What If the Watcher Were the Narrator?
If a Watcher watches, but doesn't make a sound, has he really watched at all? In the years since "The Trial of the Watcher," Uatu has frequently born silent witness to Important Events, yet his presence has given the heroes something to talk about. At other times, he has spoken with fellow observers, such as the Rigelian Recorder on the occasion of the death of Phoenix (to be fair, since it happened in the Blue Area of the moon, it was in Uatu's back yard).
But most of Uatu's words have been addressed to the reader. A year and a half after his rededication to noninterference in Captain Marvel 39, Uatu became the only continuing character in a series called What If? The first series ran for 47 issues, running on a bimonthly schedule until 1984. When the series was revived in 1989, Uatu came along, staying for more than half of the new volume's 113 issues. As in the two iterations of "Tales of the Watcher in the 1960s, Uatu played the role of narrator. There was nothing new about comics having a narrator; EC Comics' Tales of the Cryptwould not be nearly so memorable with the Cryptkeeper, while most of the DC Comics various horror books from the 1960s and 1970s had supernatural narrators (many of whom were subsumed into Neil Gaiman's Sandman mythos). Closer to home, Stan Lee pioneered a comics storytelling style that resembles what the Russian Formalists called skaz: telling a story from the stylized point of view of a persona that is neither the author nor one of the characters. The typical Stan Lee story was told through Lee's avuncular, corny hipster persona, who addressed the readers with a knowing wink and called on them to gather round and pay attention.
As narrator, Uatu is different from both the hosts of the horror comics and the impresario behind early Marvel, in that his voice is only minimally stylized. When Lee writes him, Uatu's words are pompous and high-flown, but such a style was already a familiar feature of Lee's limited repertoire of voices. By the time Uatu became the host of What If?, his function was simply to introduce the story, get out of the way, and then wrap it up. Too much focus on the Watcher and his words would have been a distraction.
Choosing Uatu as the narrator of What If? after his trial makes a perverse kind of sense: the Watcher who so often violated his oath by choosing to intervene is now obliged to tell story after story about the results of the choices made by alternate versions of the heroes in whom he is so invested. After all, the worlds of What If? are not like the DC Multiverse, whose various worlds diverge in multiple, and often extreme fashions. What If? features what might best be considered parallel timelines: every earth is the same until a single event changes history. Which means that every story narrated by Uatu is yet another contrast with Uatu's self-imposed impotence.
More often than not, however, the worlds that Uatu presents are object lessons in the peril of making the wrong choice. The death toll in the first volume of What If? is staggering. Both "What If Phoenix Hadn't Died?" (issue 27) and "What If the Avengers Had Become the Pawns of Korvac? (issue 32) end in total annihilation: in the first, Phoenix once again becomes evil, and destroys the universe in a fit of rage and grief; in the other, Korvac uses the Ultimate Nullifier to wipe out all of existence. Many of the stories that take place on a smaller scale content themselves with merely killing off major characters (Tony Stark in "What If the Avengers Had Never Been?" in issue 3, both title characters in "What if Wolverine Had Killed the Hulk? in issue 31). A surprising outlier here is the two Daredevil stories written and drawn by Frank Miller: "What if Daredevil Became an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.?" (issue 28) and "What If Elektra Had Lived?" (issue 35). In the first one, Matt Murdock's life takes a different course from his canonical adventures, but not a worse one, while the story of Elektra's survival culminates in something Daredevil never gets: an actual happy ending. There is a logic at work here: Miller's Daredevil stories are so dark and depressing that the only real alternative to them is something shockingly upbeat.
What If Marvel ran out of ideas?
Otherwise, Uatu's stories of alternate Marvel timelines serve clear and useful functions. They let the readers indulge in a kind of pleasure unavailable in the mainstream Marvel universe, killing off characters who otherwise would never stay dead, radically changing a series' basic premise in a way that would be unsustainable, and, in general, providing a sense of consequence (serious and terrible things have happened) and inconsequence (they happened somewhere else). Indirectly, these adventures also tend to do what superheroes and superhero comics have long been accused of: maintaining the status quo at all cost. Most of these nightmare scenarios implicitly confirm the rightness of mainstream Marvel continuity: look how bad it would have been if things had gone differently!
At the same time, the existence of these alternate timelines opens up the possibility that they might be used for further adventures. The very first issue of What If?, in which Spider-Man joins the Fantastic Four, got a sequel three years later ("What If Sub-Mariner Had Married the Invisible Girl?", issue 21). A 1997 story imagining Spider-Man's teenage daughter, May Parker, taking on the mantle of Spider-Girl led not just to a Spider-Girl series, but an entire line of titles in the alternate "MC2" future. When we factor in the numerous returns to the Age of Apocalypse, the Days of Future Past, 1602, and other popular alternate scenarios, the "What If?" approach lets creators and readers have their cake and eat it, too.
A skeptic might complain that the proliferation of alternate realities renders all stories and all choices equally unimportant and inconsequential, but another skeptic might remind us that all these stories (both alternate and mainstream) are, in fact, unimportant and inconsequential, because by their nature as fiction, none of them actually happened. This sort of antifictional nihilism is not what the genre wants to encourage, of course (except when it does, as we will see below), but it is also represented within the comics themselves by figures such as Uatu. At some point, the readers just have to content themselves to sit back and watch.
Next: Alan Moore and Superhero Ethics