If memory serves, this book was due out last December, so after such a long wait, it had a lot to live up to. Of course, it doesn't come close to being worth the wait, but to be honest, it does offer a couple of laughs. The problem is that humor is so low-brow and in-jokey that its appeal is going to be quite limited. The jokes in this book strike me as the sort of fare one might hear tossed around a Marvel boardroom table or around the publisher's water cooler. The writers mock themselves, Marvel's character's and Marvel's competition, but it occasionally crosses the line into mean-spirited territory. Mahfood's style suits the farcical tone of the book but never really grabs me, his edgier, urban leanings cast aside for this super-hero riff.
Marvel's top writers contribute a number of goofy "What If?" concepts of their own, some dealing with silly developments in the Marvel Universe itself and others poking fun at those who create comics. I was pleased to find that the writers stick to the "What If?" theme exclusively throughout the book, since this one-shot was developed as a joking afterword to a series of one-shots that played the "What If?" premise straight. The problem that the connection isn't there anymore. The "What If?" approach really would have worked better if it played out in the context of the release of those other self-contained comics.
My favorite piece in the book is Bendis's piss-take on Identity Crisis. He mocks the melancholy tone of Brad Meltzer's dialogue from that DC event book perfectly. The melodrama and misdirection that defined IC lends itself to parody quite easily, and as someone who (a) enjoyed the event and (b) saw its flaws, I enjoyed this sendup as well. I might have appreciated it more had Bendis or some other Marvel writer given the same treatment to Bendis's "Avengers Disassembled" event that debuted around the same time and was the focus of just as much if not more criticism than IC.
What didn't sit well with me was a crack about the now-defunct CrossGen Comics on the very first page. It set a nasty tone for the book, one that took a while to fade. It's one thing to poke fun at a competitor in a humor book, but it's another to kick someone when they're down. The CrossGen philosophy had its flaws, and one could argue that its mismanagement hurt a lot of people, but there was a lot of innovation and solid work that came from the company. I know I'm focusing on five words one a single page, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
Mahfood's crude-but-effective and exaggerated style is the most important element in the book, but it serves as a clear cue that this is not your typical Marvel book. There's both a love and disdain for the characters that shines through in the art. I'm always pleased when one of the two largest publishers in the industry provides some work for less conventional artists such as Mahfood, as it exposes new readers to their work.
The "What If?" premise wears a little after a while. The jokes, for the most part, are pretty one-note in nature. Though I appreciated the brevity of many of the sequences, by the end of the book, the concepts tended to lean a little toward the lame side. Furthermore, a lot of the humor seemed to focus too much on industry in-jokes. Bendis's non-existent Batman/Daredevil book? Is that a controversy that really resonated that strongly with the comics-reading audience as a whole? I think not. Ultimately, what hinders the book more than anything else is the price. It's a hefty one to demand for what is essentially a collection of adolescent humor. 4/10
