Marvel Comics General

It's always struck me as rather odd how often Marvel lifts from Earth X, considering as observes, it's far from the most popular of Marvel's Elseworlds.

It's one of the few that lasted more than an issue or two. What If was always done-in-ones, and it was just about other stories playing out differently. Earth X lasted longer, was drawn by much-beloved artist, and included plenty of things that were legitimately different from regular continuity.

Yeah, but you could say the same about a lot of other stories like Mangaverse, MC2, and so on.

Earth X had plotting, covers and character designs by a much loved artist. But not the interior art.

Compare to DC's Kingdom Come, where Mark Waid co-wrote and scripted it, and Ross did all of the art.

For the Earth X trilogy, Krueger's co-plotting and scripting is, arguably, not as strong as Waid's. Waid is certainly a much better known comic writer.

Braithwaite is a good artist, but a very different style to Ross, and the various specials had their own artists.

Which goes back to the other thing - Kingdom Come is a four issue series telling a single story about superheroes sliding into a next generation dark age dystopia.

Earth X is 42 issues of the three core series, plus 13 issues of one-shots and miniseries.

Edited by Mrph1 on Apr 16th 2024 at 3:36:46 PM

It was immensely popular at the beginning. When it was just a thought exercise of Wizard asking Alex Ross to brainstorm some ideas for a Marvel equivalent to Kingdom Come. Popular enough to sell out the magazine issue the feature was in and a reprint of just the Earth X feature. And the actual Earth X series is dense with ideas. It’s got so much going on and the appendices are full of even more details that couldn’t be crammed into the actual story.

That’s the explanation that makes sense to me. It was hugely popular in its time and made an impression on then current writers and readers who would become writers. And it has so many ideas that it’s a good source of inspiration to just cherry pick a few here and there

So how is Spider-Man's relationship with his daughter there? Is she Venom?

May is Venom.

Their relationship is bad.

After MJ died of cancer or something, Peter wasn’t in the best emotional shape. And then he failed to keep Venom from taking his daughter. But she managed to tame Venom or come to an understanding with it. It’s unclear because the goo hasn’t come off as it’s own character in the bits I’ve read.

But anyway, Peter assumes everything May does is just Venom fucking with him and yells at her to give him his daughter back

Which just makes her shout back that their estrangement is entirely his decision

Peter also retired from being Spider-Man because a world where everyone had powers meant to him that he had no responsibility anymore. Who could need to be saved by Spider-Man

He’s out of shape but in a middle aged way. “Spider-Man is fat now” is because the concept art of him wearing a spider-man costume that’s way too small for him

But it’s a random Halloween costume he pulled out of a store so no duh it looks bad on him.

He looks like a normal, if not super fit, guy of his age in civilian clothes.

Edited by Bocaj on Apr 16th 2024 at 7:50:41 AM

Is Earth-X the one where they made it so mutants aren’t actually homo superior? But instead actually mutants caused by celestials mucking around in the gene pool? And also have the much less insulting name of homo mutandis or something?

One of my major grips with the concept of mutants is that marvel never seems to grasp what mutants actually are. To be the next stage of humanity they’d need to probably all be the same thing. But then again school sucked and I never did learn much about genetics and evolution beyond the basics.

Also ITSV totally to out of shape middle age Peter Parker from Earth-X.

Edited by GateStarX on Apr 16th 2024 at 7:53:49 AM

This was a few years before Spider-Man: Reign, was 't it? I wonder if it was the inspiration for MJ's fate in that story...

Hopefully she didn’t die because of radioactive semen.

That is still the dumbest shit they could go to get rid of MJ.

Even dumber than OMD.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 16th 2024 at 10:57:06 PM

Earth X paints with the broad stroke that everything is caused by the Celestials.

All mutation, superpower, innovation, all everything caused by the Celestial seed implant in humanity’s genetics at the dawn of the species

So mutants and Captain America and the Hulk and the Fantastic Four are all technically the same thing. Their respective Celestial seeds have just been activated in different ways.

So in Earth X, mutants aren’t really homo superior. And they’re not the next stage of humanity, they’re just another part of the current stage. The actual next stage of humanity is a lot weirder than if it were just mutants. I haven’t gotten that issue written up yet.

As far as I know, it’s never said how she got cancer so it was probably just normal person cancer.

Edited by Bocaj on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:01:04 AM

So gamma mutates are also the work of the Celestials?

Yes. Without the Celestial seed, Bruce would have super died to that much radiation exposure. So would the Fantastic Four to their cosmic radiation. And Spider-Man and so on.

It’s basically like the Metagene from DC. Honestly Marvel should go the same way. Reveal every superhuman does have an X-gene that was activated by their various accidents. You can still keep everyone’s weird stuff too, like the Flash is a Metahuman and also powered by the Speed Force.

Edited by GateStarX on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:52:09 AM

I think the Celestial thing is in canon for the 616.

Jason Aaron’s Avengers used Celestial vomit to explain all superpowers. Although I’m confused about the timescale since the very sick Celestial was then murdered by the cave Avengers, which included cavewoman Jean expy

Maybe I’m misremembering Aaron’s run but Celestial tinkering does float in and out of canon as The Explanation

There were two Celestials. The one that got killed was there to find the vomit one.

The last issue of Gillen's Eternals series (#12) lays it out on a data page.

So: Mutants, Eternals and Deviants are all Celestial tinkering, directly or indirectly. Judgment Day established that mutants are basically stable equivalents of Deviants, and previous stories have talked about mutants as Celestial creations.

Inhumans are created by the Kree, reverse engineered from a vivisected Eternal.

The Deviant experiment climaxed in the last few hundred years, with the broader age of marvels.

There are still unrelated things like White Event superhumans and magically empowered folk (although I wouldn't rule out Celestial influence on magic, either) — but the core of the 616 superhuman logic ties into this.

Ah, I’d forgotten that

That's pretty much the best summary of how it all works so far.

I also think Aaron's avengers during its first arc explained that all of earths powered heroes were ultimately a kind of antibody to kill the bugs that were killing the celestials

Yeah Aaron’s tried to tie everything together. I give him that much.

Aaron is, I feel, kind of like an Anti-Ewing. Like Ewing, he's very big on Arc Welding and tying everything together into a coherent whole... but unlike Ewing, he is much more hit and miss about the execution due to the metric assload of weird hangups and decisions he's prone to making, as well as because despite ostensibly wanting to tie everything together, he doesn't give a shit about continuity and wants to just arbitrarily change everything to "leave his mark".

The Progenitor is pretty much the only one of his attempts at a Meta Origin and/or sweeping retcon that's actually pretty good, or at least easy to work with, and is accordingly pretty much the only one anybody has bothered to actually uphold as canon and include in their work. Contrast that with other shit he tried to pull like Phoenix being Thor's mom, cavewoman She-Hulk, and the Lost One/Beyonders, which tended to be ignored, mocked, or written around by everyone else as he was writing it.

Aaron is a very bonking the action figures off each other guy, self-admittedly so

And some of his tying together was gluing action figures to each other to make Phoenixverine or whoever else

There are exceptions to every rule, but I think relying on alternates, past/future variants and mashup composites for an open-ended story may be cool in the short term, but harms the core characters (and/or gets written out) long term.

The Captain Britain corps is possibly the most interesting thing done with the character, but it was also the 1980s and Alan Moore. The Alliance of Alternates wasn't a regular Marvel thing then.

Iron Fist as a legacy character works really well. It's the missing piece of the puzzle. But Danny interacting with Orson was fairly unique, and the historical Iron Fists were shown in brief moments of awesome. They didn't need to join the Avengers of their century, or meet the modern lot.

Aaron's run was so overloaded with legacy characters and alternates that, personally, I stopped caring. And I can't see many of them returning for the future.

The Starbrand Hulk is a perfect microcosm of that.

The prehistoric Starbrand just looking like Hulk for no reason despite previous showcases of the Starbrand power not working like that.

And then another Avengers team by Aaron in the medieval ages or whatever introduced a troll guy who is the Hulk of his team there though his design is a little bit more distinct at least.

Edited by slimcoder on Apr 16th 2024 at 11:43:06 AM