Some questions can only really be answered with another question.  Take, for example, the X-books’ contribution to a load of What If? one-shots based on 2013’s Infinity crossover.

The book asks the question: “What if the X-Men were the sole survivors of Infinity?”  To which the obvious response is, “Why would anyone want to know that?”

Infinity, let’s recall, was an Avengers crossover.  In fact, it was the culmination of a lot of build-up in Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers stories, to the point where it was widely regarded as having some serious accessibility problems for any other readers drawn in by the event promotion.  In fact, at its core, there was a fairly simple idea: the Avengers are going off to space to fight the Builders, whoever they are, and while they’re away, Thanos attacks Earth.  That’s not too difficult to get across to incoming readers.

But it wasn’t an X-Men story.  The X-Men’s only tie-in issue was Wolverine and the X-Men Annual #1, which was a Kid Gladiator story, and has nothing to do with this issue.  As a hook, “What if the X-Men were the sole survivors of Infinity?” is a bit like asking “What if Power Pack were the only survivors of the Phalanx Covenant?”

Joshua Williamson and Mike Norton are a solid professionals doing their best with a premise that gives them very little to work on.  Sensibly enough, they don’t try to do much with the details of Infinity, since none of it would be particularly relevant to the X-Men anyway.  Instead, the set-up is simply that the Earth has apparently been destroyed, and a handful of X-Men who managed to flee the planet are sitting around in a spacecraft, scavenging wreckage, and generally not doing much else, since it’s apparently a rather empty universe post-Infinity.  Cannonball’s in charge, and it’s always nice when somebody remembers that he was supposed to be the emerging leader of the future.

Then, a ship shows up with a group of Avengers on board, led by Sunspot.  That allows for a nice reunion with Cannonball – which gives Norton something to get his teeth into.  And again, since they’re the only two X-Men who were in Hickman’s Avengers and thus have a connection with Infinity, it makes reasonable sense to put them at the centre.  This is pleasant enough, in a gently uneventful sort of way.  Then, Williamson remembers that he needs a plot, so it turns out that the Avengers are being mind-controlled by a baddie.  It happens to be Supergiant from Infinity, but it could as well have been anyone, because she gets in three lines of dialogue and lasts a grand total of six panels after being unveiled.  She is very swiftly despatched, and everyone decides to stay together and call themselves “the X-Men” in an awkward attempt to justify the “sole survivors” bit of the title.

I didn’t read Infinity, so it’s entirely possible that the story provides some context which adds depth to the fairly perfunctory proceedings here.  At the very least, I imagine it provided some reason to care about Supergiant, and perhaps it made a big deal of separating Sunspot and Cannonball.  I’ll give it this issue the benefit of the doubt on those two points.  Even so, that leaves a basic and routine story with a tacked on fight scene, which ends up reframing the title question as “What if some of the X-Men were the sole survivors of the Earth?”, and answers it with “They would hang around on a spaceship.”  And that’s just not enough to hang an issue on.