Well well well. It seems I’ve moved my blog from blogspot to wordpress. Blogspot was fine but honestly wordpress looks nice and feels good so far. Who knows maybe I’ll get angry at wordpress and move back. I don’t know but I figured I should at least mention the fact that we are now a wordpress blog with a nicer name! Similar but nicer! Anyway, that’s enough discussion on our move and now we have to talk about something very important!
So, we all know Superhero movies are probably not ending any time soon despite what anti-woke youtubers would want you to believe. Or what I would want to happen. I would like for them to go away for a long time and become something special again, not one of the few things you can see on movies and TV. However I don’t get what I want when other people are willing to pay a shitload of money to studios for this. If I were given a genie I would wish for nerd culture to be a small thing that wasn’t mainstream again. None of the content was worth not being able to enjoy my collecting hobbies at all anymore.
Anyway, enough of my bitching. I find it funny, no hilarious that I just stop caring about live action Superhero media, pretty much around the time they start doing multiverse stuff. Yeah I thought Dr. Strange Multiverse of Madness was fun and it was neat seeing Wilem Dafoe as the Green Goblin again (even if that movie wasn’t as great as others say but then again I don’t really like the MCU Spider-Man all that much). The thing is I fucking LOVE mutlitverse stuff. I love Elseworlds. There’s one where Batman teams up with Harry Houdini and they fight Vampires! If you don’t think that is cool you can just leave this blog right now and go fuck a goat or something. I also love What If?
What If? started all the way back in 1977. Thanks to a man called Roy Thomas. He brought the idea of multiverses to Marvel really. It was mostly a DC thing until What If? The idea of What If? would be to take a famous story or character from Marvel’s history and ask….WHAT IF? Like for example What If Rick Jones Had Become the Hulk? which was one of the first What If comics made. Anyway the series lasted until 1984 and ended after forty seven issues. I personally very much enjoy What If volume one but I enjoy What If in any of its forms. This stuff will always be a lot of fun to me. Let me put it this way you either think Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider Ham (yes I will be reviewing an issue of that series too) is amazing or you are a big wiener who takes stories about people in spandex punching other people in spandex way too seriously. This stuff is supposed to be fun.
So in 1988 Marvel published a one shot What If comic involving Iron Man. It did well enough that they started a new volume for the series the following year. Roy Thomas came back to Marvel and wrote the first issue, which was fucking wild. It was something you need to read if you enjoy this stuff. The second series of What If? ended in 1998 after one hundred and fourteen issues. Marvel keeps bringing it back every few years for a few issues but there hasn’t been a new volume of What If since 1998, which I think is really sad.
I remember reading this issue as a kid, one of the three What If comics I had (one of them was the Spider-Girl issue! Now worth way more than I can afford right now or probably ever because of speculators.) and it blew the FUCK out of my mind. So let’s give this issue another look at because I haven’t seen read it in like twenty or more years. So I just gave the issue a re-read and damn if it isn’t as cool as it was when I was ten! How does the issue start? Well it starts the way any What If comic should with the Watcher telling us how it all worked out in the 616 Marvel Universe, you know the one that’s been going on since 1961 with the first appearance of the Fantastic Four.
The original story was that Spider-Man was given a new suit within the story Secret Wars from 1984. He comes back to New York City after the Secret Wars. Just to find out that it’s real! That he needs to get the help of the Fantastic Four. They get the symbiote off him and send him home with only a paper bag on his head. Very amusing stuff. Anyway the symbiote comes back but is finally removed from him thanks to the ringing bells of a church. A guy was also in the church. A guy with the name of Eddie Brock! That’s how Venom came to life! Now you know how the story went in the original Marvel Universe.
Now this is a pretty dark story. Then again most What If?s ended up being pretty dark. Still it’s incredibly action packed and a real ride. This time the symbiote is a lot stronger and Spider-Man is feeling bad after a lot less time and Mr Fantastic of the Fantastic Four is not available to help him. Only Dr. Curt Conners (the Lizard) is there to tell him the news. Anyway when Mr. Fantastic finally comes back it’s too late as the symbiote has now taken over Spider-Man.
They keep the symbiote in a fancy comic book prison thing, well they do until he escapes. Here’s where it gets crazy. The symbiote gives up on Spider-Man and take over the Hulk. Spider Man’s body is found and now he’s in his eighties. He’s an old ass fucking man! He goes to see Aunt May one last time in a really sad scene. Mary Jane is there and wonders if Peter has finally met his end thanks to one of Spider-Man enemies. We then go back to the Fantastic Four headquarters just to find out that Spider-Man had died but not before he figured out a way to track the alien and a gun to kill it.
We go to Spider-Man’s funeral and at the end of it, a surprise guest shows up. Wilson Fisk! That’ right the Kingpin. He and The Black Cat get to talking and well you’ll see how that works out soon enough. So just about everyone in the Marvel Universe goes to fight The Hulk who is now Venomized. They get the symbiote off The Hulk and he’s now Bruce Banner. The symbiote has now taken over someone else. Someone who is as strong as the Hulk, it’s Thor!
The Thor-Symbiote goes into a cave to bond completely. The Human Torch and Captain Marvel go in after him and are beaten back. However they finally bring in mother fucking Black Bolt and you know what he does. He Blows up the fucking mountain which also happened to be Mount Fucking Rushmore. That’s right, this comic blows the fuck out of Abraham Lincoln’s rock face. It’s fucking wild. The symbiote is not in good shape and Dr. Strange is about to send it to another dimension and POW, The Black Cat has come back and blew that fucking piece of space shit right up! It’s not coming back! She condemns them for thinking it could ever bee redeemed and walks off. It’s told to us that she gave up everything to do this and has to work with the Kingpin as a criminal for the rest of her life. Dark shit.
I loved this issue. It had great art. It told a dark ass story but never got too grim with it. It had just about everyone in the Marvel Universe show up for a panel in it, except like Captain America or Iron Man. It flowed from one scene to another very well. The only problem is a weird contunity one that might bother some people. The Symbiotes are weak to fire and the Human TOrch should have been able to do something but I guess in this Marvel Universe that the symbiote isn’t weak to Fire. Anyway if the Torch had taken it out we wouldnt have had that cool as hell scene where Mount Rushmore gets blown the fuck up.
I think it’s time to talk about a Elseworlds again now. I just have to find the right one.
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