What If…? Spider-Man #1 Review
Comics are a unique art form in many ways. It’s a place where you can tell the same story from a million different angles and still find an audience willing to indulge the paths untaken. Marvel’s What If…? comics are the perfect example of that. They are stories that literally explore the what ifs of the universe in typically bombastic and fun new ways. They switch characters out, change origins, and on some occasions change endings entirely. I am often excited for these fun little explorations, but when I saw that Kraven’s Last Hunt was being explored in What If…? Spider-Man, I was hesitant.
Kraven’s Last Hunt is a book that I consider a perfect comic. It’s a deep exploration of a character through the lens of their traumas, past, and what defines them. But Kraven has a definitive ending in the story, one that I personally believe is the true canon. I have even had conversations with Dan Slott about how Kraven isn’t in his Spider-Man run much because he too believes it’s the true ending. But What If…? Spider-Man lets J.M. DeMatteis return to his own story to follow a different path. One that is just as narratively rich as the original story.
The crux of the What If…? of it all is that Kraven continued down the path of the Spider rather than ending his hunt for good with some buckshot. We watch as he goes through his own Kafka-esque metamorphosis. Sometimes I believe my want to equate so many stories to Kafka is deranged, but he is literally the namesake of the hospital the mind-shattered Peter Parker is checked into. DeMatteis follows Kraven further into the darkness of taking on someone else’s life, their identity, and further isolating himself into something he is not.
Kraven quotes Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night in the issue with a half quote of “We are what we pretend to be” but the full quote is “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be meaning.” This is an apt quote for this journey of madness both Peter and Kraven delve into as the issue progresses with Yiddiray Çinar’s superb art colored by Alex Sinclair. Kraven is becoming the spider that brought such ruin to his family in his own mind. He allows the same destruction to fall upon Peter, who is a shell of the man he was before.
While I had huge reservations about this issue, I ended up finding it a really beautiful continuation of a story I love. It took the road untraveled with the same dire results to show what remorse could look like in Kraven and what ends it leads to.
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