Foolish
on November 20, 2019 at 1:01 amChapter: What If...? Walky Went To College
Characters: Sal Walters, The Cheese
Location: Martian Embassy
Doing this a second time around, The Cheese’s narrative boxes can give away more hints to who he used to be, now that the cat’s out of the bag.
Also, one of the perks of writing peeks into alternate universes is that you can have plausibly dead major characters on cliffhangers such as this. All folks are potentially disposable! I hear Marvel’s What If…?s have a pretty high body count.
Loading ...
I don’t think he twisted her leg this time, yikes.
“What if…? Walky and Sal were never separated at birth” is the storyline I’d like to see. Beef would be grunting with the Cheese. I feel cheated.
Wait, Sal plausibly died? Just like that?
The Cheese does have effectively godlike powers, for most intents and purposes.
I remember one “What if…?” story where Dark Phoenix destroyed the universe, so yeah, they weren’t shy about killing off anybody.
I still recall reading What If the Avengers Lost Operation: Galactic Storm, in which they blew up the Earth, killing Iron Man, Hawkeye, Vision, Black Widow, Ant-Man, and Spider-Woman, among others.
I think in every What If…? where Peter Parker doesn’t become an anonymous superhero with his powers he winds up horribly dead.
I think he lives in both the ‘Aunt May becomes a superhero’ ones I know offhand (Spectacular Spider-Ma’am and Golden Oldie, Herald of Galactus.)
I was assuming The Cheese was gonna stop the resurrection of Sal’s parents, not kill her.
killing Sal would make it difficult for her to keep resurrecting her parents if you think about it.
First one, then the other?
RIP Sal II.
Oh, yeah, every once in a while they were restrained, but most of them were like “WHAT IF… Peter Parker’s name was Peter PIPER? EVERYONE EVERYWHERE WOULD DIE. #sadwatcherface”
I think that impulse eventually morphed into the unofficial “Kills the Marvel Universe” series, which is the only thing Fred Hembeck and Sergio Aragones have in common with the Punisher and Deadpool. (Squirrel Girl headlined a gentler parody of such works that was easily the best of them, with Hembeck in second place.)
(TBH, after a while it felt like a kind of self-worship on Marvel’s part, as if to say “See, Marvelites? We have created the best of all POSSIBLE worlds, because look how horrible it is when we do things even a little bit differently!” Again, there were notable exceptions, but that was kind of the default approach. Perhaps it goes without saying that I prefer alternate worlds that acknowledge there’s more than one possible happy ending, like the early Archie: The Married Life or– fine, I’ll say it– Dumbing of Age.)
Spider Man: Renew Your Vows. Although, intentionally or not, that comes across more as “Look at how happy Peter would be if we hadn’t done that stupid thing that everyone hates. Which is still there in the regular Marvel Universe. Keep reading that as well, please!”
It’s sort of an inevitable consequence of a setting in which the world/universe is constantly being saved at the last moment by a string of implausible heroics. Mess with any of it and it all falls apart.
My favorite What If? though was the one where Captain America gets found “now” (late 80s, iirc). He inspires a revolution against the fascist US government (taken over by one of the groups he’d beaten in the real timeline.) Things went bad without him, but then he comes back to save the day.
Which is how comic universes should go.
The answer to the titular question in Marvel’s 1980s What If…? series was almost always “He/She/They/Everyone would have died!”
Oof. Bye-bye, Sal.