Designation: Earth-9997 In 1997, Marvel asked Alex Ross to come up with ideas for a dark future vision for their characters of the sort the artist had just cooked up with writer Mark Waid in the DC series Kingdom Come. Ross obliged, and that dark future turned out to be even weirder than anybody could have expected. It all starts to go wrong when, ten years after heroes have been snikting, thwipping and zapping their way across the Earth, Inhuman Black Bolt releases the mutagenic Terrigan Mists into the Earth's atmosphere, in the hope that giving even more of the population superpowers would stop his people being made fun of. Obviously that's now what happens. Instead, there's a whole bunch of untrained, unchecked new superpeople that cause havoc, with most of the world's telepaths accidentally killed by a rookie psychic, a bunch more heroes get killed by aliens, and then the Galactus turns up. Which isn't the end, actually, since the destroyer of world just eats the "celestial egg" that made Earth such a haven for superpowers in the first place. Which throws the planet off balance and causes natural disasters that kill pretty much everybody who was left. Almost as cheery as Red Son, eh.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
