Earth X - Jim Krueger, Alex Ross, John Paul Leon
I'd been talking to my friend Justin about comics a while back, and he recommended Earth X as another good series that encompassed the entire Marvel universe (see, for example, Kingdom Come). I finally got it from the library, and my first impression was that it was much bigger than I expected: it's a 12-issue story, with a bunch of appendices and notes at the end. Alex Ross did the covers and a lot of the character design for the story, but unlike Kingdom Come he didn't paint the entire story.
The story was interesting but not great: it's sort of a Grand Unified Theory explaining basically ALL of the superheroes and supervillains, from Spiderman to the X-men to Captain America. It's set in the future, at a time when pretty much everyone on earth has mutated and attained powers, and even the old characters have changed somewhat. But there was too much talking, and too much exposition in the form of a stilted dialogue between X-51 (an android) and Uatu the Watcher. So much dialogue, in fact, that at the end of each chapter there's a non-illustrated appendix that continues the conversation, mostly for the purpose of catching the reader up on various characters and situations that aren't covered in the main comic book.
Also, there were just so many characters in this one that I knew nothing about, and so the story just wasn't as compelling to me. It required a lot more prior knowledge about Marvel characters which I don't have, so I'm sure there are things that a real fanboy would appreciate which I'm just missing.
I thought the overarching story line was a great concept, but I just didn't like it as much as some other comics I've read. The afterword mentions that this is the first in a trilogy (followed by Universe X and Paradise X), but I probably won't be in a hurry to get to those.
Fed to jonathan's brain | April 25, 2006
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