They tested the waters with a four issue series, and they put a fair bit of effort into those issues. The series was picked up a half year later and continued numbering from 5, but those first four stand apart from the rest - despite some very fine efforts over the following one score and two issues.
Let's take a little look -
You might have already noted one thing that set those first four issues apart from later efforts - parody by big name series creators who weren't generally known for doing comedic parody. The above piece by Peter David, Todd MacFarlane and Jim Salicrup is a good example.
A better example still - getting the big name guys to parody their own works - like this team up of John Byrne and Jerry Ordway with their parody of Superman and the Fantastic Four (& friends) -
What The--?! featured silly little bits of fun...
...and quietly brilliant slams that none dare sign...
And every now and then, they slipped in some tasty oddity that i didn't know i needed to see until they showed it to me - like one of my favorite characters, Doctor Strange, as filtered through the wonderfully warped lens of another old fave - Phil Foglio* -
pages from What The--?! #s 2 & 4 (1988)
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*(Really? We haven't done anything on Phil Foglio yet? Not even on Blue Monday?
Damn. So much yet...
Dear Odd, so much...)
I simply adore all of this buffoonery and What The? was pretty funny. It hit the same nerve as Not Brand Echh had some many moons before. You hit it when you said it was done by name brand artists. Seeing guys like Kirby, Colan, Buscema busting up their own more serious superhero work gave the whole shmeer a gravitas it otherwise would lack and spoke to the delightful mischievous heart of what Marvel was all about at the time (though soon to be something else again).
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Originally i had written about those early issues standing apart from nearly all other parodies. It was the work you noted by Kirby & Co. on Not Brand Echh! that led me to softening the phrasing. While there's been a lot of great and fun parodies done over the years, there's nothing quite like those done by the original creators. Except maybe some of those old fanzine parodies...
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