What If? was a series of Marvel comics running from 1977 to 1984, featuring stories taking place in alternate realities where significant moments in Marvel history occurred differently. Each comic issue would take a key moment from Marvel's main continuity, Earth-616, and alter it to show how the story would have gone with that aspect changed, all narrated by the cosmic character known as the Watcher.
The premise for the series was conceived by Marvel editor Roy Thomas who proposed the book as a double-sized magazine to be sold at 50¢ instead of the usual 35¢ price. The project was sent as a memo to and subsquently approved by Stan Lee. Thomas credited the inspiration of the book to a maxim he had learned while writing under Stan Lee in the 1960s, stating that Lee taught him to ask the question "what if...?" in the same way that readers would presumably be asking the question about future stories for current comic book characters. Thomas wanted to use the new book as a way to play out "what if" scenarios that could not be done in characters' main books because they would too drastically change continuity. Thomas also wanted these stories to take place in the Marvel multiverse so that they could be as "real" as the stories in the primary Marvel universe, as opposed to DC Comics' "Imaginary Stories", which Thomas found childish because the stories at the time were not considered "real" within DC's superhero universe.[1]
Roy Thomas wrote and edited the first two issues of the book before passing it off to a rotating cast of writers and editors so that writers who were currently in charge of stories in characters' main magazines could also be the ones to help contribute alternate reality stories.[1]What If? became one of the Marvel's most-written-to title, with fans penning letters detailing ideas of "What If" stories they would like to see.[1][2]
From issue #23 to issue #31, each main What If? story was accompanied by a second, shorter story in a section called the Untold Tales of the Marvel Universe. This mini-series of six stories took place in the main Marvel timeline, Earth-616, and was told from the perspective of the Watcher. The stories detailed the creation of the genetic offshoot race known as the Eternals by the cosmic Celestials, and how the race's early adventures led to them gaining immortality and inspiring the alien race of Kree to create their own genetic offshoot race of humans known as Inhumans. The final two Untold Tales of the Marvel Universe stories described an adventure had by the Inhumans.[3]
The What If? comics inspired a second volume, What If...?, in 1989 that lasted until the end of the 90s, followed by a large number of standalone What If? comic books in every subsequent decade. In 2021, Marvel created an animated TV series inspired by the comics titled What If...?, which took a similar anthology approach to telling stories taking place in alternate universes, except these stories diverged from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
