BC: WHAT IF #1

At the time when I started getting into Marvel Comics in the late 1970s, WHAT IF was considered something of a special book, at least among my small circle of comic-reading acquaintances. For one thing, it was oversized, meaning that it was both thicker and meatier than the average comic of that period, more like an Annual (which also meant that it was impossible for me to find, given that my local 7-11 didn’t carry any upsized titles past a certain point) and also that its subject matter and stars changed from issue to issue. But really what made it such a stand-out series is that, at least among its earliest issues, the stories were really quite inventive and clever–if occasionally simultaneously absurd. And each one was a complete story, a min-history of a series of events that had not happened in Marvel history, but might have.

In essence, what WHAT IF was is a regular bimonthly dose of Superman editor Mort Weisinger’s very popular Imaginary Stories, in which he’d give his creative teams the latitude to depart from the commonly-accepted canon of the character to play out wild fantasies about what might happen if some aspect or other of the Superman legend was different. Creator, editor and writer Roy Thomas was very transparent in what he was doing here, but he dressed the whole thing up in the vernacular of the Marvel Universe, lending it a plausibility and a seriousness that Mort just didn’t bother with. In Roy’s iteration, each turning point moment had to be a specific event from withing Marvel history, and each story wasn’t simply a flight of fancy, it was a parallel universe that existed somewhere out there in the multiverse. End of the day, in practice there wasn’t really much of a difference (especially once you got to stories such as WHAT IF SGT FURY FOUGHT WWII IN OUTER SPACE or WHAT IF THE ORIGINAL MARVEL BULLPEN BECAME THE FANTASTIC FOUR.). But this rationalizing did its job, as it made readers such as myself treat these stories with a lot more legitimacy.

My buddy David Steckel was in particular taken with WHAT IF, and he’d amassed a pretty good number of the extant issues at the time that I met him. At that point, there had only been 15 issues, and Steckel had maybe half of them–so I wound up borrowing most of them over the course of time, starting with this one, the first. WHAT IF was perhaps the perfect Roy Thomas comic book of the period, as Roy spent an awful lot of the story re-creating pages from other older stories, occasionally with certain events changed somewhat. As he’d later do with SECRET ORIGINS over at DC, I can imagine him simply photocopying the pages in question from the old issues and sending those along to the artist as the plot for the issue. As time went on, Roy’s approach to the material in WHAT IF would loosen up, but in this initial outing, an awful lot of space is turned over to mimicking Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko pages from days past, and an extraordinary amount of Stan Lee’s dialogue for those stories is picked up verbatim.

For this initial outing, Roy chooses a tale that will combine the drawing power of two of Marvel’s most popular franchises, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. The story deviates from the events of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1, in which the nascent wall-crawler attempted to join up with the cosmic-powered quartet only to face rejection when he learned that the FF doesn’t pay salaries. That story had been released in 1963, a full 14 years before, but Roy acts here like every modern reader must be well-acquainted with its events. Especially in a time when collected editions weren’t yet a thing, it’s a bit of a stretch. But it doesn’t really matter, as Roy’s going to reproduce every notable moment in that meeting before deviating for the issue’s story. The artwork on this issue, by the way, was provided by Canadian artist Jim Craig, whom Roy used on a couple of different projects during this time, in particular the 3-D Man feature in MARVEL PREMIERE. Craig’s work was a bit stiff here, a bit mechanical–he’s no Kirby or Ditko–but it’s competent and does the job.

After explaining and re-explaining the concept of divergent timelines and alternate histories, Roy through his mouthpiece the Watcher begins to get down to brass tacks. At a crucial moment in the original story, as Spider-Man begins to depart, Sue Storm calls out to him, and works to negotiate a way in which he can maybe be a part of the team after all. Of course, Spidey has to reveal his true identity to his new teammates first, something which proves difficult to him. But he does it, and the FF call a press conference to introduce their new member as well as their new name, the Fantastic Five. Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson is chagrined, but learning that Reed has worked with the authorities to clear the web-head of all charges, Jonah has a paper-selling change-of-heart and instead chooses to endorse Spider-Man. In their first mission as a group, the quintet, now knows as the Fantastic Five, absolutely steamroller over the Vulture, who is ill-equipped to face such a powerful group. However, as the days go on, Sue finds herself sidelined more and more often, and begins to resent it.

This all leads up to an extended retelling of the events of FANTASTIC FOUR #14, with Spider-Man added in. It has to be said that Spidey does so little for most of this adventure that he may as well not have been there at all, for all that he’s the catalyst for what happens at the end. In the original story, the Puppet Master takes over the mind of the Sub-Mariner, causing him to abduct Sue in an attempt to draw the Fantastic Four into a confrontation that will finish them off once and for all. In this WHAT IF retelling, the exact same thing happens, with Reed and his now-three other teammates going in pursuit of the Sub-Mariner in his undersea kingdom. They save Sue, of course, the Puppet Master is undone by his own hubris, and Namor is ready to kick them all out of his palace. And then we get the story’s big twist.

Having had her place in the FF usurped by the more-useful Spider-Man, Sue decides to remain behind and marry Namor–which seems, frankly, like a crazy choice to make in response to an unrelated problem. But Namor is all for it, and in the space of a couple of panels, he converts Sue into a water-breather so that she can survive under the sea beside him. And that’s all she wrote–Spider-Man expressed a bit of guilt over how things have played out, but the Human Torch reassures him that this likely would have happened even if he hadn’t joined their team. It’s kind of a textbook example of how a WHAT IF story would function, and so it’s a pretty good (though frankly underwhelming) opening story to set the table. From here, the stories to come would become more outlandish, more emotional, more bizarre and more imaginative, at least for most of the run of the original series. Later on, overuse of the format led to certain tropes becoming common and the spirit of innovation that surrounds the early issues would have faded away. But in 1979, me and mine dug it.