What If...?
(season 1)    

[Roy Thomas, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby,] Bryan Andrews, and Ashley Bradley, 2021

This is an animated anthology series.  Virtually every character that has shown up in a Marvel Cinematic Universe film appears, all but a few of them voiced by their original actors.  I didn’t want the credits above to be longer than the article, so I wasn’t about to list the creators of every single one of those characters, but I did want to credit the creator of the original What If? comic book series, which debuted in 1977.  So I hopped on the internets to see what I could pull up about the development of the series, and was surprised to find that I came up empty.  There were plenty of issue-by-issue guides, but nothing about how the series came to be⁠—whose idea it was, how such an offbeat idea got approved, none of that.  But I guess that must be that enshittifi­cation of search engines I’ve been hearing about lately, because it turned out that the answer was right there on the splash page of What If? #1: “Conceived, written, and edited by: Roy Thomas”.  So I went looking specifically for interviews of Roy Thomas in which he discussed the origin of the What If? series, and that was a lot more productive.

In the 1960s, Roy Thomas was Marvel’s in-house continuity ex­pert.  Stan Lee cheerfully admitted in his editorial caption boxes that he couldn’t remember in which issue such-and-such a re­turning villain had previously appeared, but Roy always knew.  He explained, “Comics continuity has been important to me since I was a kid. I found it hard to take seriously Superman and Bat­man stories in which the two would fight evil Martians in two different stories⁠—and they’d be different races of Martians. If comics didn’t take their own stories seriously enough to remem­ber them from one month to the next, why should I as a reader?”  In 1972, when Stan stepped back from his thirty-year stint as Marvel’s editor to take on a less hands-on role as publisher, Roy Thomas took over the editor’s chair.  It seemed only natural: if anyone could read a draft version of a script and instantly say, “Actually, this contradicts Tales to Astonish #44 from 1963!”, it was Roy.  But after a couple of years, he was burnt out.  It was one thing to burn the midnight oil figuring out how Venus #1 from 1948 fit with the Silver Age depictions of the Greek panthe­on, purely out of personal interest.  It was quite another to have to ride herd on a bunch of creative temperaments who didn’t want to hear that they couldn’t use Thor this month because is­sue #213 of his own book had him on the other side of the galaxy.  So not only did Thomas hand the reins at Marvel over to Len Wein, but he focused on writing assignments that would allow him to work without having to coordinate with anyone.  He did keep his gig writing Fantastic Four, but otherwise, his mid-’70s docket included several Conan the Barbarian books, set in their own separate continuity, and Invaders, set during World War II.  The cover of What If? #1 billed the series as a service to read­ers⁠—one that would feature “the stories your letters have de­manded!!”.  But it also fit in with Roy Thomas’s agenda nicely.  He could revisit any comic that struck his fancy and spin out his own story without worrying about how it fit into the jigsaw puzzle of Marvel history⁠—the whole point was that it didn’t fit, that it was, as every splash page proclaimed from #3 onward, “a stunning saga of an alternate reality” rather than the official Marvel Universe timeline.

But…

…in 1972, Marvel started up a subsidiary called Marvel UK to re­package its comics for British readers: replacing Americanisms, redrawing women to be “more decent”, and publishing weekly instead of monthly, with multiple features per magazine.  That pace meant that, even with a decade of back issues to work through, the company would soon run out of material.  And so Marvel UK started making up the difference by producing origi­nal material, starting with Captain Britain, which launched in 1976.  And it was in a Captain Britain story for Marvel UK in 1983 that an up-and-coming writer named Alan Moore introduced the Captain Britain Corps, a superhero group consisting of different versions of the same character, each from a different universe.  There was Captain England from Earth‑522, Captain Albion from Earth‑523, Captain Commonwealth from Earth‑920… and Captain Britain, Moore revealed, was not from Earth‑1, as readers might expect, but Earth‑616.  I.e., the mainstream Marvel Universe was just one number out of many, nothing particularly special.  It wasn’t long before the fans and creators realized the implica­tions: that meant every issue of What If? took place in its own universe!  What If? #1, “What If Spider-Man Joined the Fantastic Four?”⁠—why, that was Earth‑772!  What If? #2, “What If the Hulk Had the Brain of Bruce Banner?”⁠—welcome to Earth‑774!  Even issue #11, “What If the Original Marvel Bullpen Had Become the Fantastic Four?”, with Stan Lee as Mr. Fantastic and Jack Kirby as the Thing⁠—that was a comedy issue, but it took place on Earth‑1228!  There were enough of these, both in What If? and other books, that the numbers got pretty big.  One of the few issues of What If? I bought as a kid was #38, because it promised a story about the Vision and the Scarlet Witch; that, it was later decided, had taken place on Earth‑83438.  So did that mean that all these What If? stories were part of the Marvel Universe?  No.  But they were part of the Marvel Multiverse!

The idea that all these different variations on the MU were numbered like television stations put a new twist on What If?’s framing sequence, in which the Watcher explains that he spends much of his time looking into the “many windows into the strange parallel worlds of what might have been”.  Wait, “the Watcher”?  Who’s this guy?  We first meet him in Fantastic Four #13, cover date 1963.04, in which the F.F. travel to “the mys­terious blue area of the moon”, which turns out to have an arti­ficially generated oxygen atmosphere.  There the find the ruins of an ancient city, with one inhabited “ultra-modern house”⁠—and, almost immediately, they get into a fight with a Ivan Kragoff, a.k.a. the Red Ghost, and his trio of super-apes.  (Long story.)  This fight is interrupted when a giant alien with glowing eyes and pale yellow skin, as seen in the corner box above, appears, explaining that “I come from a world so far from here that you do not even suspect its existence” and that “my people roam the entire known universe, watching, observing other worlds!”  Kra­goff decides to break into the Watcher’s home (“What a fabulous storehouse of scientific marvels it must be!! Once I learn the Watcher’s secrets, the universe itself will be mine!”), which turns out to be a mistake:

In #29, under somewhat friendlier circumstances, it is Reed Richards’s turn to learn about potential hazards of poking around in the Watcher’s house:

These are the sorts of sequences that Alan Moore (him again) riffed on in his 1993 Fantastic Four homage, Mystery Incorpor­ated⁠—stretches with something evocative in every panel.  This was the Watcher’s third appearance in Fantastic Four, and we can see that he’s evolved from an unsettling yellow alien to a giant Elmer Fudd with a better tailor.  He was still yellow in Fan­tastic Four #20, his second appearance, in which he teleports the F.F. to his house and explains, “As you know, we Watchers are forbidden to interfere with people of other planets! But so grave is this danger, that it might even destroy my own race! For, as long as this creature exists, the entire universe is in peril!”  The “creature” turns out to be the Molecule Man, who is in fact om­nipotent but who was nevertheless a D‑lister for about twenty years until Jim Shooter elevated him to a major player.  Having warned the Fantastic Four of the threat, the Watcher explains, “I am powerless to act⁠—my function is only to watch! And now, the rest is up to you!”  He would not feel so constrained in his most famous appearance.  In Fantastic Four #48, cover date 1966.03, the Watcher uses his “matter mobilizer” to try to shield the Earth from being detected by the Silver Surfer, herald of the planet-eating Galactus.  When that fails, he sends the Human Torch through hyperspace to retrieve the Ultimate Nullifier, the one weapon that might make Galactus back off.  The Watcher is one of those characters like Black Bolt of the Inhumans, a walk­ing Chekhov’s gun.  “I can’t use my immensely destructive voice except as a once-in-a-lifetime last resort!” means that Black Bolt ends up using his voice every three issues or so.  “I only watch⁠—I can’t interfere except as a once-in-a-lifetime last resort!” has the Watcher issuing warnings in his second appearance and straight up leading the resistance in his fourth.

His fourth Fantastic Four appearance, that is.  After his second, Stan gave him a regular feature in Tales of Suspense.  Though Iron Man was made the headliner as of issue #39, Tales of Sus­pense originally hit the stands in 1958 as an anthology series with several stories per issue.  The main feature nearly always revolved around some sort of monster, often from outer space.  But at the end would be Stan Lee’s beloved five-page Twilight Zone-style vignettes.  Example: an astronaut from Earth travels the galaxy looking for a more advanced civilization, but only finds planet after planet of primitives.  He gives up, deciding that “in all the galaxy, there’s no species as advanced as ours!”  But⁠—O bitter irony!⁠—it turns out that in fact all of these planets had once been home to much more advanced civilizations: the reason they all seemed primitive now is that they had all developed weapons like “the cobalt anti-matter bomb” and blasted them­selves back to the stone age!  And with Tales of Suspense #49, Stan added the Watcher to serve as the Rod Serling of these stories, introducing them and narrating them.  This is the fram­ing sequence Roy Thomas revived for What If?⁠—

—and as I was saying, Alan Moore’s numbering system suggested that characters from those What If? stories could travel to the “real” MU, i.e., Earth‑616.  But, as noted, the numbered universes first appeared in print in 1983, by which point Roy Thomas had left Marvel (for the usual reason: a dispute with Jim Shooter) and was in the middle of an exclusive deal with DC Comics.  And then What If? was canceled in 1984.  But it was revived, with ex­tra punctuation, as What If…? volume two in 1989.  What If…? v2 #35, cover date 1992.03, returns us to Earth‑772, the world of What If? #1, featuring the Fantastic Five.  The issue is billed as part one of a story arc called “Timequake”, and the next couple of parts also revisit previously published alternate worlds: Earth‑90110 (“What If the Vision of the Avengers Conquered the World?” from What If…? v2 #19) and Earth‑9140 (“What If Wol­verine Was Lord of the Vampires?” from What If…? v2 #19).  The fourth part introduces Earth‑9260 (“What If Thor Was a Thrall of Seth?”), and then What If…? v2 #39, the final part of “Time­quake”, titled “What If the Watcher Saved the Multiverse?”, has the Watcher working with the Time Variance Authority to put together a team made up of characters from all these realities to keep the multiverse from being destroyed by “the Immortus Wave”. 

And that is pretty much how this TV show works as well.  We get seven episodes telling what seems like a random assortment of tales, with each of the main characters of the MCU getting a turn in the spotlight.  The Watcher serves as our host, explaining the premise at the beginning and making a few summative remarks at the end.  Then, in episode eight, the show borrows a page from Julio Cortázar’s “The Continuity of Parks” and has a villain from one of these parallel worlds, an Ultron who wipes out all life in the universe, become aware of the Watcher and break into the frame story.  And so the Watcher breaks his oath of non-in­terference and puts together a team of heroes from the previous episodes to fight to save the multiverse.  So, in addition to the officially credited creators of the TV show, and of course Stan and Jack for creating the Marvel Universe in general and the Watcher in particular, I had planned to credit both the creator of What If? and the writer of the “Timequake” arc.  The former, as noted, turned out to be Roy Thomas.  The latter turned out to be… also Roy Thomas, returning to the series he had started fifteen years earlier.  So I guess that saves on pixels!

What I haven’t mentioned, though, is that “Timequake” isn’t actually very good.  Roy Thomas wrote some great stuff in the ’60s⁠—a former high school English teacher, he introduced liter­ary flourishes to early Marvel, and one of my intellectual level­ing-up experiences as a kid came when I read a reprint of the last page of Thomas’s Avengers #57, a sequence focusing on a young boy from Harlem rather than on superheroes, accompanied by Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.  Ambitious!  But the stuff he wrote during my own era⁠—e.g., he took over Avengers West Coast in 1990⁠—was not in the same league.  What If…?, the MCU series, is therefore not exactly drawing from classic source material.  It seems like it’s mainly a showcase for a new animation style, and the creators revel in the fact that anything they can draw is fair game: that, in some ways, it’s actually easier to show frost giants turning the St. Louis Gateway Arch into a slingshot than it is to show a conversation, because in the latter you have to get the facial expressions right.  But it really runs the gamut: there’s some gorgeous art, and then there are sequences that look like crude Flash animation from the Internet circa 2001.  There’s a lot of loudness-war combat action, which is of no more interest to me here than in the MCU films.  And, finally, to the extent that this show and the Loki/TVA show are indications that the MCU is making a big move into the Multiverse, I find myself in the same camp as Ruben Bolling:



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