The What If? one-shots are back for another year, with more alternate endings to recent Marvel stories.  The X-Men's contribution for 2007 rejoices in the full title of What If? X-Men - Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire, which is so long and dull that it doesn't even appear on the cover.

"Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire" ran for a year in Uncanny X-Men, and I rather lost interest in it before the end.  I can't say I'm desperate to read more of it.  But to be fair, writer Christopher Yost has got some mileage out of the characters in his sequel miniseries Emperor Vulcan, so it was always possible he might find an angle here as well.

The big idea here is that during the big fight at the end of the story, Vulcan falls into the M'Kraan Crystal and becomes Phoenix.  This was a rather peripheral aspect of the original storyline, but it's probably the most promising element to focus on for a What If? story.  After all, the original storyline ended with the villain winning control of the Empire, and there's not much mileage in "What if the heroes had won and everything had gone back to normal?"

Still, it means that Yost has only one issue in which to do a cosmic storyline largely detached from what came before it.  He does at least have a reasonably interesting take on Vulcan, presenting him as a man who would have been a great hero if only he hadn't been driven mad by all the catastrophes that befell him in his origin story.  Working from there, Yost has written a story in which Vulcan gets a measure of redemption after nearly losing control of the Phoenix power and being driven to breaking point.

Larry Stroman shows up on art, after years away from the X-books.  His stylised scenes still look good after all this time, and visually, it's all acceptably over the top. 

The problem is that it's terribly rushed, with entire civilisations being wiped out off panel.  The plot is choppy, with characters surviving apparent death for reasons that are only hinted at rather than explained. And the scale of devastation that Vulcan causes in this story makes it impossible to accept him as some sort of tragic hero; he's plainly a genocidal maniac, which puts him way out of the reach of audience sympathy.

It's not a desperately good issue, but in fairness to Yost, I don't think there was ever a great deal of potential in trying to spin a What If? story out of "Rise and Fall."

Rating: C+

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