10 Best 'What If?' Marvel Stories You Must Read
With Disney+ making an animated 'What If?' series, what are the best stories from the comic?
Marvel Comics' popular What If...? series of books has been optioned as a television series for Disney+, leaving many fans wondering what stories might make their way to the small screen. The series will be an animated anthology, which will take much of its content directly from the comics.
That being said, there is a lot of content to choose from, and many of the stories written in What If...? over the years have gone on to influence the Marvel multiverse, which suggests the show could adapt pretty much anything and everything into the new series.
Whatever Marvel and Disney decide to do, the older comics have been cast back into the light leaving many to look back on the amazing series. Fans unfamiliar with them are wondering what they were all about, while those who read the books are considering which stories might be adapted for the new show.
This list compiles the 10 best What If...? stories ever written, and though the TV show won't be arriving until a while from now, it's never a bad time to talk about Marvel's best What If? tales.
10. What If... Venom Had Possessed The Punisher?
What If...? Vol. 2 #44, (1992)
Venom was a hugely popular character back in the early nineties, so Marvel played around with who/what he was early on with some What If...? storylines. In what many consider to be one of the best, Venom doesn't possess Eddie Brock, but rather finds Frank Castle instead.
It all went down when Castle ended up at the church where Peter Parker rid himself of the Venom Symbiote instead of Brock. It bonded with him, but he thought it was just some advanced SHIELD technology and not an alien symbiote intent on taking over his body and mind.
With the new "tech," Castle became an even deadlier Punisher. He killed the Kingpin and Tombstone but began a struggle with the symbiote for dominance of his body. It started controlling him at night while he slept, which brought him to the attention of Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Moon Knight who confronted him.
Castle's struggle with the symbiote ultimately ended in his favor when he threatened to kill himself if he didn't regain control. From that point, he was the master of the Venom symbiote (and a more powerful Punisher to boot). The heroes left him alone at the end of the story thinking he could be a powerful ally sometime in the future.