Once again, it's that time of year when Marvel dust off the What If? trademark and shove some one-shots onto the shelves.  This year, the theme is to do alternative endings for some of the recent major storylines.  We're going back to basics here; the original What If? series did this sort of thing all the time.

Surprisingly, given that the X-books have been largely overshadowed over the last year, three of them turn out to be X-Men stories.  There's another version of "Age of Apocalypse" still to come, which may be a first - an alternate alternate reality story.  We've also got a Deadly Genesis spin-off.

But we start off with What If? Wolverine: Enemy of the State - and yes, that's really the official title.  This isn't one of the more promising stories to use as a springboard.  What If? has always been riddled with uninspired rehashes of better stories; it's inherent in the concept.  At its best, though, What If? provides an opportunity to explore other possibilities that weren't viable in the original story because they would have derailed the series in some fundamentally unacceptable way.  Of course, a lot of What If? books overshot the mark in that regard, and just went for gratuitous mass slaughter as an alternative to writing a proper story.  But it can work with a book like Deadly Genesis, where the other possibility ("What if Vulcan and his team had actually joined the X-Men in 1975?") is plainly unworkable anywhere else.

"Enemy of the State" doesn't offer the same possibilities.  It was never exactly plot-driven to start with.  Like many of Mark Millar's stories, it was essentially a string of cool scenes with a loose structure around it - Wolverine is captured by the bad guys, they brainwash him, he does bad things for six issues, he escapes, he brings down the bad guys over the next six issues.  Now, that's a perfectly fine structure for Millar's purposes, but it doesn't leave much for writer Jimmie Robinson to work with on this book.

The angle here is "What if Wolverine had never been de-programmed?"  The problem is that Millar's brainwashed Wolverine didn't offer many possibilities.  He was a one-dimensional killer with some of Wolverine's personality traits glossed on top.  The dramatic weight, such as it was, came from his occasional attempts to resist his brainwashing.  Again, this was fine for Millar's story, since he really just wanted to do a big, dumb action story and the plot was merely a framework to hang it on.

But if Wolverine stays brainwashed by HYDRA, does it open up any new possibilities?  Not really.  You just get the same routine from the first half of "Enemy of the State", and it continues for longer.  And that's about it.

This story picks up six months later, with most of the heroes dead or mutilated, and a band of plucky survivors trying to bring Wolverine down.  Mainly, it's Kitty Pryde's story, and that's a smart move - she's got the close connection with Wolverine, and because of her intangibility powers, you can do the stalemate where he can't affect her, but she can't get through to him.

Broadly speaking, that's the angle Robinson takes, and it's probably the best you're going to get out of this concept.  But there's limited mileage in evil Wolverine to start with, and frankly, Millar and John Romita Jr already did it better in the parent story.  This is the curse of What If? books.  If you're going to invoke a story that worked rather well in the first place, you're setting yourself an awfully difficult task. Robinson's writing and Carmine di Giandomenico's art are both thoroughly solid and professional, but they lack the manic, cynical energy of Millar and Romita - the magic ingredient that made the original story work.

It's not a bad issue, given the premise that the creators had to work with.  But that premise doesn't offer a great deal of mileage, and the book falls far short of the original "Enemy of the State" - a standard that it necessarily has to aspire to.

Rating: B-

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