Earth X

I actually haven't read many Marvel comics, but I've watched some X-Men and Spider-Man animated stuff and seen most of the movies. I have a pretty good grasp of a large number of the characters. This book makes me feel like I know nothing at all. I knew the Marvel universe was big, I just didn't know how massive and complicated it was. The complexity is due to many years of new ideas and recycled old ones. Earth X is an attempt to bring all of those crazy stories under one roof and give them a cohesive purpose; it largely succeeds.

Starring primarily Captain America, Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic, the elastic man), and a character I'd not heard of called Machine Man or X-51, Earth X is about a time somewhere in the future when all the characters we know are old. For some reason every person on the planet has become a super-being/mutant/whatever. Most of the book is spend trying to figure out why this happened. In the course of events we find out why such beings and humans in general exist, and also that everyone is doomed. Of course this is averted for the time being but new developments arrive leaving a shadow of foreboding over the ending. This is the first of three books so it's there for a reason.

A lot of the time it all seemed pretty silly to me, just because the Marvel universe is not a cohesive thing; there's all sorts of crazy crap going on all the time and so many different things happen for different reasons. They sort of explained the reason for the variation but it seemed forced. However, in the end it all made a sort of sense, and had something close to the feel of the revelation at the end of Watchmen. I enjoyed it and I'll probably check out the other two at some point.