What If WHAT IF? #48 never got published?
In 1984, on the letters page of What If? #47, it was announced the series was being put on hold for the time being. Issue #48 would arrive… sometime in the future. And two new stories were in the works. So what happened?
The first What If mentioned by editor Ralph Macchio was “What If Doctor Doom Had Kept The Powers Of The Silver Surfer?”, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Butch Guice. There’s no evidence that this was anything more than an idea.
The second What If mentioned was a two-part X-Men What If? by Peter Gillis and Jerry Ordway. Essentially it was “What If The X-Men Were The Avengers?”, where Professor X is never crippled by Lucifer, becomes a superhero who helps reform the Invaders into the Liberty Legion; an embittered Cyclops forms a rival mutant team; the story builds to a clash between the two groups.
What I find fascinating about the proposed X-Men story is, there’s credible evidence that Jack Kirby, when he created the original X-Men, wanted Professor X to go into battle with the team, and that Cyclops was added to the team to be the fifth field member, probably to satisfy Stan Lee.
Instead of the 48th issue, we had to wait four years for the “What If Iron Man Had Been A Traitor?” one-shot, and one more year for the second volume of the series.
The Peter Gillis X-Men/Avengers story, I would love to see finished and published. The Stan Lee story? Hey, I’ve never met a What If…? I wouldn’t buy, but that tale would have been best written by most anyone else.
What do you think?
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