Earth X Sketchbook #1

History

The project traces back to 1997, when Wizard magazine commissioned Alex Ross to design a dystopian future for the Marvel Universe; that feature sold out rapidly. Marvel then partnered with Wizard to publish the expanded material as the Earth X Sketchbook in late 1998 (cover-dated February 1999), with the book's sellout confirming enough audience appetite for Marvel to greenlight the full series. Writer Jim Krueger supplied the character-profile text alongside pencil artwork by Ross, John Paul Leon, and Bill Reinhold, under editors Polly Watson and Marie Javins, with Bob Harras serving as editor-in-chief. The Sketchbook also includes a foreword by Ross recounting how the concept grew from those original Wizard sketches into a collaborative storytelling endeavor.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published by Marvel Comics; released December 30, 1998, with a cover date of February 1999; one-shot format, approximately 48 pages.
• Written by Jim Krueger; pencil art by Alex Ross, John Paul Leon, and Bill Reinhold; edited by Polly Watson and Marie Javins under editor-in-chief Bob Harras.
• The issue originated as a reprint/expansion of an Alex Ross feature from Wizard magazine (1997) that had sold out; the Sketchbook itself also sold out, directly leading Marvel to commission the Earth X limited series.
• Introduces the Earth-9997 versions of the catalogued characters in profile form: Aaron Stack / X-51 (Machine Man) as the new Watcher recruited by a blinded Uatu; Steve Rogers / Captain America as a centenarian leading an underground resistance; May Parker bonded to the Venom symbiote (with her spider-sense giving her control over it rather than the reverse); Daredevil as a mentor figure; and David Jarrett as the last unmutated human on Earth.
• The book is structured as finished character-design art (not rough sketches) with accompanying in-universe prose descriptions — SpiderFan's reviewer notes that all drawings are complete, polished pieces, some occupying a full page.
• The universe depicted — Earth-9997 — posits that all of humanity has been mutated by Terrigen Mists, rendering traditional superheroism obsolete, a core premise first laid out visually and textually in this issue before any story pages existed.
• Sketch material from the Sketchbook was later reprinted in the September 2005 Marvel hardcover deluxe edition of Earth X (592 pages) and in sketch/background sections of the October 2007 Earth X Trilogy Companion trade paperback.
• The Earth X franchise has had measurable media impact: its Celestial-embryo mythology was cited as a major inspiration for the 2021 film Eternals, and the Earth-9997 Spider-Man appeared in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023).

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