Ah fuck, whatever, man. Look, there are some strong bits in this issue, pretty much any of the flashbacks to the time right after Jessica Jones got bitten by the radioactive spider instead of Peter Parker. And I do admire the central conceit being that Peter Parker is a selfish prick who only overcame that particular brand of nasty solipsism thanks to the death of his uncle. But, most of this comic is predictable mediocrity that does very little interesting with the concept. Spoiler alert: Jessica was just as terrible at being a superhero here as in the regular Marvel Universe and ends up in basically the same place as a result. Hey, I admire the whole idea of sticking to the character and all, but, I do have one question: what’s the point of this comic?
In the history of What If...? there have been numerous issues where the broad concept is that some characters can’t escape their fate or themselves. Stories where everything is different and, yet, somehow someway the character in question still lands in the same situation that we’re familiar with in the regular 616. Usually, there’s some ironic twist baked in or some tragic outcome, and I suppose Jessica’s family getting blown up or her teenage crush trying to goad her into putting the mask on by mimicking her worst enemy could qualify... but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like an ending where she suggests becoming a PI to Misty Knight and everything is converging with the regular comics. It feels like there are no real stakes or that Jessica’s shit life hasn’t been replaced with a remarkably similar-looking shit life.
Like nothing matters.
To a certain extent, that is the message of What If...? Uatu watches the world we mostly read our comics about, but he also watches all of these. These endless stories about endless variations where one thing changes and life still goes on. How many does he see where a seemingly important moment in time is dramatically changed and, yet, the ending is the same? Uatu watches as fate is unavoidable. Free choice is an illusion. Nurture versus nature is the fight that obscures the truth. Some would call that bleak; others reassuring. All I know for sure is that it doesn’t necessarily make for a good comicbook. It mostly makes me wonder how this was worth the cover price of $4.99 (and that’s USD... as a Canadian, that price gets raised via a very unfriendly exchange rate) and why I keep reading this year’s crop of What If...? comics and finding them so lacking, in general...
In a sense, there isn’t a lot different between this issue and What If...? Secret Wars #1 where it also ended with a hint towards converging with how things roughly played out in existing comics. In that case, it was the original Ultimate Universe continuing under the somewhat watchful eye of the god of the multiverse, the Maker, and eventually giving birth to a resistance in the form of the Ultimates ala the second Ultimate Universe. But, I found that ending charming and a little clever. I guess that’s because the route was surprising and somewhat logical. While the route that What If...? Jessica Jones #1 takes to a familiar place is logical, it’s hardly surprising. The journey itself is tedious. The ‘big reveal’ of Peter Parker is obvious and Jessica’s adult life is too much of a retread of the regular MU. Put simply: one comic had ambition, the other did not. And holy fuck will I overlook a lot of faults in an ambitious comic...
I’ve been surprised at the class of artists on this crop of What If...? comics. We’ve had some serious talent wasted on mediocre-to-bad scripts and David Messina is the newly wasted talent. The moment they saw his ‘retro’ pages come in, why did no one think to rewrite the whole thing to take place in the past? Moreover, that’s the only time Justina Ireland’s writing approaches anything like charming. Every page that takes place in the past overshadows every page that doesn’t by a large margin and it only serves to make the issue all the more frustrating to read. The rest of the issue feels like a dry walk-through that’s compulsory somehow.
The final insult: everyone involved seems to know all of this to a certain extent. The final word of the issue is given to Uatu: “NO MATTER THE PATH IT MUST TAKE, DESTINY ALWAYS FINDS ITS TRUE COURSE.” But, we’d already seen a whole comic that was the barest of changes for Jessica. Pretty easy to find the ‘true course’ of destiny when nothing matters.
