Dave Campbell recently featured a post about non-compelling comics covers, and in the ensuing discussion, a lot of people were particularly confused by this cover. Because nobody knows who the Cosmic Avengers are. This is entirely fair, because the Cosmic Avengers never actually had their own comic book per se. I thought I would explain this horribly arcane cover, as I was the sole person purchasing What If back in the late 90s.
(Yes, it was me. Now you know.)
So. Note the little graphic in the bottom. “Timequake! Part two of five!” This was probably the nadir of What If?, where the writers were so stretched for new What Ifs that they came up with this bullshit adventure story featuring Uatu as various alternate universes MOOSHED TOGETHER. There were also this group of people with clocks for faces, none of whom were the Clock King. But I’m getting sidetracked.
For example, two such universes were:
1.) the one where Wolverine became Lord of the Vampires (by killing Dracula when Storm failed to beat Dracula) and then started taking over the world by turning all the mutants into vampires until a fight with the Punisher and Dr. Strange’s ghost brought Logan back to his senses and he read the Montesi Formula aloud (the spell that destroys all vampires, you see, from the climax of the old Dr. Strange-versus-Dracula stories in the early 80s).
2.) the one where the X-Men lost Inferno and only the last-minute teamup of Rachel Summers, Johnny Storm and Dr. Strange (Dr. Strange shows up a lot in What Ifs) could possibly stop Belasco and Maddie Pryor from taking over the world with a demonically enhanced Wolverine.
In “Timequake!”, these two got smooshed together into an alternate universe where the X-Vampires controlled most of North America, and then Mr. Sinister showed up just before Belasco attacked with his demons and cloned a bunch of new X-Men to fight the demons. (I think. I am a little fuzzy on the details. I remember Boom Boom getting decapitated and that is about it.)
So, back to this issue. The Cosmic Avengers are the Avengers from an issue of “What If” where the Kree blow up Earth, and the Avengers (who were in space, you see) fight a guerrilla war against the Kree for the rest of the comic until they, you know, win and stuff. And in this comic, the Cosmic Avengers fight the Guardians of the Galaxy, who I believe are not the canon Guardians but the Guardians from a What If where the Guardians were formed in the 20th century rather than the 30th.
Simple, huh? And people wonder why this book got cancelled!
I think if Roy Thomas were to read the previous passage aloud, his erection would be massive enough to generate gravity.
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Actually, I’ve got a complete run of What If, Volume 2. Timequake was, indeed, a feeble attempt to introduce issue-to-issue continuity into the What If series for a brief time, while at the same time revisiting some of their more popular past stories.
This issue, though, came out in the early 90’s – 1992. And Timequake had nothing to do with the book’s cancellation, as it did run for another 80 issues afterward, relatively unmolested by further attempts at issue-to-issue continuity.
I believe you are overreading into my statement a bit. You see, it got cancelled because it sucked balls. Big donkey balls, did it most verily suck. Timequake was just some of the worst suck to suck.
In the post, you seem to be lambasting the complexity of the storyline, which was atypical of the title. Now, if you want to say that What If, in general, sucks – that’s fine, and I’ll meet you on the field with pistols at dawn. But Timequake is in no way representative of the run as a whole.
It’s certainly representative of the latter half of the run, by which point you were getting recycled concepts, poorly written or just plain stupid storylines and almost uniformly terrible art. Marvel was practically using it as a tryout title by issue #60, and it showed.
I’ll be the first to agree that the first thirty issues or so of the second run of What If are mostly very good comics, but Timequake sucks in all the ways later What If comics sucked, along with its own delicious brand of nigh-incomprehensible additional hypercomplex suck.
Amend ‘latter half’ to ‘latter quarter’ and I think we’d be in perfect agreement, though there were some late gems. I remember fondly the story wherein the Impossible Man gets the Infinity Gauntlet. The downturn of the series, for me, was when they stopped letting the Watcher appear in it.
Fortunately, Marvel revamped the What If series, gave it a supporting cast, and called it Exiles. To this day, I don’t think there’s ever been a better and more defining Mojo story than the one starring Morph called “So Lame”.
As for Avenger spin-offs, I still think they should make a Mystic Avengers and revamp some of the supernatural characters that have been locked in cold storage since the cancellation of the Ketch Ghost Rider and the Midnight Sons.
Aw c’mon. That Timequake finale had a heroic Dr. Doom and a Vampire Wolverine fighting Dire Wraiths AND Space Phantoms…
I read through pretty much the entire Volume I and Volume II of What If in my day, and I loved it to pieces, and good lord did some of it suck. It was like Kevin Siembada’s posse got to play with the Marvel Universe.