What if the Hulk Went Berserk? #45 (1984)
Pencils: Ron Wilson
Inks: Ian Akin, Brian Garvey
This issue came about chiefly because Ron Wilson wanted to draw the Hulk smashing stuff up. Thankfully, there's a little more to it than that. The divergence here is that Banner failed to save Rick Jones from exposure to the Gamma bomb. Jones slowly dies from radiation poisoning, while telepathically linked to the Hulk. This trauma drives Hulk into a killing rage, even murdering some of the heroes who try to stop him. This makes for a very dark, rather unpleasant, action heavy story that I haven't really gelled with.
What if Uncle Ben Had Lived? #46 (1984)
Pencils: Ron Frenz
Finishes: Sam De La Rosa
On the face of it, May biting the burglar's bullet rather than Ben seems an arbitrary change. Yet as Gillis pointed out, Peter Parker's only surrogate father figure in the early stories was J Jonah Jameson. Gillis paints Ben as a much wilier cookie then his dear departed. Ben finds Peter's costume pretty quickly, then actively supports his crime fighting career. When JJJ continues to besmirch Spider-man's name, Ben makes Peter reveals his identity to Jonah, hoping to appeal to the publisher's better nature. Unfortunately Jonah's better nature is buried way deep. I find it hard to believe Ben would this be naive, but the entire plot hinges round this development, so you reluctantly have to go along with it. At least we get this fantastic 8 panel grid from Frenz, where Gillis completely nails Jameson's character in a single page.
Frenz swaps his Kirby lines for a Ditko pastiche here, and it's terrific work. A shame he didn't get to work with Gillis again, as the two together were dynamite. Jameson chooses to keep Spidey firmly trapped under his thumb, until JJJ's machinations finally come back to bite him. Interesting how Jonah is the central antagonist in both Gillis' Spider-man stories. Like with the FF, Gillis' deep grasp of humanity could have been a great fit for a Spider-man title. But at least we have these two classics to enjoy.
What if Loki Found Thor's Hammer First? #47 (1984)
Pencils: Kelley Jones
Inks: Sam De La Rosa
To answer the titular question, Don Blake would end up skewered by the Stone Men of Saturn. With Thor blissfully chilling in Valhalla, Loki makes his bid for Ragnorak, killing Balder and raising an army against Odin. Similarly to Gillis' previous Thor What If, the issue revolves around a war for Asgard, but lacks the emotional stakes of the former. Eventually Sif sacrifices herself in Odin's stead, to resurrect Thor. Again, a lot of the blame lies with bad daddy Odin, who survives mostly unscathed. Decent fare, if much more forgettable than the Jane Foster story. Gillis' Micronauts collaborator Kelley Jones provides attractive, if occasionally stiff, early art.
What If was effectively cancelled without warning with #47, despite claims it was switching to an irregular schedule. Excerpts from Ralph Macchio's bizarre final editorial:
A big change is in store for What If, which ceases bi-monthly publication as of this issue. We have special issues in the works that will blow you away... so, to insure each and every upcoming What If be an upcoming masterpiece, we've decided to lavish whatever time and effort is necessary to make them truly comics events. Thus, What If #48 will appear when we feel it is perfect... Stay with us folks, we have unbelievable things planned for this book - and they'll be well worth the wait...
Reasons for the sudden cancellation are unclear. The book was always one of Marvel's lesser sellers, hovering just below the cancellation threshold of 125,000 copies for most of its existence. There were several more stories in the works, with an Iron Man by Gillis and Ditko already in the can, which eventually saw light...
What if Iron Man Had Been a Traitor? (Special 1988)
Breakdowns: Steve Ditko
Finishes: Pat Redding
This was pulled out of a drawer 4 years after it was completed. Presumably it's a thankless task finishing the unique Ditko's breakdowns, which look a little cartoony and sparse in places. Gillis channeled the spirit of Stan Lee in this melodrama set around Iron Man's origin. Here Tony Stark didn't manage to escape from Vietnam and was instead sent back as an unwilling double agent for the Radioactive Man, with Stark's heart turned into a remote control time bomb. Nick Fury tries to expose Stark, with the help of the FF. It's a deliberately quite old fashioned tale, lacking the depth of the best Gillis What Ifs.
The special was intended to test the waters for a revival, and it sold well enough to pave way for a new What If series the following year, which lasted an impressive 115 issues. By this point however, Peter Gillis was on his way out of Marvel, so his final What If ideas never came to fruition. In Amazing Heroes 1985 preview, he discussed future plans for the now occasional series with Peter Sanderson, including a "What If Daredevil had been crippled as well as blinded"? Conversely his other story in the works was essentially a "What if Professor X had not been crippled"? He went into great detail about this 2-parter, that sadly never got past the plotting stage:
What If is no longer being published by Marvel on a regular basis, but several new stories are in the works and should see print in 1985. The first of these will be the first two-part What If story. It tentatively has the cryptic title "What if the X-Men were the Avengers?", is being written by Peter B. Gillis, and will be drawn by Jerry Ordway. In this story, Gillis states, Professor Charles Xavier, who was to found the X-Men, was not crippled in his clash with the allen conqueror Lucifer. "As a result he becomes, instead of the mentor of other superheroes, a superhero himself." Years before the Fantastic Four is formed, Xavier reorganizes the most famous World War II superhero team, the Invaders, by finding the Sub-Mariner and Toro, the partner of the original Human Torch. Eventually, instead of forming the Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk join this team, which calls itself the Liberty Legion, after another wartime team. What we know as the original X-Men team, meanwhile, is organized not by Xavier but "by an embittered Cyclops", who has become that way not only because he himself has been persecuted for being a mutant, but because he has learned that another mutant, Iceman, was killed by a mob (the same mob from which Xavier rescued Iceman in his origin story in mainstream Marvel history). Cyclops calls the team of mutants that he organizes the Avengers, because they are out to avenge Iceman's death and other examples of the persecution of mutants. The Beast never becomes a superhero in this story, but the Angel and Jean Grey join Cyclops's team. "Jean's a little bit ... crazy" in this story, Gillis explains, "mainly because she was neglected by Xavier, who was more interested in putting together the Invaders" than in teaching her how to cope with her mental powers, as a young girl, as he did before she joined the X-Men in mainstream Marvel reality. Other members of Cyclops's Avengers include Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, Unus, and the Blob. Gillis points out that this two-part story "is an alternative history not just of one character, but approximately 40. If for its length alone, it should be one of the most elaborately constructed alternate universes." The history of the two teams will be depicted, with such incidents as Johnny Storm's teaming up with Toro, and a battle between Thor and the Juggernaut, leading up to the climatic battle between the two teams, which will include a psionic fight between Xavier and Jean Grey. "And Dark Phoenix does not appear", Gillis cautions.
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