Classic Comic Series: What If?

-
Lately I've been on an old comic book kick, reading a lot of old issues from the 60s, as well as some from the 70s and 80s. I don't care at all for the current state of comic books, but I love the old stuff.

Recently I read the 2nd issue of Marvel's What If? series. This series would take an alternate history approach by proposing what would happen if certain key moments in the Marvel Universe had occurred differently, or if a character had been different in some way. They brought the series back a few times, but it's the original issues from the late 70s to mid 80s that I enjoy the most.


What strikes me as I read these old issues is how much attention was given to accurately portraying the original histories of the characters. For example, in the issue pictured above, elements from the first Hulk comic are incorporated. It's not that they modified the Hulk's origin in general terms: they actually used specific dialog and characters from his first issue. Having just read the very first issue of The Incredible Hulk a few weeks ago, I was surprised (and impressed) by this level of detail: that first issue had been written 15 years before the issue of What If?.

They would also recognize that later events that unfolded in the original stories would be different had the alternate history occurred. For example, in What If? issue 2, because The Hulk is not a rampaging beast, The Avengers are never formed to stop him. And because Bruce Banner becomes a public figure, with a very public condition, Professor X teams up with Banner and Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four to try and find a cure for Banner -- causing The X-Men to never exist either.

I have to admit a geeky love for all of this. These characters are classic, and I've always been fascinated by the whole alternate history/alternate universe take on things ever since hearing of the old "Mirror, Mirror" episode of the original Star Trek. The thought of what could've been if things had happened differently has always been an intriguing one.

Comments

Rob said…
This was a fun series and they did think of some clever variations (as well as some very lame ones, like Rob Liefeld's version of Wolverine as an agent of SHIELD. No, that didn't work for me...)

I got a laugh from the letter column, which featured a banner with a frustrated-looking Watcher, responding the a mailman, saying, "What now...?"
February 16, 2011 at 12:40 AM
Ed said…
I thought I remembered one with the cast from Saturday Night Live.

Turns out it was "Marvel Team Up" another series I used to read back then.
http://www.samruby.com/MarvelTeam-Up/marvelteamup074.htm

I also have this one where the Avengers and David Letterman.
http://blastr.com/pics/AvengersLetterman.jpg

Notice the "assistant editors month" stamp on the cover. I forgot about AEM issues until I looked this one up. You remember them? Marvel would pretend the assistant editor took over the comic and made it a parody issue instead of the normal serious story.
February 16, 2011 at 9:00 AM
Ed said…
Here's a good article on Assistant Editors month.
http://estellabooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/assistant-editors-month.html
February 16, 2011 at 9:04 AM
Alan said…
@Rob: From what I hear, they eventually made Wolverine (and Spider-Man) members of "The New Avengers". Ugh.

@Ed: I love Marvel Team Up, and it's funny you should mention that, because that was next on my list of comics to look for. I'd never heard of the SNL or Letterman issues -- wow, that's very, very weird, LOL!

I'd never heard of Assistant Editor's Month -- that's funny! I need to check some of them out.
February 16, 2011 at 12:42 PM
Ed said…
off topic,
Thought you might get a kick out of this.
http://www.forbes.com/2011/02/23/dumbest-warning-labels-entrepreneurs-sales-marketing-warning-labels_slide.html?partner=yahooshopping

"Avoid Death" was my favorite.
March 9, 2011 at 4:09 PM
Alan said…
Hey! Things have been CRAZY lately! Keep meaning to write, but things have been so hectic.

That link is hysterical. "Avoid Death" was my favorite too. I try to avoid death as much as I can. Good advice.
March 9, 2011 at 6:54 PM

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Resolving the "n timer(s) still in the queue" Error In Angular Unit Tests

-
A few months ago one of the developers I work with ran into the below error in an Angular unit test: 1 timer(s) still in the queue The fix was to specify a particular amount of time in the tick() call as shown below: it( 'should set accountConfirmationDetails when getAccountConfirmationDetails is called' , fakeAsync(() => {          // Arrange          let  spyGetAccountConfirmationDetails = spyOn(accountService,  'getAccountConfirmationDetails' )         .and         .returnValue(Promise.resolve(AccountMockData.mockAccountConfirmationDetails));                    // Act         fixture.detectChanges();         tick(15000);          // Assert         expect(spyGetPaymentConfirmationDetails).toHaveBeenCalled();           expect(comp.zone).toBe(42);           expect(comp.hasValidProfile).toBeTruthy(); })); Hoping this helps someone!
Read more

Silent Renew and the "login_required" Error When Using oidc-client

-
I recently implemented the Silent Renew functionality of oidc-client in an Angular application I work on, and was getting reports that the users' tokens were still expiring. This made no sense to me as I'd verified the code was working during development, but yesterday I found the problem and am hoping it will save someone some time. The error we were getting back was "Error from signinSilent: login_required". This indicates that the user's session is no longer active on IdentityServer and they must re-authenticate -- which, of course, is what we're trying to prevent by using Silent Renew. In our case, the problem wasn't with the Silent Renew functionality, but rather the user's session was expired. The reason why  it was expired was because, for some reason, we were setting the session length to 15 minutes instead of the default 10 hours . What was occurring was that Silent Renew was attempting to renew a token after 55 minutes (60 minutes expirat
Read more

How to Get Norton Security Suite Firewall to Allow Remote Desktop Connections in Windows

-
Image
I ran into an issue recently with RDP connections being blocked by the firewall in Norton Security Suite. I checked the traffic rules under Settings > Firewall > Traffic Rules  and found that it was enabled by default (and couldn't be edited): But during further research, I found  this page  on Norton's support site which discusses the different trust levels of networks and mentions that, for the Public trust level, "This setting also blocks remote desktop connections by default.". I checked my network's trust level, and sure enough, it was set to Public (I'm not sure how/why). (Sidebar: Notice in the screenshot above that allowing Remote Desktop for Public Networks is defaulted to Allow , though that rule is not active). Here's what my network trust level looks like now after changing the setting to Private (accessible under Settings > Firewall > General Settings > Network Trust ): After changing the network trust level t
Read more

Fixing the "Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation" Error In An Angular App After Upgrading to webpack 4

-
I'm currently in the process of upgrading an Angular application which does not  use the Angular CLI from webpack 2 to webpack 4. The incremental upgrade from webpack 2 to 3 was easy, but once I made the jump from 3 to 4, I encountered a lot of problems. I went through them one by one, but the one that had me stumped was the following: Unhandled Promise rejection: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. ; Zone: <root> ; Task: null ; Value: Error: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. The code was transpiling/compiling fine, but this error was occurring when I'd navigate to a page containing this pipe. This code has worked fine under webpack 2 and 3. I made sure that the pipe was being set up as a declaration , which it was. What finally  corrected the issue for me w
Read more

How to Determine if a Column Exists in a DataReader

-
I recently had to work on something which required me to query a database, open the results in a DataReader, and check for the existence of a particular column. While the DataReader doesn't have a method to do this, with just a few steps I was able to accomplish this task. Here's how. First, the DataReader has a method named GetSchemaTable() , which returns a DataTable consisting of information regarding the data contained in the DataReader. The first column in this DataTable is named ColumnName , and its value is (obviously) the name of the column. Knowing this, we can loop through the rows in the DataTable, checking the ColumnName column for a value that equals the name of the column we're looking for. To this end, I wrote a static method in one of my classes which takes the DataReader and the name of the column being sought: (C#) public static bool HasColumn(DbDataReader Reader, string ColumnName) {    foreach (DataRow row in Reader.GetSchemaTable().Rows)    {       
Read more