story that’s hard to follow with characters who look wrong when Warren Ellis, Benny Powell and Hector Gomez bring us What if Legion Killed Magneto.
Credit to the cover blurb because the plot does not at all go in any expected directions, also there’s no Uatu to give any context for the things that happened as a result (credit it where it’s due; while I dislike Ellis, he is a professional writer so you can figure things out from context clues, up to the point where the art falls apart. Also, want to shout out Sam Parsons on colouring duty because he can’t give anyone the same skin tone for two consecutive panels.
Y’all… this isn’t one of the better What Ifs.
Anyway; as my existing X-Men in the 90s Knowledge tells me, because this is in media’s rez and the comic does nothing at all to explain the set up, David Halley (Legion), the illegitimate son of Professor X with a chip on his shoulder larger enough to fit the hundreds of split personalities he has (plus nigh omnipotence, since each of those personalities has a distinct, high level mutant power) decided that the best way to deal with his filial abandonment issues was to travel back in time and murder his dad before he could form the X-Men. This means that the number of Good Mutants keeping the bad ones in check is pretty limited and disorganized and ultimately the world winds up conquered by Apocalypse, leading to the Age of Apocalypse timeline.
Thats the 616, however. Here, Davey likes his dad more, and opts to go after Magneto instead; travelling back to Germany in the 1940s and killing him as he flees Auschwitz.
Which, I believe, happened when he was a small child and not a middle aged man as he’s depicted here.
Anyway, he succeeds, but turns out Dave wasn’t well read on X-Men continuity and he didn’t know that Magneto was also responsible for saving his mothers life sometime before he was born, so Legion accidentally wiped himself from the timeline.
So that’s a wrap on both Magneto and Legion, before the title page even comes up.
Flash forward to the present day (well, 1995) and we see what a world without Magneto in it is like; and as it turns out *pretty good*. Turns out that without any to start any brotherhoods worth of them, the Evil Mutants of the world just… never really got motivated enough to do anything particularly bad.
The X-Men still exist but they’re mainly spokespeople and celebrated heroes and because no one ever had any reason to hate or fear them, Mutants are a beloved part of the population.
In fact they’re so universally beloved and haven’t really needed to do any actual superhero stuff in a while they’re all pretty drastically out of practice and completely suck at fighting supervillains, as shown in a Danger Room training mission where they get their asses handed to them by low-difficulty replicas of the Hellfire Club.
Professor X laments that this isn’t really the what he envisioned his dream of Human/Mutant unity to look like, which I guess means his ultimate goal was to make sure that he had a team of attractive people in spandex who are good at fighting robots since that really seems to be the only downside to this reality.
He also mentions that a number of highly powerful mutants have suddenly gone missing and that’s something the X-Men should be concerned with more so than showing off for Press Conferences like if the Power Team was concerned with the power of the X-Gene instead of Jesus.
So now we cutaway to the Hellfire Club which is where the plot gets really confusing.
I *think* it’s a business deal between the Hellfire Club, Warren Worthingtons company and the Externals (the immortal super mutants that keep coming back even though I don’t think over ever seen a single person who hasn’t sighed whenever they show up). And then the wall explodes and a bunch of villains start attacking everyone.
I have absolutely no friggin’ idea who or how or why. There’s no proper establishing shot to show who was already in the room, different characters keep showing up, and established good and bad guys in the usual timeline are interspersed among each group, and all wearing different costumes.
Anyway, after a couple pages of this nonsense; the building explodes and… I guess The Vanisher kidnaps some people and Apocalypse says “All according to plan”. He’s in shadow, but he’s like eight feet tall and has pipes leading from his butt to his elbows, so not a big mystery).
Oh and Charles heads off to Anchorage Alaska to visit Cyclops and Jean Grey to see if they want to form a new, actually effective, X-Men team and they turn him down.
Anyway, a few days later and the X-Men are at a press conference that was *supposed* to announce that the Hellfire Club and X-Men were undergoing a corporate merger, but had to instead pivot to finding and avenging the Hellfire club for them all having been murdered.
Then a giant spaceship appears in the sky, disgorges a bunch of supervillains as well as Apocalypse, who says “Oh. Me, I did that.”
Well, it’s Apocalypse, so he says it all real imperiously and talks of being forged in strife and blood and yadda-yadda. Dude spent 6000 years overspecializing in Villain Speeches, that’s his real mutant power.
Anyhow, this timelines X-Men, as established, totally suck at fighting evil, so they get killed right away, and largely off panel. But, in Alaska, Jean and Cyclops were watching this all happen on TV and say “Well… I guess we have to get involved now”.
And in this timeline Jean still has the power of the Phoenix so getting from Alaska to Washington only takes a few seconds. And, as tough as Apocalypse is, he sure as hell isn’t in Phoenixes weight class, so she blows his armor to shreds and she and Charles tag-time brain blast him, killing him and also knocking the whole city into a coma courtesy of splash damage.
This didn’t, however, affect the army of evil
Mutants Apocalypse had on his payroll who collectively said “Oh, *way* easier to kill peoples who are asleep. Thanks guys!” so Phoenix decides to solve that problem by… umm… incinerating the entire city with Phoenix flame; killing the evil mutants but also… everyone else.
I don’t know if that’s *better*, but it’s the choice that Jean made.
Also apparently the tv cameras stopped rolling… sometime between Apocalypse showing up and vowing to destroy the planet, him being killed, and the grab bag of bad guys saying “Well… nationwide killing spree time!” so the general public just knows that that the X-Men were standing around and then Washington got sploded and said “Well clearly Mutants are to be feared and hated”
And, well, Jeans first executive decision was “Blow up a densely populated city with a giant bird”, so fair.
Anyway, Jean and Scott decide to start a new school for Mutants to teach them to not blow up cities as a first response to problems.
Oh, and a randomass selection of X-characters all watch Scott’s welcoming speech on a TV, and most of them I thought died through the course of the issue.
Story’s Over; No Moral.
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Not really; Magneto did die recently, but it mainly served to galvanize anti-mutant bigots since the guy who hated them the most was dead.
NEXT TIME:
Age of Apocalactus
Including this, there’s only three issues left of What If on MU and, lemme tell you, they are not leaving on great terms. In any case, we have what’s less of a What If and more of a Therefor, a lot of pretty justifiable hatred and fear of mutants and two different guys who look like the same guy as Mariano Nicesza and Kevin Hopgood tell us What If The Age of Apocalypse Had Not Ended? Can A World shattered by Apocalypse survive the coming of… Galactus?!?
Theres no title page so I guess they just went full on light novel with the title here. Also the cover promises some Adam Warren esque art and also a bunch of characters who do not even appear in the background of any panels. Sorry, Blink fans. It is also really rough looking , so sorry Adam Warren fans. The credits list Kevin Hopgood as being responsible for every part of the art so we know who to blame at least.
Anyway, as noted this isn’t a proper What If, so much as it’s a follow up to Age of Apocalypse, since that was a very popular event and they’re still willing to wring some juice out if that orange. Anyway, TL/DR, owing to some ill considered Terminator shenanigans, Professor X got killed before he could form the X-Men and correspondingly Apocalypse had no difficulty in conquering the world without them to oppose him. After a few decades worth of systemic genocide of the human race, Magneto and Friends managed to kill En Sabah Nur and freed the world from his tyranny.
And now it’s two years later, and Magneto and his X-Men are celebrated as the heroes of the world, but also humans are more distrustful of Mutants than ever, owing to the whole systemic genocide thing Apocalypse had going on.
And as it happens, some of those distrustful humans have need of Magneto. Specifically the ones who scampered off and hid on the moon to avoid Apocalypses namesake event. And they were fine to stay up there indefinitely, even after his defeat, on the grounds of “Mutants, yuck!”.
Theres a bunch of greater or lesser Marvel characters in this particular lineup but the art makes it really hard to tell which one is who, and they all factor so little in the story it doesn’t matter. One of them is named Dwayne. He’s the important one.
Anyway, the reason these moon racists called up the X-Men is because they’ve got an impending problem that is basically the same problem they just dealt with scaled up a bit. While exploring the moon they found the abandoned home of The Watcher, and after figuring out how to turn on his TV, noticed that one of the things he was focused on was a gigantic man in purple armor, and a normal sized guy made of silver who eat planets. And they’re coming this way.
You’d think that a situation like that would cause Humans and Mutants to put aside their differences and unite against a common foe, but *nope*. Humans are still hella racist against Mutants because of that whole Age they just survived. Especially Some Guy Named Dwayne Who Lives on the Moon.
The main exception being this timelines version of Gwen Stacy (who is alive) and Quicksilver, who start a romance. This adds absolutely nothing to the plot whatsoever, both are incredibly minor characters to the story, and I suspect this entire subplot was just added because they were a little short on content to hit 24 pages.
Anyway, despite some… weird anti-mutant hysteria (“Magneto *did* save us from Apocalpse, so I say we trust Mutants” “Yeah, you’d trust them until one wants to marry your sister or something!” Yells the crowd at each other) the human and mutant population decide that, yes, the giant space man is a bigger scope issue and decide to throw together a clever plan to stop him.
*Shoot a Bunch of Missiles At Him!*
A plan fiendishly clever in its simplicity.
So they do do that; blowing his Worldship to smithereens (this version of Galactus really skimped on construction with that thing) and Wolverine also stabs the Surfer to death (is… that even possible?). Unfortunately this doesn’t stop Galactus himself who lands on Earth and promptly gets to fighting the planets defenders so he can eat in peace.
Meanwhile, Dwayne (remember Dwayne? The only important character in this story) finds another machine in the Watchers garage and, knowing it’s something that can turn the human mind into a weapon, hops into it and emerges… looking almost exactly like the Silver Surfer. But he’s drawn in Bad CH instead of being a blurry mess. It’s extremely hard to tell them apart and it’s a good thing they don’t share a panel more than a couple of times.
Luckily besides looking like bad Prog Rock album art, Dwayne also gained super telepathy, and united the entire human race into one gestalt hive-mind and brain-blasted Galactus with billions of minds simultaneously, killing him dead. So that was handy. And the fact that his brother died trying to save Mutsnts mean he’s gotten over his racism too. Hooray.
BUT DID IT HAPPEN?!?
Uniting the entire human race with telepathy and then whacking him with it is more or less how Gah Lak Tus was beaten in the Ultimate comics so I’ll give it partial credit for that. I will not give the comic any other credit.
NEXT TIME:
By a wide margin, the most successful thing to come out of What If.
There are dozens of us! She has multiple action figures!
And I want to note for "but did it happen" posterity that Age of Apocalypse has had a few starts and stops as far as "what happens after AoA in the AoA universe", and absolutely all of them have ignored this What If and even the minor bits like Quicksilver's love life.