For the most part, Marvel's What If? one-shots are an exercise in squeezing a bit more mileage from recent storylines.  They tend to range in quality from mildly diverting to utterly superfluous.  But almost invariably, they take a fairly obvious story as their starting point.

So I was more than a little surprised when What If? Spider-Man vs. Wolverine showed up in the solicitations.  Of all the stories to revisit, Spider-Man vs. Wolverine?  If you haven't read it, then rest assured, you won't be alone.  The original story is a one-shot by Jim Owlsey and Mark Bright, which came out in 1987 and was reprinted in 1990.  It's best known for advancing the Hobgoblin storyline, and by all accounts, it's quite good.  I've never read it.

But this story doesn't involve the Hobgoblin stuff.  Instead, its starting point lies with obscure, largely forgotten details of the plot.  In other words, what we have here is a What If? issue, based on a story that came out when I was eleven and which has been out of print for 18 years, hinging on plot points which almost none of today's audience will remember.

Are they mad?

And yet, in fact, this is quite interesting.  Let's get one thing out of the way: it's not a Wolverine story.  He's only really in it because he was in the original.  No, this is a Spider-Man story.  And the writers, Jeff Parker and Paul Tobin, do have something to say about Spider-Man.

A lot of What If? stories are rather tiresome exercises in carnage.  Usually, the answer to "What if things had happened differently?" is "The villain would have won and everything would have been a bit miserable."  But there are more interesting ways to use the format, because the What If? device allows you to take characters in directions that could never be used in a regular series.  Spider-Man has to be open-ended; he can never come to a decisive finish, and he can never stray irreparably from the original concept.  But in these stories, you can do all that.

The original Spider-Man vs Wolverine story, putting it very broadly, saw Spider-Man getting drawn into an adventure involving Wolverine's black ops past.  The basic angle was that Spider-Man, still a fairly light character at the time, felt a bit out of his depth among these people, and rather uncomfortable about the whole situation. 

The point of departure here is that instead of returning home at the end of the story, Spider-Man finds out that the girl he failed to save at the climax has a sister, also from the twilight world of black ops, and he sticks around with Wolverine to rescue her.  From there, he's drawn into Wolverine's world, and the two of them never go back, forming a little family with Alex (the girl they just rescued) and Nebo (Wolverine's mentor figure).

It's quite cleverly put together.  Many writers, having come up with this premise, would have chosen the boringly obvious route: at first things look fine, but then Spider-Man realises he's chosen the wrong route in life, and it all ends tragically because it's too late to go back.  There's nothing particularly wrong with that story, but it's a bit uninspired. 

Parker and Tobin take a more difficult route, and pull it off.  In the traditional Spider-Man set-up, most of the drama comes from the tension between Peter's normal life and his superhero career.  But in this world, he's chosen decisively between the two, and it works out just fine.  With that basic conflict resolved, Spider-Man's life comes out quite well.  He's got friends.  He's got the woman.  He's still a hero.  Ultimately, it all works out quite nicely for him.  The happy ending is soured only by a sense that Peter has lost some of his innocence and sacrificed his family in the real world - but since he gets a perfectly good life out of the deal, and arguably a better one than the endless parade of melodrama in his "real" stories, it's entirely ambiguous whether that sacrifice was worthwhile.

As usual, artist Clayton Henry takes a bright, open approach.  I find myself in two minds about Henry's art.  He's certainly a sound storyteller and his art is attractive enough to look at.  But he's not hugely original, and he leans somewhat towards house style.  He's never been particularly good at atmospherics.  Then again, many artists would have drowned this story in darkness in order to hammer home the idea that Peter and Logan are living in a Dark Place.  The story is meant to be more ambiguous than that, and Henry's more neutral style is better for the purpose.

So what's the catch?  Well, it's a spin-off from a relatively obscure comic from two decades ago, and it has to hammer the reader with a terrible infodump right at the start.  It's a great idea for a story, but too compressed in the course of a single issue.  It's very rare that I say this about a comic, but this story needed to be longer. 

Crammed into the space of a single issue, it's merely a good execution of a great concept.  Or, put another way, it's the last part of a good story, without having time to do the necessary set-up.  For those reasons, and pretty much only for those reasons, it doesn't quite work as well as it should.  But the idea is great.

Rating: B+

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