Earth X ... at last

I bought Earth X four years ago, but only this May did I manage to read it all the way through. 

This says more about my eyes being bigger than my stomach, reading-wise, than about the quality of the work by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, and John Paul Leon. 

Still, the book is dense, both in concept and execution. Readers weaned on more pedestrian crossover events (oh, all the villains have escaped from Arkham ... again!) may be surprised by how ambitious Earth X is. Its goal is nothing less than a unified theory of the disparate events at the bedrock of the Marvel Universe, encompassing the Celestials, Inhumans, and Asgardians, along with Uatu the Watcher and Galactus thrown in for good measure. And those are just the cosmic players. The book is also chock-full of the typical suspects—Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Captain America, Spider-Man, the Thing, et al. 

So, this is a book that swings for the fences. It doesn't quite get there, but it still offers much to recommend. 

First, the world-building and continuity bridges are impressive. Krueger, as writer (sharing story credit with Alex Ross, who also designed the futuristic landscape and characters), has set himself a Miltonian task (to "justify the ways of God to men," as the poet announced in Paradise Lost) by teasing out "a purpose to the throng of accidental heroes that Stan [Lee] and Jack [Kirby] created so many years ago." Earth, it seems, is home to a gestating Celestial, protected through the years by mutations implanted in the indigenous inhabitants. Said mutations present themselves as superheroes, but only after traumatic events, such as World War II (for many of the Invaders) or radioactive spiders (for ... well, you know), germinate the deeply buried seeds. 

Second, this may well be John Paul Leon's masterpiece. I haven't yet read The Winter Men, which some readers declare his finest work. Yet it's hard to imagine any other artist organically working so many heavy hitters into one story. The climactic battle between Galactus and the Celestials rivals any big-budget superhero film, and that's just one sequence among dozens that are equally jaw-dropping. 

It was also gutsy of Krueger, Ross, and Leon to use Aaron Stack, aka Machine Man, aka Mister Machine, as the story's protagonist. Outside of hardcore fans in 1999 (when Earth X was first published), who even remembered this character from Kirby's short-lived 2001: A Space Odyssey series? But Stack makes the perfect vehicle to observe a Watcher's dissolution into madness. That the creative team also worked in an appearance by the Monolith, the hunk of extraterrestrial stone that gave humanity's ancestors the edge over their enemies in Kubrick's original film, is a bonus. 

However, Earth X's biggest assets are also its biggest flaws. The ambitious plot is sometimes too convoluted. A teenaged Red Skull skulks about the periphery, a new Daredevil's origin remains fraught with mystery (if it was revealed, it flew over this reader's head), and a major plot point—all of humanity gaining superpowers—isn't explored in nearly the detail that it could (or should). 

A series that relies so much on the audience's previous knowledge of the Marvel Universe doesn't need origin recaps for the major players, but the book overflows with them. Worse, these summaries of Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four don't provide any new analyses or breakthrough observations. 

And the ongoing battle of wits between Stack and Uatu becomes tiresome, especially when extended to text pieces at the end of each chapter. These could uncharitably be described as filler, something to fill the empty spaces around Ross's concept sketches. A better use of the pages comes in the appendix to Chapter Twelve, when Captain America offers an insightful analysis of his relationship with the Red Skull and with America itself. More insights like this would allow the words to compete with Ross's sublime designs.  

In the end, Earth X is a book that commands attention. It transcends the tired rationales for most large-scale events and delivers a carefully considered vision of the Marvel Universe's past and future, along with some slices of philosophy suitable for our own time. Despite flaws in pacing and an overabundance of underutilized characters, it's a book that deserves to be revisited.

Even if it takes some readers four years to do it. 

 

Lost Marvels 1: Tower of Shadows

 Tower of Shadows is the first volume in Fantagraphics Books' Lost Marvels line, dedicated to titles that Marvel apparently has no interest (re: financial incentive) in reprinting. 

It's a promising start. The sturdy hardback reprints most of the first nine issues of the short-lived anthology from the 1970s. "Short-lived" in its original incarnation, at least. With the tenth issue, Tower of Shadows was relaunched as Creatures on the Loose, took a more sci-fi/fantasy bent, and would eventually house the Man-Wolf solo series. 

The stories are not the main draw here. While a stellar collection of comics writers (Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, and Gerry Conway among them) fills these pages, the tales they spin are perfunctory rehashes of stories EC Comics did much better a few decades earlier. When Jake Wyatt grouses about the possibility of a robot taking over his drilling job in a mine in "Look Out, Wyatt ... Automation's Gonna Get Your Job" (Gary Friedrich, writer; John Buscema, penciler; and John Verpoorten, inker), the reader knows exactly what type of machine is going to show up soon and the role the setting will play in serving old Wyatt his just desserts. 

But let's face it, most readers will buy this for the art, by such standout draftsmen as Gene Colan, the aforementioned John Buscema, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Joe Tuska, many of whom are stepping away from the standard superhero fare that marked the majority of their careers. 

The best pieces are the ones where the artist also serves as the writer. This doesn't save them from formulaic, O. Henry-style plotting, but in most cases, the artists give a little extra to help them transcend the ordinary. We're talking "From the Brink!" by Johnny Craig, "Flight into Fear!" and "The Ghost-Beast!" by Wallace (Wally) Wood, two efforts from the severely underrated Tom Sutton, and, of course, "At the Stroke of Midnight" by the legendary Jim Steranko. That last one won an Alley Award and is, as the book's introduction states, "probably the stand-out story of the Tower of Shadows series." Unfortunately, it's also the first piece in the collection, so everything after is a slow coasting downhill where story satisfaction is concerned. 

The book's reproduction is great, given that these issues are fifty-plus years old. The art isn't garishly recolored but is presented in decent scans on paper that is far better than the original newsprint but still gives off the comics vibe. 

One caveat is that the book does not reprint two stories adapted from H.P. Lovecraft's work because of "legal questions." Nor does it reprint the stories that were themselves reprints of earlier Atlas/Marvel titles. The editors say they've been "naturally omitted," but I wonder how much it would have affected the price of the volume to include them, especially with the cutting of the Lovecraft material. 

Readers who like horror anthology comics (which I generally do) and/or the artwork of any of the gentlemen listed above will find much to like here. If you're looking for something that will compare to the glory of EC Comics in its heyday ... well, this isn't it. But then again, so few things are. 

Godzilla vs. Spider-Man

Of the three Godzilla oneshots released by Marvel so far, I expected the least of Godzilla vs. Spider-Man. Maybe that's why I liked it the most. 

Given Spider-Man's popularity, a meeting of the two characters could be seen as a blatant cash grab. Yet setting the story in the 1980s era, with Spidey newly garbed in his symbiote suit from Secret Wars, provides as much rationale as such a story needs. 

It makes sense that Godzilla, the "eighty-thousand ton surgeon," should head to New York to destroy the spreading "cancer" of the alien symbiote. And, just as Godzilla vs. Fantastic Four provided fan service by mixing the Silver Surfer's power cosmic with the Big G's own radioactive powers (to say nothing of a Godzilla-sized Thing battling him), this issue sees the black suit expanding its ambitions to kaiju-sized extremes. 

An unexpected delight of the issue is the inclusion of typical Spider-Man subplots—Mary Jane v. Black Cat, Peter being verbally abused by J. Jonah Jameson, and the perennial Parker woe-is-me soliloquy as he muses on his mistakes. 

Joe Kelly writes the script as a pastiche of Spider-Man stories from forty years ago (which never go out of style, apparently), while Nick Bradshaw channels the style of Art Adams to give the visuals a slick, ultra-detailed 1980s sheen. The result is the most effortless Godzilla mash-up yet.