Regarding What If... Runaways #1, I discussed how well I thought it worked to set up an intriguing enough alternate premise to the original title that it could work as its own ongoing series. While most What If...? issues end in an open-ended manner, the idea that another issue could follow isn’t always actually so apparent. In this year’s crop, most of them ended in a manner that, technically, further issues could follow. What If...? Spider-Man #1, for instance, could be slotted into its place in regular Spider-Man continuity fairly well, while What If...? Secret Wars #1 offered a future of the original Ultimate Universe fighting against the Maker. Part of the conceit of this series is that it offers an alternate continuity while still existing within the confines of an ongoing superhero universe; while the story may end, the franchise must continue. The only issue that completely resisted that idea was What If...? Uncanny X-Men #1 where the Earth was destroyed. Its bookend partner, What If...? X-Men #1 does not share that sort of definitive finish, preferring something more open-ended, closing with a caption “THE END?”
But, oh lord, how fucking dreary and dull this issue is. Dark X-Men horror will scratch an itch for some and, it may have for me, if it wasn’t so mediocre and unambitious. Like so many of this year’s crop of What If...? comics, What If...? X-Men #1 shows signs of a nice high concept and an unexpected application of it, delivering an issue that seeks to be something more than a simple on-off, but doesn’t do anything interesting. It’s your basic two best friends on the run from an evil school type of story. There’s an underlying horror in Cassandra Nova’s embrace of inhumanity and control, the way that familiar heroes now follow her bidding, thinking themselves righteous... But why? In service of what? We’re meant to care about Jean Grey and Emma Frost because we know about these characters already. There’s always some tension inherent in What If...? stories between this reality and the regular six-one-six – that’s part of the fun – but you need some reason to care past that. This is so by the numbers in how it progresses that there doesn’t appear to be much effort into making us care about the girls. It’s just assumed.
It’s not until the final few pages that this comic actually does anything worth noting when Cassandra Nova abandons all pretenses of humanity to embrace her Mummudrai self, becoming a genuine figure of Lovecraftian horror for a page or so. Up until that point, it’s just evil Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and evil X-Men and oh my god who cares. If I could sum up the general feeling of this year’s What If...? comics, it would be that:
oh my god who cares
Now, many of these comics are probably not that bad. If they’d appeared as some random issue in a monthly series, it would be easy to absorb it and move on. By making this a bit of an event in its own right with eight issues released over a couple of months, there’s an expectation of curation and thought and intent. Instead, this line reads like a fucking scramble of checking boxes of the types of What If...? comics should get published. A couple of X-Men one, a Symbiote one, a tie-in to the Last Great Event that also links into That Line We Just Ended, something in the future, a classic creator revisiting their acclaimed story, and a couple of cult characters... Some were good, some were bad, most fell somewhere in between.
It may be obvious, but this is completion as obligation. Sorry about that. Can’t all be winners.
