A Few Points About Bullet Points

I just read Marvel's Bullet Points # 2, in which the alternate history of the Marvel Universe continues with Peter Parker, not Bruce Banner, getting the Gamma Ray Rama Lama Ding Dong and becoming the Hulk. The first issue had Steve Rogers, back in 1941, miss out on the Soldier Soldier treatment when a fateful bullet took out Prof Erskine before he could finalize his top secret formula (in the real Marvel history, he was shot dead just minutes after Rogers became Captain America, keeping him from mass producing what would've clearly shortened WWII significantly). Instead, in a stretch that kind of left me behind, Rogers became part of an early Iron Man project that bonded him with the armour that shouldn't have existed for another twenty years or so.

The series is certainly an interesting concept, not all that different than various incarnations of What If? series that Marvel's produced over the past thirty years. The central conceit of a What If? issue was always to take a pivotal moment in history and have someone dodge right instead of left. So early storylines included "What If Spider-Man Hadn't Been Bitten by the Radioactive Spider?" and "What If Rick Jones Had Become the Hulk?" You can see how Bullet Points would remind me of this, hmmm?

Anyway, with JMS doing the writing chores, and appropriately rough-edged artwork by Tommy Lee Edwards, it's an enjoyable enough series so far. I suppose the only negative for me, through two issues, is the contradiction of doing it as a divergent history while still playing with all of the same characters at its core. So Steve Rogers becomes Iron Man, instead of Captain America, and then Peter Parker ends up as the Hulk, in Bruce Banner's place. Reed Richards and the rest of the not-yet-fanastic foursome are preparing to take a fateful rocket flight, but of course something's going to go horribly wrong such that they don't become the FF we know and love (maybe they'll become the X-Men? or some other foursome will steal their rocket and they'll be the FF?) I realize that superhero comics require a willing suspension of disbelief from the get-go, and yet this approach seems to have just pushed the envelope a tad too far for me. It reminds me of the conversation Vicki and I had after watching the movie Frequency, with Dennis Quaid, in which one character was changing history repeatedly thanks to some information he was receiving from the future over *ahem* a short-wave radio. The film's writers at least understood that changing the past would change the present, but there didn't seem to be any consideration of just how much effect such drastic alterations of the timeline would have, as things were by-and-large the same except for a few key points that were central to the story. Maybe I'm wrong in my standpoint - and it's not like we'll probably ever know - but I'm with the classic SF story in which the time traveller steps off the time platform in the distant past, crushes the plant or small animal under his heel, and returns to find that everything has changed! I suppose I have to file this under my growing list of "how time travel works" theories even though Bullet Points is actually a divergent history, not time travel.

Regardless, I like the rest of the package enough to keep buying and reading the remaining 3 issues in the mini-series. I just wish JMS hadn't gone the route he did, flying so fully in the face of what seems like an obvious ripple effect to messing around with historical events.