I just reread the Earth X trade and was pleased to see it hold up so well. When it first came out, I felt it was a great series with poignant moments, hilarious yet fitting touches and some shocking secrets revealed, though I doubt they were mentioned in any core Marvel book. All in all, the characterizations felt real and true to these heroes we know so well.
Of course, I feared that this would be the future Marvel wanted to happen and would head for, similar to DC and Kingdom Come but thankfully this was not the case.
I also have the two Universe X trades but not the Paradise X ones, probably due to the "enough-is-enough" syndrome! But I do have those issues, somewhere.
So I ask you all, what are your opinions on Earth X? Good, great or indifferent? In some ways, it does lead to broader crossovers like Civil War, Planet Hulk and Seige.
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Or am I right to leave them alone.
Though I will admit that I prefer the depressed Cap and paranoid Stark there to the ones in Civil War!
BTW, was anyone shocked that Wolverine was barely involved in this? Or the Punisher? Or Ghost Rider?
The future versions of our heroes were very well thought through. Cap was literally nothing more than a man wrapped in a flag, Tony was completely isolated from everyone by his technology etc. Pot-bellied Spider-man is always a possibility. The first series had a strong narrative through-line and the story we were reading was well tied up at the end.
Possible futures were a longstanding staple of DC, but apart from genocidal deathcamps courtesy of the X-books, we rarely got to see the Marvel heroes face up to their old age in a changing world. Ross's art has its critics, but I always get a kick out of seeing the heroes I love depicted so 'photo-realistically'. It's always a disappointment when one of his projects turns out not to be drawn by him.
I loved it at the time, and it was obviously part of the zeitgeist then of going back to the Silver Age and asserting their primacy. It was very nessecary given how far from their original template they'd drifted by the 90s.
In retrospect now, I see some things that irk a little. Ross's Christian upbringing comes through a bit strong in how all the heroes ended up as 'bearded patriarchs'. Perhaps related to this, as with Ross's Superman, the heroes carry a heavy burden of responsibility and suffering. Stan and Jack's sense of wonder and fun got lost somewhere along the way. Maybe we'll all be grumpy and world-weary when we're old?
There's no getting away from it, but great as the Silver Age greats were, a book focusing on them in the 90's is always going to look strangely 'Aryan', and Ross wasn't interested in putting any women in there either...
Still, Ross and Kreuger should be proud of Earth X. In Universe X and Paradise X, they lost the run of themselves, trying to show us every single hero in Marvel's catalogue, and then bringing back all the dead too! I bought Universe X as it came out, but couldn't really follow it and dropped out before the end. Then I got most of Paradise X and those interminable extra mini-series from the 50c bins, but they are still tough reading. I'll have to read to the end some day, but I don't expect to be too impressed...
This was also the time when it became clear that Marvel were milking those readers who were buying into it for every cent they could. That didn't seem right. We were told the minis weren't nessecary to the main story, but it became clear to me, not having bought them, that the only interesting story beats happened in them. eg Reed and Sue's story, Peter Parker's issues etc.
But perhaps Universe and Paradise are the subjects of another thread.
BTW, was anyone shocked that Wolverine was barely involved in this? Or the Punisher? Or Ghost Rider?
The whole raison d'etre of Earth X was to show the power and grandeur of the original Sixties Marvel creations, which had been frittered away up to then. Earth X is very much a 'reclamation project'. Given that, then no, its not a shock that johnny-come-latelys like Frank and Logan wouldn't get much airtime.
Ross probably hated the turn from 60s idealism that heroes like those represented, anyway. He certainly hated 90s X-Men!