What If…

Who was a comicbook kid that didn’t play that game? You were with your friends and showing off your latest Spider-Man issue (free if you bought enough back-to-school paper), or the 7-11 rack copy of a new Superman, or if you were lucky that month you had the title your friends didn’t have because you got to take a trip to the local comic shop, and they had more books than you ever thought possible to read in your life (every week!). Or you were the kid holding your beaten up copy of the Power Pack you fished out of a bin at a yard sale for a quarter. You played the game as one of those kids or with those kids.

And when you were home alone, with that pad of lined paper you never really used at school, you’d play that game in your head.

What if… Thunderbolt Ross had Recruited Hulk? What If… Tony Stark never recovered from his addictions? What If… Aunt May had come to pick Peter up? What If… The Klyntar had bonded with the Asgardians? What If… The possibilities were as endless as your imagination, because there you would be writing them down or sketching little figures in mock panels and covers. Doing your best to bring them to life at the kitchen table.

Those artifacts rarely survive the myriad of moves from house to house or apartment to apartment and every variation therein. Pieces of paper are so much more tangential than toys, and even those playthings are lost to lives lived. Still, after years, the imagination remains and that love of the possibility of potential thrives if you feed it well enough.

Somewhere along the line, someone at Marvel (Stan Lee? Lovely man if you’d ever had the chance to meet him and he might shoulder the burden of this idea if you’d asked.) got it into their head there might be a series based on this fan-tastical game. What If… Was born!

I’m no comic historian. I love comics. Collected them off and on since I was a kid, but I’ve been terrible at remembering all the facts and figures and ins and outs of the business. I’ve never been in a position to afford that priority. None of which has dampened my wonder, especially when it comes to this series of books. I like to imagine they never believed it would run past a dozen issues. And I guess in the newest relaunches of the series that would be true. Wonder of wonders it must have been in the beginning when it just kept going and the ideas didn’t stop. I would have loved to sit in the Marvel Bullpen in those days. The smell of cigar cigarette smoke, pencil lead and ink smudged into your hands, the rustle of fans and paper, and a group of folks standing around pitching ideas for issues. These secret things they’d wanted to see beloved characters do, yet never could within the strict confines of story arcs and canon. To be there and watch Joe Kubert sketching up a cover that brought to life what had no doubt been the center of schoolyard debates… Over the years a lot of folks tossed their hats into that ring — new kids and legends both.

Of all the Marvel Comics titles out there, What If… is the one I’ve wanted most. What kind of comic writer or artist doesn’t want to be a part of a legacy of infinite possibilities?

This mock What If… cover imagines a story where Cletus Kasady never bonded with the Carnage symbiote and instead bonded with Spider-Man’s Doppelganger. It presents the idea that Doppelganger, being little more than instinct and primal urges, the symbiote could not just inhabit this host, it could control it, and achieve complete independence. What would Carnage have chosen to become without Cletus’ warped hunger for slaughter and mayhem?

This was my fourth round entry of the #kibinkcontest. It ended up being both a tribute to a favourite series and a chance to pretend I was playing in that sandbox just like I’d dreamed of as a kid.

Don’t sleep on this! You folks get out there and make your dreams happen. No matter how long they take or what form they finally arrive in.

Fox