Warning: contains spoilers for Fantastic Four #43!
The Fantastic Four have now officially placed every ‘What If?’ adventure in Marvel canon proper – all at once. The team is known for their travels through space, time and even different dimensions, thanks to the genius of Reed Richards’ inventions and their propensity to encounter strange, otherworldly beings like Uatu the Watcher. But in Fantastic Four #43, the team realizes that every adventure that could have happened in actuality did happen.
The What If? series of comics began in 1977 with the inaugural issue What If…Spider-Man Had Joined The Fantastic Four? The issue and the rest of the series was a hit; it allowed writers to create stories unburdened by the complexity of comics canon and in many ways the one-off issues actually influenced the comics later on (Spider-Man has teamed up multiple times with the Fantastic Four, though he never stays with the team for long). The series even spawned a popular television show in the form of Marvel’s What If…? on Disney+ in 2021. But within the pages of the comics, the entire series finally receives an in-canon explanation.
In Fantastic Four #43, written by Dan Slott with art by Rachel Stott & Andrew Di Vitto, Susan Storm and Nick Fury rescue Uatu from the Seat of All Knowledge, where he had been forced to watch a What If universe (specifically, the events that were chronicled in The Trial of the Watcher). The undulating void above the characters is called the Apex. “Our reality contains multiple nexus points. Above them lies the Apex,” explains Uatu. “The gateway to every possibility – any What If world you can imagine.” Uatu’s fellow Watchers constructed their new home around the Apex to keep it safe from the Reckoning.
The Apex is a narrative device brought to life, essentially canonizing every single What If tale in Marvel history. It could also exist as a naturally-occurring Forever Gate, a device Reed Richards constructed to travel to any reality in the Multiverse. It could also be used to find variants from different dimensions; considering the importance Marvel is placing on the Multiverse in 2022 in both comics and film, this is not out of the realm of possibility.
The Fantastic Four’s latest adventure brings all of their possible stories and makes them reality. The Watchers might also guard the Apex as part of their oath never to interfere: they do not use the Apex, but merely observe it. The Fantastic Four are in the midst of a universe-wide crossover event called the Reckoning War, however, and if the enemy truly desires the Apex, they must muster all their allies in order to defend it.
