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In What If Galactus Transformed Spider-Gwen #1, well, you can probably figure out what hypothetical scenario gets explored just by seeing that title.
As with most What If stories, What If Galactus Transformed Spider-Gwen is exactly that. What if Galactus turned Spider-Gwen into one of his heralds? As it turns out, she might become the leader of a resistance on a far-off Dungeons & Dragons planet. A typical weekend for us all.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of What If stories. The first, which many older ones follow, takes a logical, hypothetical premise based on existing characters. (E.g. Jane Foster becomes Thor, which eventually did happen for real.) What If Galactus Transformed Spider-Gwen, on the other hand, is decidedly not that, combining characters and concepts that seem otherwise completely unconnected. No version of Gwen Stacy, to my knowledge, has ever met Galactus, so why would she become one of his heralds? This is a common critique of the What If animated series on Disney+, but it also applies to some of these more recent iterations of the comic. It’s fun to come up with these wild ideas, but it comes with the risk of the reader asking a simple question: why?
Even knowing this run of What If is specifically based around Galactus transforming other characters, it still feels a bit random. The comic itself also doesn’t really do much with the central premise; Galactus is not around for most of it, only really showing up in the beginning and end. There’s some worthwhile character study with Gwen here, but none of it is anything we haven’t seen elsewhere before (i.e. guilt over her Peter Parker dying) so it just comes across as a bit redundant. Having her land on a D&D inspired planet is a fun choice, but she doesn’t really get to do anything there under the confines of a 20-odd page comic book that needs to wrap up within those pages. The setup leading us here comes across as an afterthought —Gwen just ends up on an alien planet, because multiverse— which doesn’t help the “why?” nature of this story.
To the creative team’s defense, their work here is totally solid. Writer Kalinda Vasquez does what she can with the concept, and Daniel Picciotto’s art is very nice to look at. What If Galactus Transformed Spider-Gwen just isn’t particularly worth seeking out unless you really like Spider-Gwen.