Some
What If's have the most
terrifying consequences. For example...
Well, yes, bad things do happen. The
Fantastic Four,
Hulk and
Daredevil are depowered,
Thor never returns from
Asgard,
Iron Man goes alcoholic way earlier and dies,
blah blah blah.
But the
real tragic consequences of this tiny change in the timeline is that the
X-Men end up in the
worst damned costumes you've ever seen.
I know--given that the X-Men started with the worst costumes
ever designed by
Jack Kirby, and given that they've spent the subsequent decades going through bad costume set after bad costume set, you're probably saying, "Gee,
snell, How bad could they possibly be?
Pretty bad.
In this reality,
Xavier spent years digging himself up from the bowels of the Earth, so
Magneto gathered most of the mutants together for self-protection. And either because of Magneto's terrible costume sense, or the lack of Xavier's design aesthetic, get stuff like
Angel and
Beast dressed thusly:
Or
Colossus dressing like it's
RenFair day...
And yes, that's a little soul patch he's wearing there:
The
Scarlet Witch stays precisely the same, in her original bathing suit/evening gown hybrid and
Quicksilver mostly does, except for these 1950s sci-fi style shoulder fins:
Jean Grey? Hey, it's
still RenFair season!
Ah, but
Cyclops...let's start from the rear, shall we?
The front is not any better (the color register was off on this page...the costume is the same blue as above)...
Nothing says
Scott Summers like "
lightning bolt pointing to my crotch!"
And then there's
the helmet...
That helmet...
Now, the art in this issue was by
Vince Mielcarek. So maybe he designed these costumes. Or perhaps author
Kurt Busiek gets the blame.
Then again...
...the cover
is by
Jim Lee, and we all know what happens when we put him in charge of redesigning costumes for alternate universes...
What If? #13 is from 1990, as if we couldn't tell.