What If the Avengers Had Been Formed During the 1950s?
WHAT IF? — Issue no. 9, March 1978
Book: What If?
Issue No.: 9
Published: March 28, 1978
Title: “What If the Avengers Had Been Formed During the 1950s?”
Cover Price: 60¢
I was always fascinated by What If? when I was reading comic books in the late 1970s, but for some reason I never bought a copy. I guess I knew about it from house ads in other Marvel books. Maybe the grocery stores and convenience stores where I bought comics didn’t carry it? Or maybe I was scared off by the 60-cent price tag (apparently each issue of What If? was double-sized and nearly double the price of Marvel’s standard books of the era)?
The first thing I’m noticing here is the Watcher doesn’t look like I remember him looking. Here he just looks like a bald guy, but I’m used to seeing him with a huge head. Actually the first thing I’m noticing is Tom Orzechowski’s lovely lettering work. But you know I am obsessed with lettering.
In case you aren’t familiar with the classic What If? comic book (or the more recent What If...? animated Marvel TV show), the premise is there is a single main Marvel Universe (or at least there was as of 1978), but the Watcher can peek into alternate universes and tell stories from those universes. This was a big difference between Marvel and rival publisher DC Comics at the time, because DC had a very active multiverse setup going, with regular crossovers so “Earth-1” heroes could interact with “Earth-2” heroes (to name but a couple of DC’s many alternate universes).
This What If? story throws my understanding of the series out the window up front though. While the Watcher briefly introduces the story, it quickly jumps to Iron Man showing some fellow Avengers a TV screen he has created that shows images from the 1950s of an alternate universe. And Iron Man asks “what if the Avengers formed in the ’50s?” And I’m thinking, well wouldn’t that just be the Invaders? But I guess the Invaders technically formed in the 1940s, and whatever Iron Man is looking at would be a post-WWII superhero group.
But, just saying, it’s weird that Iron Man is doing the Watcher’s job in this issue of What If?
The architect of this story is Roy Thomas, Invaders writer and, apparently, Marvel’s go-to retro guy in the 1970s. A note from the creative team on the fan mail page of this issue explains this was actually a fill-in issue — Thomas had come up with the retro character 3-D Man (he has the strength and abilities of three men!) and wanted to create a post-Invaders/pre-Avengers (which is post-WWII/pre-1960s) super-group using 3-D Man plus some generally forgotten Marvel characters from the 1950s. Thomas wasn’t sure where to publish such a story, but he got Don Glut to write it, and it ended up here in What If? no. 9.
Other than Thomas’ 3-D Man, the 1950s version of the Avengers includes Venus (love goddess and Hercules’ cousin), Marvel Boy (he’s from earth but was raised on Uranus, yes really, Uranus), the Human Robot (who as far as I can tell is just a robot and not human at all), and Gorilla-Man (a man turned into a gorilla by a curse). Plus their government liaison, FBI agent Jimmy Woo. Basically as soon as Woo assembles the team, the bad guys (led by the Fu Manchu-ish Yellow Claw and an ex-Nazi guy) kidnap the president (Eisenhower), and it’s up to the Avengers to save the day.
Despite some internal squabbling (it wouldn’t be a Marvel team book without one hero occasionally punching another), the Avengers prevail. Eisenhower is grateful, but he also worries that Americans of the 1950s aren’t ready for goddesses and gorilla-people and dudes from Uranus (like, they couldn’t have made Marvel Boy from Neptune? Really?), so the team disbands and Eisenhower promises a high-level government cover-up will ensure that no one ever learns of their existence. There is also some nice meta commentary in the denouement dissing on Seduction of the Innocent and the anti-comic book hysteria of the 1950s.
And then the Watcher shows back up to imply that maybe this story, even though it is appearing in a What If? comic book, actually happened in the main Marvel universe, and we just never heard about it because of the cover-up. What the heck, Watcher?
Regardless of whether this story “really” happened in the main Marvel universe, it’s still fun. Glut and the art team do a good job of capturing a goofy-yet-earnest 1950s vibe. (Unfortunately, they also capture some casual Cold War racism with their depiction of the Yellow Claw. It’s a weird creative choice to depict the Claw as an awful Asian caricature when one of the key heroes of the story is Asian Jimmy Woo.)
Next time — John Carter fights an army of undead Martians!