Oh, so X-Men comics have become an unreadable mess of bloated muscles and pointless ultra-violence? Let’s make a What If issue where Wolverine is ultra-ultra-violent, and his bodily proportions hurt even more to look at.
Starting in ’96, there was an intentional push to make the stories as adult as possible, and by “adult,” we mean “a 15-year-old’s idea of adult.” One issue asks, “What if Bruce Banner was the real monster?” and it’s mostly just Banner beating up his wife Betty accompanied by non-sequitur dialogue that might or might not be the result of a production error.
Later, Betty gets the courage to speak up about Bruce’s abuse, so he tries to have her committed and … actually does it, the end. The last panel is of a smiling Betty, seemingly unaware that she’s about to be forced into a straitjacket. At least they added a little editorial note about how Marvel isn’t saying you shouldn’t speak up about domestic abuse or you’ll end up in a padded room, don’t worry.
A lot of issues from this godforsaken period are poor attempts at horror stories starring barely recognizable Marvel characters, like the one about Peter Parker slowly mutating into a giant spider monster instead of a wisecracking superhero. Somehow, he still managed to convince someone to have sex with him at some point and had a son, but the kid turned out to be a freak with creepy bug eyes … and, worse yet, kind of an asshole.
One night, while struggling with his mutation, Peter crawls to the kitchen for a midnight snack and ends up eating part of the family dog, leaving the rest suspended on webs in the back yard. Then, to his horror, he sees that Junior did something similar to a school bully, and the PTA are all looking for him with baseball bats. Peter saves his kid from the mob, only to end up getting beaten to death in front of him.
The “feel good” ending for this issue shows the kid willingly going to the Charles Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, like Peter always tried to convince him to do. We have to assume he shot up the place within a couple of years, though (hopefully, it was only with web fluid). So yeah, let’s all hope Marvel Studios’ What If gets canceled long before it reaches the Dork Age, and we have to sit through an adaption of one of these atrocities.
Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok‘s heroic effort to read and comment every ’90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com.
Top image: Marvel Comics