They've been properly convinced that there should be no more superheroes by this four
panel discussion, and so the Avengers proceed to commit genocide.
I'm here with Tom and Nina and we're going to talk about our favorite what-ifs.
I just wanted to kind of...
I was looking these issues up and I wanted to talk about some of the stuff I saw.
What's interesting about all of this is that I noticed in just the quick descriptions of
all the what-ifs, a lot of these what-ifs have actually come to pass years and years
and years later.
So quickly, I'm just going to run through them.
What if number one, Spiderman joined the fantastic four.
Number two.
Can you imagine?
What if Hulk had the brain of Bruce Banner?
What?
Number seven; what if someone else besides Spiderman had been bitten by a radioactive
spider?
Now quickly, those three...
That would be like 18 different issues.
That'd be great.
Spiderman did join the Fantastic Four.
He joined the Future Foundation.
Hulk has had the brain of Bruce Banner several times, and most recently in Avengers: Endgame.
Someone else besides Spiderman had been bitten by the spider.
We've already seen a character named Silk who was another person who attended the same
science fair as Peter Parker.
Now we've got number eight; what if the world knew that Daredevil is blind?
Famously, in Brian Michael Bendis' Daredevil run, his identity was revealed to the public.
And so everyone knew that Daredevil was blind lawyer Matt Murdock.
Number 10; what if Jane Foster had found the hammer of Thor?
Coming soon.
Coming soon to a theater near you.
Number 30; what if Spiderman's clone had lived?
In the nineties, they did an entire-
That would've sucked, right?
Multi-year run called the Clone Saga, which is still happening in different ways every
once in a while.
I don't know if it's happening this second, but I'm pretty sure there's another spider
clone still running around.
Number 37; what if Beast and Thing continued to mutate?
Beast did continue to mutate again, Grant Morrison's X-Men run.
He had another mutation.
Number 44; what if Captain America were revived today?
That comic book is from the seventies.
And since then we've gotten him revived today in the current crop of Marvel movies.
So anyway, I've talked a lot.
I think I'm going to throw to someone else.
I guess I have the floor.
All right.
It's all you, Nina.
All right.
So my pick is issue number 33, which actually spins off from a real Iron Man comic and imagines
that the opposite thing happened.
And it is what if Iron Man got trapped in Camelot?
Yeah.
Based on a multi-arc.
So I couldn't find an original copy of Doom Quest anywhere to read online, which is the
original comic where Doctor Doom and Iron Man are tussling as they do, and they end
up transported back into Camelot and Iron Man teams up with King Arthur and Doctor Doom
teams up with Morgan le Fay and they fight and then...
And Morgan le Fay has been a constant Avengers bad guy since then.
Yes.
And then basically the two of them put their differences aside for like five minutes and
they built a time machine and they leave Camelot.
It does not sound like the-
That's the whole story?
Kind of, yeah.
Morgan le Fay is like, "My half brother, Arthur, we must defeat him."
Yada-yada.
And so they fight, they fight.
And then the two superheroes are like, "Well also Camelot sucks.
So let's go back to where we're from."
But what if they imagine that Doctor Doom betrays Iron Man, and just leaves him in Camelot
forever?
And so he can't build a time machine.
He doesn't have any technology, so he just joins the round table and becomes a knight.
And he becomes the successor to King Arthur and is Sir Anthony, the Man of Iron.
And that imagines that Tony Stark was a part of medieval lore instead of being in present
day.
Hello, my liege.
And that is my favorite what-if, because it is, well, I liked that it took this really
already silly, kind of stupid comic premise from a real Iron Man series and just went,
but what if Doom was really a jerk and left him there?
Which he is.
Yeah.
And just the idea of Tony Stark being like, "All right, I guess I'm a knight of the round
table now."
I mean, I want to see this.
I want them to bring Downey Jr. back for an exorbitant amount of money and put him in
a suit of armor and make him hang out with King Arthur.
I want this.
Please Disney, please do this.
I would love to see...
Yeah.
I mean, they've done stuff like that, right?
I need this.
Didn't they do like a kid in King Arthur's court?
They did Black Knight starring Martin Lawrence.
Do that with Robert Downey Jr.
Just send Downey Jr. back in time to join King Arthur.
Look.
Last year was a really hard year.
I think we all need this.
Yeah.
I am absolutely on board with Disney's End Game and this being like spending a billion
dollars on this movie for nobody.
Just no one is going to enjoy this.
Yeah.
I want this to be such a big budget.
Game of Thrones level budget.
Like they build a castle, they don't even need to.
There's castles everywhere in Europe.
They build one anyway.
Yeah.
I have big dreams for this.
They go to like local Shakespeare in the Park performances and they find the worst actors
that they can get, and they give them these big, meaty, Arthurian characters to play.
No, better.
They go to a renaissance fair in the middle of Kansas.
And they're like, "Who is the real dud at this ren fair?"
And they pick that guy, and they bring him in and they're like, "You will play King Arthur."
Outstanding.
He pulls the foam sword from the foam rock, but everyone can.
They just want to get it on camera to see who looks the best.
I like it.
Yeah.
So that is my pick for the weirdest what-if story, but weirdly the more I thought about
it and the more I talk about it, the more dedicated I am to making this a reality.
So you're into it?
I'm into it because it's so stupid, and it has the potential to be so just campy and
dumb.
This is what I live for.
This is why I'm here.
I like it.
My pick was issue number six, which is what if the Fantastic Four had gotten different
powers.
So in the original, in the normal, the accepted Fantastic Four.
You've got Mister Fantastic.
He stretches, that's Reed Richards, Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman, she turns invisible.
It's a shocker.
Johnny Storm, the human torch, he becomes flamy and on fire.
And then The Thing, Ben Grimm, he becomes a big rocky guy.
Thing?
Yeah.
A big rocky thing.
Yes.
That's what I should have said.
And so there's...
Basically they say like, "Oh, well, those were the things that happened because in their
subconscious, the cosmic rays accessed their subconscious.
And that's sort of how they transformed because Reed Richards is always stretching his mind
to like...
Whatever.
Johnny Storm's a hot head.
You see what I'm saying?
So their powers matched their personalities.
It all lines up.
Right.
So in this re-imagining, they say, what if different elements of their personalities
were accessed?
So Ben Grimm grows wings, dragon wings.
That's because he's a pilot?
Dragon wings.
'Cause he's a pilot?
Dragon wings.
Trying to stretch this out.
You really should have led with dragon wings.
You really buried the lede.
He calls himself Dragonfly.
Sure.
So again, now let's think for a second.
That sucks.
Does a dragonfly have dragon wings?
No.
A dragonfly has dragonfly wings.
Dragons have dragon wings.
Dragonfly is not the best name.
At least the name Thing was vague enough that it covered pretty much whatever he turned
into, right?
Right, yeah.
If his name had been Noun, that would have been fine, but dragonfly...
So Johnny Storm, he's not doing hotheaded things, but he is a mechanic.
So he turns into a robot.
Oh, okay.
So he's a transformer.
No, he's literally just a robot.
He's calls himself Mandroid.
And Sue Storm...
Mandroid?
I don't remember the justification for why she...
They were just like, "Whatever, just give her Reed Richards' power."
So she stretches now.
Does she never not get the short end of the stick, like creatively?
She's a great character.
But yeah, they don't do as much with her as they should have.
Yeah, they do her dirty.
She becomes a great character.
But like, man, back in the day, she spent like the first couple of years in that thing
just getting kidnapped every week.
Really?
Yeah.
"Hopefully he won't notice me walking away now that I'm invisible."
And that was literally every story.
So I haven't mentioned what Reed Richards turns into because it's the best one.
I am so excited.
It's the best one.
He just turns into a gigantic brain.
What?
He controls the Baxter building, that's where they live, and he just travels around in a
series of pneumatic tubes.
And I've shared an image of that with you.
And he's just a brain.
I don't know what he does.
He just watches the other three do things and he's a brain.
So then as the issue progresses, Doctor Doom gets involved as always.
He kidnaps brainy Reed Richards, his nemesis from college, and then the other three go
after him.
There's a fight.
Things happen, and eventually Doctor Doom is about to blow up everyone and everything.
And Reed Richards activates his super-duper big brain powers and takes over Doctor Doom's
mind.
And the new Fantastic Four is born.
And there's a visual I've just shared with you.
It's Doctor Doom in a light blue-
Oh, golly.
-Doctor Doom outfit with a little four on there and he just looks really awkward.
It looks like he's holding in, like he has to go to the bathroom.
Yeah.
He does.
That's my what-if.
He looks really natural.
The worst, man.
His outfit also fits so poorly.
Like the tunic is...
No, nothing's good here.
They should have tailored it a little better.
But anyway.
Yeah.
That's my pick for the weirdest what-if...
That's deranged.
I love it.
So, Tom, what is your pick for the weirdest what-if story?
My pick...
All right.
So my favorite what-if story that I would love to see adapted to any screen, really,
what if Number 29, it was written by Steven Grant and it was titled what if the Avengers
defeated everyone?
I came across that one.
I came very close to picking it, because it's nuts.
It is nuts, and it's an exciting premise, right?
Yeah.
It's nifty.
Yeah.
And then as often happened with comic books and still does from time to time, once you
start reading the actual story, it's a major buzzkill.
What happens is, we start out with the Avengers and they're all having an argument about being
Avengers, 'cause this is Marvel Comics from back in the day, and everybody is always butting
heads.
That's what you do if you're an Avenger.
Yeah, as one does.
They're having an argument.
And then all of a sudden this guy appears out of nowhere and his name is, I think, the
Scarlet Centurion, and they've never met him before.
And he's like, "Listen guys, in the future, which I've been to, superheroes destroyed
the world."
And they're like, "No, they don't."
And he's like, "Yes, they do."
"Nah."
And they're like, "All right."
So they've been properly convinced that there should be no more superheroes by this four
panel discussion and so the Avengers proceed to commit genocide.
They go out into the world.
It's alarmingly abrupt.
They just bust the wall of the Baxter building and immediately just take out all of the Fantastic
Four.
And it should be really exciting except for they only give this whole 'the Avengers kill
everyone in the universe', they only give it two pages.
Sure.
Three, if you count the one-page that's dedicated to the Scarlet Centurion watching them on
a computer screen, revealing that he's actually Rama-Tut or Kang the Conqueror.
What a twist.
Wow.
And he disguised himself by putting a hat over his other hat, which pretty much sums
up Kang the Conqueror as a character, in my opinion.
But I'm a simple man.
Who could've predicted that this mysterious person we've never seen before, who would
tell us to kill all the superheroes, was actually a villain?
Why did we listen to him?
He was just so convincing is the thing.
He's compelling and I think that's what...
Okay, so they go out and they knock everybody out and then Rama-Tut is like, "Hey, just
kidding.
Gotcha."
"JK."
Yeah.
And then the Avengers split up for a while, Tony gets drunk and gambles.
Is anyone arrested for a war crime at all?
No, this is another one of those great Avengers stories where there's apparently no police
or United Nations or anything.
Nobody's ever seeing any of this.
Yeah.
No, there's no governing body.
There's no one to be like, "Wow, these superheroes just murdered people on an unprecedented scale."
They just sort of started breaking through buildings and kidnapping people, and then
delivering them to an alien that they met 10 minutes ago.
It's outstanding.
The weirdest part of the whole thing is like, and it comes out of nowhere, but then a different
team of Avengers from a different universe comes in and almost beats the first team of
Avengers.
That's relatively boilerplate for comic books, but what makes it fascinating is that Hawkeye
meets Thor, and they're very vague as to how that happened.
There's just a shot with a twang onomatopoeia, and then Thor's down.
Anyway.
Hawkeye beats Thor.
Really, the whole premise of that what-if should have been what if Hawkeye beat Thor?
What if Hawkeye beat Thor?
What if Hawkeye beat anybody?
That's equally as absurd to me.
Yeah.
What's the Marvel universe's most enthusiastic sporting goods purchaser actually got out there
and knock out a Norse god?
What if Hawkeye released an album?
Ooh.
You know what?
I feel like we live in that what-if universe and maybe just not acknowledge it for a sec.
This is what it's like to live in a what-if universe.
What if Hawkeye released an album?
Yeah.
We all know now.
What if Hawkeye had an app named after Hawkeye that was devoted just to talking about Hawkeye?
Those were the good days.
What would that be like?
How can anyone even imagine such a thing?
Anyway.
You know, I'm kind of rocking the Watchers' whole head skull structure right now.
Anyway.
So I feel like, I feel like you might be onto something.
You're primed.
You're ready.
I like to think so.
Well, I know we're going to see some of these at some point someday.
Maybe not the Fantastic Four in the what-if series that's coming up, but I know that we're
going to get what if Agent Carter was Captain Britain?
What if Marvel zombies were a thing?
What if T'Challa was Star-Lord?
So that'll be interesting.
Thanks for watching.
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