Comments on: Black Summer’s End http://www.juliansanchez.com/2008/09/29/black-summers-end/ Just another geek in the geek kingdom Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:38:37 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2 By: Julian Sanchez http://www.juliansanchez.com/2008/09/29/black-summers-end/comment-page-1/#comment-5800 Julian Sanchez Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:27:56 +0000 http://www.juliansanchez.com/?p=2695#comment-5800 "What If?" was a lot of fun... but that's just the thing, it was mostly an outlet for writers' smash-it-all impulses, not any sort of sustained or serious storytelling. “What If?” was a lot of fun… but that’s just the thing, it was mostly an outlet for writers’ smash-it-all impulses, not any sort of sustained or serious storytelling.

]]> By: That Fuzzy Bastard http://www.juliansanchez.com/2008/09/29/black-summers-end/comment-page-1/#comment-5799 That Fuzzy Bastard Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:00:52 +0000 http://www.juliansanchez.com/?p=2695#comment-5799 My favorite solution to the "breaking the toys" problem was Marvel's "What If?" line. For those not sufficiently steeped in geekery: What If? was a series in which each issue told the story of the Marvel Universe with some crucial variable changed---What if Spiderman joined the Fantastic Four?, What if Phoenix had lived?, and so on. But the really odd part was: Almost every story ended in apocalypse, or at the very least, death. This was mostly just writers enjoying the chance to break the toys, knowing there'd be no consequences. But it created this weirdly conservative implication: if anything---anything!---had been different from how it was, the result would have been DISASTER! My favorite solution to the “breaking the toys” problem was Marvel’s “What If?” line. For those not sufficiently steeped in geekery: What If? was a series in which each issue told the story of the Marvel Universe with some crucial variable changed—What if Spiderman joined the Fantastic Four?, What if Phoenix had lived?, and so on.

But the really odd part was: Almost every story ended in apocalypse, or at the very least, death. This was mostly just writers enjoying the chance to break the toys, knowing there’d be no consequences. But it created this weirdly conservative implication: if anything—anything!—had been different from how it was, the result would have been DISASTER!

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