Petergiaquinta's Reviews > WHAT IF? CLASSIC: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION VOL. 1

What If? wasn’t a comic I read as a lad…actually, I may have mostly given up comics by the time it came out, moving onto football and girls and other such pursuits. But when I used to see it on the rack, I dismissed it as goofy silliness, a little like Mr. Rogers in the Land of Make Believe. And so when Disney announced the new What If? television series, I wasn’t that excited. I even might have rolled my eyes.

Nonetheless, as a True Believer, I’m happy to report today that I was wrong back then. There is far more to What If? than just silly adventures in Imaginationland. From the first page of the first issue (“What If Spider-Man Joined the Fantastic Four”), the comic book connects to the realm of quantum mechanics as the Watcher, who functions as the narrator for each story, gives readers a basic primer on the Many-Worlds Theory, essentially introducing the multiverse to readers of the Marvel-verse. Each story begins as a familiar one to readers of Marvel comics, each initially set squarely in the familiar world of Earth-616 but then with a choice or an accident causing the familiar to veer into previously unknown storylines of the many worlds which only the Watcher is privy to.

Therefore, and perhaps most fascinating to me as a reader today in 2021 compared to, say, the reader I might have been in a different universe on a different timeline in 1979 had I been buying these comics at my local Drug Fair and then riding home on my bike to read them in the basement, I understand the foundational role they play in the massive entertainment industry which is the MCU today. By kicking off this imaginative series exploring the diverging timelines of the many worlds of the Marvel multiverse, editor/writer Roy Thomas puts into play the ideas which we are now seeing culminate not only in the current Disney Plus What If? series, but in the fantastic Loki series which has recently wrapped up, as well as in the upcoming Spider-man and Dr. Strange movies.

To be entirely honest, the stories in this first volume aren’t great, but they’re interesting, especially the tales which have gone from “What if?” to Marvel canon, such as Issue 10 which asks, “What If Jane Foster Had Found the Hammer of Thor?” And now, soon enough, we’ll have the movie Thor: Love and Thunder playing at a multiplex near you. Another great feature of this volume is the way they have opted to keep the original letters pages in each comic, not something you usually see in reprinted volumes. The response from the True Believers is pretty enjoyable to read on its own, and Roy Thomas does a pretty remarkable job interacting with those readers and asking them to help brainstorm possible What If? storylines, although Thomas’s promised Conan the Barbarian in 20th Century New York City never materializes in this first volume.

My favorite story is Issue 11, “What If the Fantastic Four Were the Original Marvel Bullpen?” with Stan Lee becoming Mr. Fantastic, Jack Kirby the Thing, Sol Brodsky the Human Torch, and Flo Steinberg Invisible Girl. Kirby wrote and illustrated the issue, too. And it is goofy silliness. In fact, it’s goofier than hell. But there’s room for that, too, in the multiverse.