What If? 200

The first story here is a flip of the recent Siege event: “What If Norman Osborn Won the Siege of Asgard?” Its greatest distinction may be the ugliest spread I’ve ever seen – bizarrely, this is by a different artist than the rest, one Lucio Parillo, a cretinously composed mass battle scene with no one quite oriented correctly and horrid painting. Weirdly, the face and hands of the largest figure, Wolverine, shows that he can really draw – maybe someone can put him with a layout artist, or give him some colour lessons. The rest, by Dave Wilkins, is less bad. Maybe I am prejudiced against painted art – I’ve seen so little I’ve liked. It mostly looks like the work of people who’ve learned to draw comics by copying others, then have achieved some basic competence in painting. There are actually nice grace notes in the painting here, but as basic comics storytelling it is frequently extremely weak.

The Marc Guggenheim story starts promisingly: it finds a plausible way of tipping the balance, then a decent plot for the fight back afterwards. It’s weird that it dismisses Magneto as insignificant, and he apparently accepts a cannon fodder role, but crucially it goes wrong at the key moment. Super-psychic Emma Frost enters the mind of the Sentry, surely the most dangerously mentally unstable superbeing in comics history. Since she is in psychic contact with him, she has no excuse for not realising this, if she didn’t know it already. She shows him how his wife was murdered, and he shocks everyone by going batshit crazy. From there it’s just “he kills everyone” which is kind of tedious, but I had lost any belief by that point.

Then we get “What If I, The Watcher, Killed Galactus?” These stories are always narrated by the Watcher, in case you’re confused by the “I” in that. This is by Stan Lee and Dale Eaglesham (actually it credits him with pencils, but there is no inker named). It’s a spin on the first Galactus story, officially written by Stan (I don’t believe that for a second), wherein the Watcher basically pointed the FF at a handy Galactusdefeatomatic that was lying around, so I’m not sure that the difference in terms of his comedy non-interference vow (“well okay, just this once” should be his catchphrase) is terribly significant here. Anyway, this 10-pager reads rather as if 15 or 20 pages had been written and some editor with a grudge had removed several of the pages, more or less at random: these include the pages where we see why he took the decision, rather than passing on the deus ex machina (actually I guess it was more of a machina ex deus, except I have surely failed to change something to the ablative or dative or whatever there – my Latin O Level was back in the ’70s…), and how he did it, as well as some transitional pages. The ending is deeply stupid – no one actually says “*choke* How ironic!” but they might as well have done so. As a punishment for interfering and killing someone, condemning countless billions of uninvolved beings to death is not so much a cunning irony as cosmic-scale idiocy. It would have been nice if they hadn’t misspelt the Watcher’s name in the climactic sentence too.

Eaglesham gives us a decent pastiche of old-school Marvel style: maybe more a watered-down John Buscema rather than Kirby, but there is one spread that shows an imaginative touch that Jack might well have liked.

I guess as a celebration, asking a bunch of creators their favourite What If? story makes sense, but I am puzzled why they then reprint the runner-up – three chose “What If The Avengers Had Never Been?” (Shooter/Kane/Janson), but they give us “What If Elektra Had Lived?” instead. Perhaps the fact that this is by Frank Miller, with Terry Austin inking, was the reason – I guess he is a bigger sales draw. The trouble is, the standard here is leagues ahead of the rest of the comic, which emphasises the low calibre and faults of the new material: there is genuine, strong emotion in the story, and it looks stunning, mainly thanks to Miller’s magnificent, imaginative layouts, compositions and flows, plus Austin’s sharply precise and perfectly sympathetic finishes. The story stays simple, and although there is some very clumsy colouring (caused by now being on glossy paper), I really enjoyed rereading this one. As it happens, it is one of two I kept from the original series (the other was another Miller DD story), so I could compare the colours: the moody last panel especially is ruined here. It needed recolouring, really, for printing on different stock.