Michael Hancock

That's it for this week! We'll see what I finish book-wise, and what things look like out of the What If main series over at Marvel.

And Garth stumbles on to a Cave of Death remnant, which is a nice nod to the very tail end of the first series. Mike Mignolia does the cover, and I do love his work, but it makes a poor pairing with the Caliafore interiors.

Jim Caliafore takes over during a later arc, with issue 5, where Arthur is looking for Ocean Master's mother, and runs instead into a young man who may be his son. And in issue 6, Deep Ones with a vague superhero team theme go after the assembled group.

Aquaman: No! I'm not going to going to feel guilty! I settled that ghost long ago! Dream Manta: Righteous fool! Who cares about your guilt trips? That's old news. Belated and boring! I don't want you to fee guilty!

This dream sequence from issue 0--which comes just after issue 2--feels like a pointed message against the last few runs as well.

And honestly, I'm all for that--the past runs have gotten very heavy and serious. For art, we have Marty Egeland. In the first arc, Arthur loses his hand to piranhas, replaces it with a harpoon. Visually striking, if a kind of odd disability message.

And over at DC, I read Peter David's run on Aquaman, issues 1-6 and 0. It's very much a Peter David comic, which means a lot of puns, sexual innuendo, a tone that shifts between comedic and heavy sometimes rapidly.

81 is What if The Age of Apocalypse got invaded by Galactus, by Mariano Nicieza and Kevin Hopgood. Hopgood either painted this, or has a very painterly style. It's very pretty to look at, but the action doesn't really come off.

75 is What if Blink of Generation X had not died by Stefan Petrucha and Grg Luznak. In the mission where she did die, she instead blinks into the timestream, and tries to make a perfect future for everyone. Instead, she accidentally runs afoul of the Inbetweener, and nearly destroys reality.

Kieron Gillen got around it by making him an egoist whose only real goal is a somewhat tunnel vision advancement of his own power, but that can't really apply to this story, at least not how Furman executes it.

Which is a Sinister problem in general--his motivation is usually kept too vague to get a sense of stakes.

I like the idea that Furman is going for here, that Cyclops is still drawn towards the X-Men, but tainted by Sinister's influence. But I don't think the execution works, because Sinister's ideology is too vague to really suggest what that taint means.

74 is What if Mr Sinister Formed the X-Men by Simon Furman and Nathaniel Palant. Mr Sinister takes a more direct role in keeping Cyclops close earlier in his life, and as a result, forms a team of him, Madelyne, Havok, and Sabretooth.

There's a bit of a darkly amusing montage, where it goes over how DD's support cast fares without him; Foggy fades into obscurity, but Elektra and Karen Page have much, much better outcomes without him.

73 is What if The Kingpin Owned Daredevil by D G Chichester and Tom Grindberg. The Kingpin takes a role in Matt's early life, taking him under his wing after the death of his father. Matt attempts to pull out of his orbit, but finds it's not that easy. Nice little crime story.

It's not so much that he's haunted by guilt in the usual way, or caught by JJJ or the cops--it's that he feels he can't trust his strength under pressure, and that continually makes him a worse superhero who, ironically, leads to people getting hurt through his hesitation.

72 is probably my favorite of the set--What if Spider-Man became a Murderer? by Simon Furman and Craig Brasfield. Spider-Man accidentally kills the burglar who killed Uncle Ben. The story goes to a fairly predictable end--he eventually turns himself in. But I really like the way it gets there.

And there's something really gross about taking a civilian population that was killed in a bombing and turning them into conquerers. It turns the bombing into a sort of we killed them before they could enslave us, which is not a great moral justification.

The premise is that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a gamma bomb, that accidentally created thousands of Hulks who go on to conquer America and rule it in a dystopian manner.

71 is What if the Gamma Bomb Spawned a Thousand Hulks? by Ian Edginton and Larry Stroman. I like Stroman, and that's about all to like here. I don't think we've had a direction this racist since that What if Captan America that both sided the Civil War.

It ends with the Fantastic Four signing up as heralds to lead Galactus to lifeless planets, and... I don't think that was an option?

So I read 70-75, and 81. 70 Is What if Silver Surfer never betrayed Galactus by Chuck Dixon, Joey Barney, Don Hudson, and Michael Kraiger. Galactus goes all out trying to destroy the world, and eventually the Watcher steps in. Galactus kills him, but is satisfied feeding on his energy.

Over at Marvel, I'm near the end of the big What If volume, or at least near the end of how much Marvel has up on Marvel Unlimited--there are some big gaps. I'm toying with going back and finding copies of what I missed, as those are the issues I remember reading as a kid when they came out.

Cover of Aliette de Bodard's Navigational Entanglements.

And finally, I'm 2/3 through a novella I started last year, Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard. The characters have faced down an alien threat, only to figure out they've been set up. And they still can't stop from fighting each other. And kissing each other, in one case.

Cover is a griffin fighting a blue dragon.

Similarly, I'm 1/20 into Elizabeth Willey's The Well-Favored Man The Tale of the Sorcerer's Nephew, a 1993 fantasy novel. It's leaning really heavily into the idea of a family of nobility, and I'm interested in seeing where this sense of privilege and duty takes us.

Cover of Lavanya Lakshminarayan's The Ten Percent Thief. The top half is a tree in a yellow background; the bottom half is the roots of the tree, in what looks like triangles or constellations on a blue background.

I'm about 1/10 into Lavanya Lakshimarayan's 2023 The 10 Percent Thief, which is about said thief operating a cyberpunk dystopia. I'm not far enough to really have a sense of it, but I like it so far.

And on one jaunt, he finds an album written by his alter self. As with a lot of Anderson, I'm less into where the story ended up, but the premise is a lot of fun, with a lead suddenly finding himself more invested than he assumed. There's something here about the nature of creativity as well.

I read Kevin J Anderson's short story, Music Played on the Strings of Time, written in 1993. I like the premise--a character is commissioned to go into alternate timelines and look for music by famous musicians that was never made in his timeline.

In the distance, there's a tree with wires and round balls. Other such trees are further in the distance. Closer to the foreground ,we see humans walking roads. Cover of Brian Aldiss' The Canopy of Time.

I also think his claim that these are interconnected stories is a troll of the audience--the connection is usually 2-3 sentences at the end that's some variation of "and then everyone forgot about that invention." The tenuousness of it all is probably my favorite aspect of the collection.

I'm about 1/3 through Brian Aldiss' 1959 collection The Canopy of Time. And honestly, the more I read of his work, the more convinced I am that he's a guy who wrote one story ("Supertoys that last all summer long") that really resonates with people, and a bunch of other stuff that's just odd.

The black and white cover of Cold Hand in Mine Strange Stories by Robert Aickman. A hand lies on the ground, the body attached to it out of sight. In the distance, there's two rows of trees, one on each side of the cover. In the horizon is a large house.

I'm 2/3 through Robert Aickman's Cold Hand in Mine, a collection of short stories. They tend between outright weird fiction and suspense stories that hover on the edge of something stranger. The last I finished was The Hospice, which is about a hotel that may or may not be Purgatory.