What if…Mike wasn’t dead tired as he was writing this?
So I was just poking through some old issues of Marvel’s What If…? at the shop (hey, I’m the boss, I can waste a little time looking at comics if I want) and was reminded that the occasional issue would have something like this:
…a short gag back-up, or an “Untold Tales of the Marvel Universe” story, or…well, more content than what was promised on the covers. I’m generally familiar with the main stories for most of the issues, just from having seen the covers over and over and over again at whatever store I happened to be working at the time. But the back-ups…unless it was an issue I’d actually purchased and read at the time, the supplementary material in What If…? are nearly always new to me.
For example, I remember finding out that there was a Man-Thing story in the first series of What If…? But, darned if I could find it, because as it turned out, this was the comic it was in:
…and not a Man-Thing to be seen on that cover, alas. Of course, eventually the Internet would spring into being and never again would I ever have any trouble tracking down that exact bit of information I need, and I’d finally put an end to my half-hearted seeking of this issue.
There are plenty more short and funny pieces located in those old What If…?s, with issue #34 (of both the ’70s and ’80s/’90s runs) basically being an issue filled with those same shorts. Don’t know if they had space to spare in these new What If…? comics that are Coming Soon to a Shop Never You for gags like this, but it’d be nice.
Unfortunately I don’t have a #34 of either run but the Vol. I cover shows Cyclops blasting blasts out of his ears, Iron Aunt May, Stan Lee as Cap, Ghost Rider in a wheelchair (which we know now would totally work) and a bespectacled Conan.
Whatever you do, don’t google image search Vol. II.
Yeah, that Man-Thing back-up is the one that picks up from where Claremont abandoned Michael Fleisher’s plotline from the late-70s series. I hadn’t looked at that comic for 20-some years, but for some reason I had it in my head that Fleisher actually wrote the What If, as if to say “Here’s what I was going to do there.”
But when I did actually check the book, it turns out that it wasn’t Fleisher, but Steven Grant. Oh, well. (But it did make me want to see what Fleisher would actually do…)
That Fleisher Man-Thing # 1 chokes me up every time.
Every Damn time.
I too would have liked to see where he was going.
The back up in the What If? Issue was An unexpected treat – tho I no longer remember it.
TO THE LONGBOXES!
Love Reagan in the back making a sour face. Eat it, Dutch!
That’s the second time you’ve posted that Keith Richards page.
Yup…I posted it on Twitter the day before. Sometimes I expand on my Twitterings for posts here.