In every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without actively retconning away the previous story. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

Today, based on a suggestion from my pal Fraser, we look at the brief period in time when Uatu, the Watcher, actually followed his sacred oath to not interfere with Earth (shocking, I know).

Obviously, as you all likely know by now, Uatu is the Watcher for Earth. The Watchers are a powerful and ancient alien race that chronicle the history of the universe, with different Watchers assigned to different planets. They are all supposed to not interfere with what goes on on their assigned planets. However, when we first meet Uatu in Fantastic Four #13 (by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko), he breaks his vow as he introducing himself...

The Watcher next showed up again in Fantastic Four #20 (by Lee, Kirby and Dick Ayers), and that set up his standard appearances for the next few years. He shows up, he tells everyone, "I can't get involved" and then he, you know, gets involved...

Lee would also use Uatu as a narrator of stories of the past, which was a clever use of the character. That later became the set-up for Marvel's What If...? series of books, where Uatu would see an alternate reality and tell us what would have happened had Spider-Man, like, gotten a taco instead of a hamburger one night (not every what if is an amazing one).

This was how things would go for years until Steve Englehart, who often used the past history of Marvel as the basis for his stories, you know, taking a little inconsistency and then building a story out of it ("If Captain America disappeared in World War II, then who was the Cap who fought the Commies in the 1950s?" became a story of the anti-Communist Captain America replacement who starred in a number of stories, with his Bucky eventually becoming the hero known as Nomad), realized that the Watcher never followed his own established purpose.

So Englehart first took things to an absurd degree by having the Watcher declare war on Captain Marvel in Captain Marvel #36 (by Englehart and Jim Starlin...Starlin just drew three pages in the issue, the rest of it was a reprint of Captain Marvel's first appearance)...

The Watcher, having committed too many actions over the years, was now so committed to action that he ended up beating up Captain Marvel in the next issue (by Englehart and Al Milgrom)...

He actually helps save Marvel in the following issue, so it might have been that he thought Marvel actually meant him harm, but in any event, his fellow Watchers put him on trial in Captain Marvel #39 (by Englehart and Milgrom and inker Klaus Janson). Tony Isabella helped Englehart come up with all of the examples of the Watcher interfering over the years. It's pretty funny.

In the end, he agrees to never interfere again...

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When the Watcher next showed up in Fantastic Four Annual #11 (by Roy Thomas, John Buscema and Sam Grainger), he follows his new status quo to the letter (well, except for showing himself, which is, in and of itself, interference, but, well, you know what I mean. He didn't actively, like, point them down a hallway or whatever)...

That story continued in Marvel Two-In-One Annual #1 (by Thomas, Sal Buscema and Grainger), where the Watcher sort of kind of interferes, but at least he is still pretending to not actively interfere...

What If...? debuted around this time, giving the Watcher something to do without interfering with the superheroes of the world.

The Watcher next shows up in Fantastic Four #188 (by Len Wein, George Perez and Joe Sinnott), and they stress how he can't interfere...

The Watcher showed up to check in on Michael Korvac during the Korvac Saga in Avengers #173 (by Jim Shooter, David Michelinie, George Perez and a bunch of inkers)...

He showed up in Fantastic Four #205 (by Marv Wolfman, Keith Pollard and Joe Sinnott), bemoaning his lot in life...

Finally, in Fantastic Four #213 (by Marv Wolfman, John Byrne and Joe Sinnott), the Watcher finally flat out interferes. The FF had enlisted the help of Galactus to stop the Sphinx, with the payoff being that Mister Fantastic would relieve Galactus of his vow to not attack the Earth. Once the Sphinx was defeated, though, Mister Fantastic (artificially aged as part of some other plotline), tricks Galactus into leaving Earth by pretending to have built a new Ultimate Nullifier, with the Watcher preventing Galactus from learning the truth that the machine was all a bluff by Reed...

It is fair to note, though, that the Watcher tended to be a BIT more circumspect in the years after than he was back in the old days, where he was flat out calling the FF for help most of the time.

Thanks to Fraser for the suggestion! If anyone else has a suggestion for an abandoned comic book plot, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!