5 Is for Satire

Art by Isa Eugenio

The Wolverine becomes the Lord of the Vampires.  Spider-Man has six arms. The Punisher assumes the identity of Captain America.  The Daredevil is in cahoots with the Kingpin. The Hulk has the brain of Bruce Banner.  The Vision has killed every one of the Avengers.

It seems back in the 1970’s, Marvel Comics—the so-called House of Ideas—had more than enough of those to speculate on speculation.  In 1977, the comic-book juggernaut published its first What If? issue: “What if Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four?”  The Marvel universe had so many untapped storylines, its fan base (who inhabited that universe 32 pages at a time) finally got a comic book that tickled their subjunctive sensibilities.  Thus superheroes got powers they never should have, unlikely allegiances were forged, marriages happened left and right (Spidey + the Black Cat, the Invisible Girl + the Submariner), and death came to our spandexed immortals.  

If even those who are wishful thinkers by trade need to imagine an alternate universe based on an already bogus universe, what more us mere mortals who barely have the powers and wherewithal to imagine a scenario where we don’t have homework on a Monday night, where Mission Boulevard isn’t snarled in traffic, where the girl we’re crushing on actually acknowledges our existence, where Amazon Prime actually means same-day shipping for God’s sake?

Well, Witherly Heights is going to do some imagining for you.  

For sure, the world is a place not worth contemplating for too long.  After a few minutes, you run smack into school shootings, refugee crises, an EPA that disregards the “P,” Russia’s digital assault on our sanity, the Kardashians, our constipated Congress, our president’s imagined military parade, Syria.

Imagination is a sure salve for our real-world woes and, perhaps, a hint at how they could be solved.  After all, even Marvel had to imagine how a scrawny, bullied teenager can be empowered to be Spider-Man, how brains need the brawn of the Hulk, how those who are different and seemingly beyond the pale of society can constitute themselves into the X-men, how Mjolnir is now slung by a woman, and how an African technological utopia can come to be Wakanda.

Thus, in our Issue #5 or all our May publications, we dare to offer our own What If? stories: to lend some humor to our cringe-worthy current events, to demonstrate reason while we show outlandishness, to ridicule so as to instruct, to travel an ironic distance to argue that what should need not to be too far away from what is.  Since we realize imagination or wishful thinking fills in the gaps between real unsavory events and should be constantly exercised, we have created a dedicated and permanent “Issue 5” section to our journal, to be updated monthly.  

So let’s start speculating in the hopes that we need not speculate anymore.