Francis here and its time for a Francis Favorite on Friday!
As you know, all three of us Snakes and Otters guys are huge Comic Book guys, although Robert by far is the hugest. (That was not a fat joke. Robert’s a pretty svelte guy.) One of the great connections between comic books and our love of ‘eternal questions’ could perhaps be summed up in the two word phrase, “What If?”
Fans of comic book history probably know what I’m talking about here when I utter that phrase. I’m referring to the Marvel Comics series begun in 1977, which was right smack dab in all three of our formative comic buying years. “What If” was the comic everyone wanted to get, and not just because of the ads for it within other Marvel comics. It was an amazing concept then and still is today.
With comics thriving on long form story continuity by their very nature (keeps regular readers coming back month after month) taking some of the ‘pivotal’ moments of great stories from the past and changing choices or events slightly would create a totally different tale. This also enabled stories that would have never been permitted otherwise to be told involving deaths of major characters for example. (This was before the whole repetitive death/resurrection trope in comics was thing.) It’s kind of in the same vein of Star Trek’s ‘Mirror, Mirror” where everything is just different enough, taking readers on a great story they never would have gotten otherwise. (Yes, I can always manage to work Star Trek into everything somehow.)
The series has had actually thirteen volumes over the years, with most of the stories being self-contained each time within one issue. (You can read an entire list of all the issues and ideas HERE.) Most fans our age of course, remember the initial one which ran 47 issues from 1977 until 1984 and contained some of the best stuff ever.
My personal favorites, as a Fantastic Four geek of course, were #6 when we see a version of the FF with different powers, #21 where Susan Storm married the Submariner instead of Reed Richards and #22 when we see Doctor Doom becoming a hero instead of a villain. The other guys have their favorites too which I’m sure they’ll tell you about.
So how does this intersect with us three guys as Snakes and Otters? Well, the idea of “What if?” is an enticing one, isn’t it? What if we each made different choices in life? What if major players in world history had done things differently? What if some stayed on the world stage longer? Or shorter? Or maybe even not at all? You get the idea . . .
We Snakes and Otters guys love a good alternate history story, which is why we have our own “What If?” stories we tell from time to time. And now you know it was Marvel Comics which inspired us to do so!
My personal favorite of our “What If?” episodes is still the first one, something I posed to the other guys in one of our many discussion sessions: what if Robert F. Kennedy were not assassinated in 1968? I wish we had recorded our original discussion about that actually (cause it was hella good for sure) but we created an awesome episode nonetheless.
Our best moment here is when Martin was inspired to compare Richard Nixon to Thanos. Folks, you just can’t find geniuses like us anywhere else!
Give a listen to that awesome episode below. It’s one of our very best . . .
