In the first issue of Earth X (numbered #0), Aaron Stack is faced with a familiar shape: a 2001: A Space Odyssey-like black rectangle, which leads him through a cosmic light-show, landing him on the moon. While the shape might not be the Monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece (or from Arthur C Clarke’s novel, which was written alongside the screenplay), it’s an important homage: Aaron Stack – or X-51, the Machine Man – debuted in Jack Kirby’s bonkers 1976 2001 adaptation.
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Details like this illustrate just how deeply Earth X understands the Marvel Universe or, rather, how it understands that it is the minor details that hold that Universe together. In the same issue, wandering through the Blue Area of the Moon, Stack unknowingly passes by an ominous Kree laser – a pivotal set piece from the Dark Phoenix Saga; that it goes unremarked upon is haunting. These details, however massive they were in the scope of their own stories, are near-meaningless now, in Earth X’s dark, complicated world. Like so much of the Marvel continuity, they have ceased to mean much of anything. They have been left in abandoned darkness; to borrow a phrase from Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, this world has moved on.
Even narrative framing harkens to Marvel history: as in classic What If? comics, the book is told from the perspective of The Watcher – or Watchers, as the case may be. Having been mysteriously blinded, Uatu enlists Aaron Stack to be his proxy; 20 years have passed since the attack that left him blind and Stack must recount what has happened and what is happening.
What is happening? When asked by Wizard Magazine to conceive of a Marvel future as he had for DC in Kingdom Come, superstar artist Alex Ross concocted too much. The sketches he produced, further distilled by writer Jim Krueger and interiors artist John Paul Leon, gave birth to one of the most transformative and exciting pieces of Marvel fiction.
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The world of Earth X is almost overwhelmingly bleak. The whole of humanity has mutated, gained powers, and as a result, society has crumbled. Every familiar face of the Marvel Universe has been irreparably altered, and heroes have been cast low. Extraterrestrial squids – the new Hydra – have made zombies of wide swaths of the population (including, notably, She-Hulk and Falcon); wary of whatever contagion has mutated mankind, Iron Man has sealed himself into an automated shelter. The Avengers – presumably dead – have been replaced by his Iron Avengers. Half of the Fantastic Four are also dead; Captain America is a man without a country.
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Despite being a book about a failing Earth – the very cusp of an apocalypse – Earth X also manages to be a primer on the history and workings of the Marvel Universe; each issue introduces a small bit of deep history, whether that be familiar (the origin of the Hulk) or esoteric (the less-revisited history of the Inhumans); this background lore is woven with the mysterious blind period, making it feel vital to the telling of the present story – where do classic comics leave off and where does Earth X begin to invent?
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That epic is, indeed, massive. Touching on every corner of the Marvel Universe, the book addresses the prehistoric past, the Celestials, and the origin of the Asgardians. The Mutant gene is addressed, the Inhuman’s Terrigen Mists and Wakanda’s Vibranium are given cosmic framing. A terrible, historic secret is slowly uncovered. The Marvel Universe – both the one unique to Earth X’s story and that of Earth-616 – is altered by the events contained in this story.
Ideas are presented here that presaged or influenced hundreds of future stories. Something as small as Carol Danvers taking the Captain Marvel name, which occurred in text here before it appeared in Captain Marvel #1 in 2012, or something as large as a Celestial seed in the core of the Earth, a masterpiece surprise in this comic since made commonplace by the MCU Eternals film; the Terrigen Bomb, which would eventually give us Ms. Marvel, first exploded in these pages. The book is rife with these massive, world-altering ideas – but, as with the Kree laser on the moon, these progressive concepts are often minor notes in an incredible epic, glimpsed but unembellished.
If the book can be said to stumble, it does so due to the size of the story and the rush to finish it in the allotted 14 issues; things accelerate so quickly in the final two or three issues that it feels as if the story is being robbed of potential action.
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This is because the story of Earth X – which can be read as a completely self-contained masterpiece – could not be limited to fourteen issues; it is, in fact, only the first small chapter of a sprawling trilogy (along with a recent prologue, Marvels X). We can hope that this modern collection of the first chapter might lead to reprints of the following Universe X and Paradise X, neither of which is easily accessible to new readers (beyond, thankfully, their inclusion in the Marvel Unlimited library).
Earth X is a nearly flawless work of genius. The amount of detail and invention contained in these 14 issues is absurd. Somehow, the book seems under-celebrated in the larger canon of Marvel masterpieces. This new volume is a must-have addition to any collection, and the story is a must for any serious armchair comics historian.
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