REVIEW: What If…? Vol 2, #9

“What if the X-Men died on their first mission?”

Writer: Roy Tomas
Pencils: Rich Buckler
Inks: Sam Delarosa
Colorist: Evelyn Stein
Review: Madman

Man, I do love me some Volume One What If..? comics, but Volume 2 and beyond are always hit-n-miss. This issue was particularly miss on all fronts. It was a struggle just to actually finish reading the damn thing. I literally nodded off at least twice, somewhere between the Konami Ninja Turtle game ad and the Clearasil DoubleClear pad ad, and that’s a true story.

Granted there could be a couple other factors in play such as the minimal amount of sleep I’ve gotten in the last week, the fact that my wife and dog are both contagiously snoring away on the couch next to me, or the fact that my fish tank needs some water added, since it’s making this sort of babbling brook kind of white noise in the background… Or it could just be the fact that this comic was about as exciting as visiting grandma at the nursing home on a Friday night.
Just kidding; I don’t visit my Grandma, let alone on a Friday night.     

For serious though, some may argue that What If…? books are just throwaway nonsense, and I should have known better. Like I said, I truly dig most of them...just not this one. The writing is way off the mark; it was disengaging and couldn’t make you care about it if it was raining twenty dollar bills. In fact, I don’t recall having ever read so much dialogue in a single issue of any comic book ever. Some panels were so crammed full of dialogue that the artwork was pushed out or covered up entirely.

I read or watched an interview with Stanley Martin Lieber, and he mentioned that once upon a time in Marvels pre-technology era, the writers and artists were having a hard time keeping up with the quota. The artists would draw a whole issue and then Mr. Lieber would go back,make up, and fill in the dialogue after the fact. That is exactly what it feels like Thomas and Buckler did here, except they aren’t Lee or Kirby no matter how much they want to be.

So, somewhere between the flashback narrative squares, the dialogue circles, and the fluffy blurby clouds of inner dialogue, the X-Men get eaten/enslaved by a living island known as Krakoa. All of them die except the Professor (he’s in a wheel chair and the writers wrote it like he’s absolutely worthless), Beast (he had left to join the Avengers), and Cyclops (I’m not sure why).
Cyclops is one of my least favorite comic book characters of all time. I was so hoping to see him die a horrible death, but I was denied…
Who knows, it probably happened but was obscured behind the half-a-million dialogue squares, circles, and fluffy blurby clouds.

On the plus side, the new X-Men brought in to replace the ones the island offed did fight some anthropomorphic villains. On the crap side of things, it was a pretty lame fight….at least the parts of it I could see.

I need to punch myself in the junk next time I’m thinking about spending a hard earned dollar on another issue of volume 2, but I won’t.
I’m sure you’ll get to read me complaining about it here in the Dollar Box sooner or later.