What-If: Annihilation

 What-If: Annihilation

Originally released in 2007

Written by David Hine

Art by Mico Suayan and Rafael Kayanan


The video game Marvel Cosmic Invasion released The Thing and Cyclops as DLC characters. As Ben was one of the characters that I wanted the most, I'm using this as an opportunity to read a What-If story based on the Annihilation event.  As this event was going on and the entire universe at risk, the heroes of America were locked in a civil war over registration. Nova is very quick to point out how utterly stupid and meaningless this is in the grand scheme of things, and even the Watcher seems to look down on them for doing this.



Nova showing up and explaining the situation quickly gets the heroes to unite, though there's still tension between them. The Watcher breaks his oath of non-interference, given that refusing to act would lead to Annihilus's forces destroying all life outside of the Negative Zone, and gives the survivors of the first wave a doomsday weapon that will send the inhabitants of the anti-matter universe that is the Negative Zone into a separate dimension devoid of life, though using it for extended periods of time puts the moon and the Inhumans' home of Attilan at risk.



The Inhumans don't come across as great here; while some of their acts are part of a ruse, it seems entirely believable, which seems to say a lot about how I view them. (I could see Namor, or maybe the Inhumans, making a deal that would allow them to survive at the cost of the rest of Earth, whereas no matter how morally ambiguous he can get, I couldn't see Professor X doing the same thing - maybe that speaks more to my lack of familiarity with the Inhumans)



The tone of the story was more optimistic than I initially expected. Given how what if stories generally tend to go (with them turning out worse than the main universe), I was fully expecting that Iron Man and Captain America wouldn't be able to put aside their differences, leading to the destruction of the entire Earth at the hands of the Annihilation Wave.   It goes without saying that it doesn't end like that; it's not a perfect ending, and some of Earth's heroes and villains are dead by the end, but it turned out more positively than I thought it would.

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