Nightmare Fuel / What If?

The 2021 animated series, has its own page here.

What If? the comic book

PUNISHER BECOMES CAPTAIN AMERICA = Not Good for Villain

• What If? 25 - What If Set Came To Earth? is just Nightmare Fuel from beginning to end. Set wins. The Avengers die. Everyone on Earth is turned into mindless snake-people forever. The Seven Brides remain brainwashed, and even help kill the last heroes standing. Quasar, Thor and the Silver Surfer manage to defeat Set, but the Brides have already been impregnated, and once the Surfer leaves Earth, they give birth... and are then immediately eaten by Set's offspring, who proceed to chow down on the former humans as well, until eventually they become strong enough to leave that reality and repeat the whole thing all over again.
  • The horrific bit about the Brides? They don't fight back when they're eaten. Neither do the former humans. They're even shown standing around just looking on dispassionately as the giant snake gods eat people.
  • The ending as the Watcher warns that the Set offspring are now in other realities and "yours might be next!"
• "What If The Hulk Went Berserk" (vol 1 #45) has the Hulk and Rick Jones with a mind-link while the latter slowly dies through radiation poisoning. When General Ross tortures Rick to lure the Hulk to him, Rick dies, and the Hulk goes berserk and tears through the entire army, killing half the Fantastic Four and Iron Man when they're called in to help, all while screaming about death and how he's going to kill everyone.
• "Cat and Mouse" (vol 2 #87) was about Jubilee being left to fight an Ax-Crazy Sabertooth after he kills both Bishop and Beast. As the story progressed Sabertooth received more and more physical damage, verging on Body Horror, as Jubilee is left to fend for herself in a version of the Xavier Institute which verges on H. R. Giger levels of nightmarish design. The issue was voted one of Comic Book Resources' "Scariest Comic Books Of All Time". See here. It ends with Jubilee curled up outside the Danger Room, listening as the machinery constantly burns Sabretooth to death until his healing factor stops working.
  • The art really doesn't help, it's heavily reminiscent of Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth.
    Jubilee: It was him or me. It won't bring Hank or Bishop back, but it had to end this way. His screaming, I'll never forget it. It's stopped now, but somehow, the silence is worse.
  • As an extra punch, the very last panel where she says, "But somehow, the silence is worse" is in completely inverted colors. Said colors are blood red and black.
  • The comic also has a brief scene that suggests a rather serious amount of Fridge Horror: Jubilee finds Iceman draped over an unconscious Emma Frost, possibly dead. But when she examines him, she sees no evidence of Sabretooth having attacked him, and later on Sabretooth doesn't mention him when referring to his victims. No explanation as to what had happened to Iceman is given.
• "What If the Fantastic Four's Second Child had Lived?" has the daughter turn out to be a succubus-like creature who drains Sue's life and causes Ben and Johnny to die as well. Add to everything the fact Reed goes crazy, and Franklin has to team up with Doom to banish his sister to the Negative Zone and you get a "whoa... that is messed up" moment. Plus in the end Franklin is left alone in the Baxter Building with no one.
• "What If Death's Head 1 Had Lived" has one of the biggest body counts in the entire series (not counting the ones where the entire planet and/or the universe is destroyed), and was explicitly written as a Revenge Fic by Death's Head's original creator as payback for Marvel killing off the character.
• "What If The Avengers Had Become Pawns Of Korvac" has Korvac using Mind Rape on the Avengers and eventually culminates in Korvac destroying the entire universe with the Ultimate Nullifier by thinking of "all that has been, is, and will be" ... and pressing the button. It's also revealed Death was behind it all to win her war against Eternity, and she succeeds with the universe's destruction.
  • This reality is eventually revisited by Doctor Strange, Phoenix and the Silver Surfer who were all outside the universe when Korvac destroyed it, and return home only to find an empty white void. Strange elects to remain as the realm's Sorcerer Supreme, even though he is now the only living being there (aside from a ghost of Eternity).
• "What If the Alien Costume Had Possessed Spider-Man?" has the Venom symbiote pretty much eating Peter alive, only abandoning him when his body is used up, leaving him a decrepit old man, who soon dies of old age.
• "What If The Punisher Had Found the Venom Symbiote" has Frank Castle arrive at the church a few minutes before Eddie Brock, and ends up with the symbiote, which he quickly utilizes in his war on crime. However, the Symbiote keeps using his body while he's asleep (he even attacks Microchip) to prey on humans, not the mention making him far more violent and savage than before and it only ends with Frank threatening to commit suicide to get the symbiote to listen to him.
• "What If The Silver Surfer Had Been Trapped On Earth" has Mephisto burning Johnny Storm alive with hellfire to force the Surfer to sell his soul to him. Even worse, this had specifically been stated as being Johnny's worst fear just pages before.
• "What If Spider-Man Had Killed the Lizard" shows Curt Connors' son Billy suffer Sanity Slippage, and the short story ends with revealing that he chopped off his own arm at the behest of Calypso, who offers him a way to become the Lizard himself.
• "What If...Norman Osborn won the Siege of Asgard?" has the Sentry laying waste to both the Asgardians and the other heroes, who are all killed or defeated. Then when he discovers Bullseye killed his wife, the Void takes over to Omnicidal Maniac levels: everyone present dies, and then the Void consumes the world. The send-off is that Earth's Watcher, Atau, telling Uatu that he knows the Void is coming to tear apart his Moon home before going after everywhere else in the universe.
• Stephen Strange's fate in "What if Doctor Doom became Sorcerer Supreme?" is pretty terrifying. As if having his hands chopped off and replaced with cybernetics wasn't creepy enough, the story ends with him being kidnapped by Doom's robots and having his mind overwritten with Doom's own. Even worse is that the text boxes note that poor Stephen will merely be the first in a long line of victims to be bodyjacked in this way, allowing Doom to become the Sorcerer Supreme for all eternity. Even when Doom thinks he's being a hero, he's still a villain.
• In "What If Captain Marvel Had Not Died?", Captain Marvel is cured of the cancer that would have killed him. Unfortunately, everyone around him starts getting sick with cancer and it's contagious. He causes plagues on Earth and among the Skrulls and the Kree before he realizes what's going on, and he ends up killing so many Kree and Skrulls that the races are able to make peace because there's so few left.
• "What If? Infinity - Dark Reign" takes the horrifying prospect of Norman Osborn with the Infinity Gauntlet and makes it reality. With the Gauntlet, Norman shows his abusive father repeats of his past victories against heroes and villains alike as he atomized them and took over Earth, but the worst thing he does is to poor Spider-Man. Norman makes him infinitely relive Gwen Stacy's death, with the "Snap" sound effect repeating until it goes off-page. Then Norman accidentally erases himself from existence when he eradicates his father from time and space, ensuring he was never born. All that's left is the Gauntlet floating in an empty void.

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What If? the blog

• The last picture of "Spiders vs. the Sun" will probably be this for arachnophobes. Consider the last two lines.
  No matter which way you look at it, the bottom line is that we live our lives surrounded by tiny spiders on a world completely dominated by a gigantic star.
  
  Hey, at least it's not the other way around.
  • The last illustration is just that: a woman with tiny suns and an utterly gargantuan spider filling the sky behind her.
• How long could humans survive on cannibalism?
  I'm gonna look for less morbid questions for a while.
• Some of the questions go unanswered in the "Weird and Worrying Questions" segments found in the book. A few examples:
  Q: Is it possible to drop your teeth's temperature so they shatter when drinking a cup of coffee?
  A: Thank you for my new recurring nightmare.
  Q: What is the total nutritional value (calories, fat, vitamins, minerals, etc.) of the average human body?
  A: Hat guy: ...I need to know by Friday. Shhh! Here he comes.
  Q: How fast would a human have to run in order to be cut in half at the bellybutton by a cheese-cutting wire?
  A: AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!
• Rising Steadily - imagine slowly drifting off into the sky, away from everything and anyone you have ever cared about, knowing you are going to die but having nothing to do but wait for hours for the end...
• A deliberate case with "Dispatches from a horrifying alternate universe", a collection of Noodle Incidents where just enough is revealed to know that something is very, very wrong.
  ... and most SCUBA equipment functions relatively well when immersed in human blood. However, since the density of blood (1.06 kg/L) is much higher than fresh water (1.00 kg/L) and slightly higher than seawater (1.03 kg/L), SCUBA diving weights must be adjusted. For obvious reasons, most equipment manufactured after 2006 is designed to cope with this ...
  ... while there are no firsthand accounts of the new building layout near Buckingham Palace, an examination of satellite imagery can give us an idea of the changes. Although the images are clearly heavily distorted due to the highly variable air temperature in Westminster, it appears that the Tower of London is intact, surrounded by a series of concentric rings presumably made from the remains of ...
  ... while a roc is self-evidently capable of lifting and carrying adult humans without difficulty, even the largest among them would struggle to lift a typical 1,200 kg sedan. While it's plausible that a flock could accomplish this by cooperative lifting, they have instead taken to dropping boulders (usually 50-100 kg) on the cars from above. This is why most commuters stick to the tunnels, despite the obvious threat posed by snakes and ...

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