Comic Book Questions Answered – where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

As you have probably noticed if you are on social media at all, people are really getting a kick out of the fact that our actual year is catching up to some of the seemingly "far off" years that were featured in notable pieces of popular culture. Nothing quite matches the excitement a few years back when the present caught up to the future of Back to the Future, Part II, but that likely has to do with the fact that that film gave an out of the ordinary specific date to celebrate. Nothing quite cheers up an otherwise random day in the middle of October than celebrating the fact that it was the "future" featured in a hit film.

Anyhow, 2019 is the "future" in a number of prominent films and TV shows, with Blade Runner probably being the most notable example (although, for comic book fans, 2019 is also the point where Bruce Wayne retires as Batman in the Batman Beyond universe, which is pretty notable). It is also the second year of the Killraven series of stories that began in Marvel Comics in Amazing Adventures in 1973. The series begins in 2018, 17 years after the Martians from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds return to Earth and conquer it. A young man named Jonathan Raven is one of the many humans forced to fight in gladiatorial combat for the amusement of the Martians. He takes on the name "Killraven" and then escapes and joins up with the free humans who are trying to win their planet back from the Martian invaders. The series was launched by Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Neal Adams, but the most famous run on the book was by Don McGregor and P. Craig Russell.

Late in their run, there was an issue of Marvel Team-Up (#45, by Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema and Mike Esposito) that saw Spider-Man get sent to Killraven's future. This led to this panel, which popped up all over social media earlier this month...

In that issue, Spider-Man had just finished an adventure in the past when he uses Doctor Doom's time machine to return to the present, but he overshoots and ends up in 2019 in the middle of a battle between Killmonger and the Martians!

After Spidey helps Killraven make short work of the Martians, Killraven then fills in Spider-Man on his whole deal and the webcrawler has an interesting reaction to the story...

Yikes, Spidey is DEPRESSED! The whole idea of seeing "the future" has left Spider-Man with a great deal of existential dread.

He and Killraven are then exposed to some hallucinegic gas by the Martians, but they both manage to fight through their fears and then Spider-Man turns down an offer to help Killraven fight off the Martians (it is kind of a nonchalant response by Spider-Man, right? "We need your help." "Eh, sorry, loose ends and all that. My sense of responsibility only works in my timeline, apparently.")

Okay, so this all leads up to reader Mike J. writing in to ask about what is the deal with Killraven. If he is in the same Marvel Universe as Spider-Man, why weren't there any superheroes fighting along side him? Interestingly enough, the editor on Marvel Team-Up addressed this very issue!

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='What is the deal with the future of Killraven?']

Lots of readers apparently a bit shaken by Spider-Man's sorrow about his future, so Mark Gruenwald wrote in to Marvel and they adopted his suggestion, which is that Killraven's future is a TRULY alternate one, in that it was one where the PAST had diverged, as well, so that there WERE no superheroes on Killraven's timeline!

I feel compelled to try to clarify a possible misconception one might get from reading #45's "Future Shock". Namely: Spider-Man's concern that "Nothing we do matters because in thirty years time the Martians are gonna grind it all into paste."

It has already been established that no future is the only possible course of reality a world will take (notably in Defenders #26), but Spider-Man has even less cause for concern. Killraven'ts world of 2019 couldn't possibly be in Spider-Man's future, because Marvel-Earth is NOT in Killraven's past. What warrants this conclusion? Simply this: it is highly improbably that in 1900 on Marvel-Earth the Martians attacked as in H.G. Well's original book. Had they, it seems improbable that the world of reality of Marvel-Earth of the 30's (Doc Savage), 40's (Invaders) and 60's (Fantastic Four) would have turned out as depicted in the wake of the Martian aftermath. It also seems improbable that the inception of the mass super-hero population of the 70s wouldn't have found some way to stem a possible Martian invasion before it could occur. Although we do not know for certain that all Marvel's heroes will be dead or retired by the time of the Martian invasion of 2001, one imagines that some would still answer the clarion call to save Earth -- if indeed the War of the Worlds were actually one of Earth's futures. We all know that Doom's time platform can travel to alternate realities (as witnessed in Fantastic Four #152), so Spidey could have easily gone to the future of another Earth besides his own. Remember that the future is wide open, and there's no reason to tie all future down to Marvel-Earth.

Fascinating stuff.

Later stories would begin to suggest that superheroes might have existed on Killraven's world (and there was the whole future deal where they tried to merge Killraven's future with the future of the Guardians of the Galaxy for some reason), but for a time, at least, that was the official position on Killraven and superheroes.

So there ya go, Mike!

Thanks for the question!

If anyone else has a question about comics, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!