Writer & Penciller: Jack Kirby / Inkers: John Verpoorten, Mike Royer / Colour Artist: Glynis Wein / Letterers: Gaspar, John Costanza, Irv Watanabe, Royer, Ram / Collects The Eternals #1-#11 (July 1976 - May 1977) / Marvel Comics
Buy Marvel comics here and support The Comic Crush.
9th February 2022 (Released 6th August 2021)
The Pitch: Jack Kirby reveals a secret history of heroes and horrors as humanity's cousins, the Eternals, and the Deviants, vie to inherit the Earth! It's a time of titans, terror, and time travel as only the King could conceive!
Looking through the solicits for new comics over the last few months, something struck me. An awful lot of the new books coming out were distinctly ontological in nature. Many of them concerned Gods - ancient Gods - returning to the Earth they made and judging it unworthy. It was a familiar theme, one that resurfaces every few years. I began thinking about where these stories originated. Everything has to begin somewhere. Ignoring the obvious religious origins and moving on to the historical and then the fictional ones, there are a couple of major milestones along the way. One of those is Jack Kirby’s Eternals. I came late to Kirby. When I began reading comics, my entry points were Frank Miller’s Batman, 2000 AD Marvel UK’s weekly Return of The Jedi comic, and Jim Starlin’s and Mike Mignola’s Cosmic Odyssey. Actually, maybe I found Kirby earlier than I thought…
KIRBY MAKES COMICS THE WAY JIM STEINMAN WRITES SONGS
Kirby makes comics the way Jim Steinman writes songs: Everything is as loud and theatrical as it can be. It's not emotion. It's DRAMA!! Despite that drama, Kirby has no need for sentimentality. One has to wonder if it's the WWII era that bred a certain toughness? Nonetheless, there are stakes. Nothing less than the fate of the world And humanity. This is BIG. One can see the input/output of influence in the early pages. It's clear that Kirby, for all the emotional practicality, was something of a believer. He was reading Eric Von Daniken's Chariots of The Gods and using it as the baseline of his orchestral overture. That's the input. For output, you're immediately thrust into a memory of Alien's space jockey, its size, scope, and unknown purpose. And you can't help but think of Moebius' strange cultures, Mignola's ancient societies, Bilal's Egyptian-influenced sci-fi epics.
KIRBY BOTH ADHERES TO AND BROADENS THE HOUSE OF IDEAS’ TEMPLATE
As you head further into Kirby’s strange worlds it’s interesting to note how his characters represent the multitudes contained in humanity. In Sersei we see free-spiritedness and joy. In Sprite, mischief. In Ikaris, a stoic heroism. In Makari, drive, and energy. Collectively, even outside their Uni-Mind, they represent everything good that people can be. More than a decade into the Marvel Universe's interconnected worlds, we see Kirby both adhering to and broadening the House of Ideas' template. The story offers a global danger but makes it relatable by bringing the action to New York, showing us ordinary folk exposed to strange happenings. And things are strange, with the Deviants taking on new guises, reaching back through humanity's myths to make fearful forms.
wHAT GRAPS YOU, OF COURSE, IS THE ART
I have to be honest and say I found this tough going, albeit in a good way. There are so many ideas coming at you across the eleven issues that you find yourself caught up in one wild, new concept before the previous one has had time to settle in. Thematically, Eternals becomes about looking beyond the surface to what lies beneath. The Celestials become almost a distraction, a backdrop against which the real drama must be played. Kirby fractions the ensemble down to separate components, sending small groups off on missions of their own, which plays havoc with following the story. we even stop for bread and circuses in the Deviants undersea city. Of course, he manages to begin bringing the threads together by the end of the first volume. What grabs you, of course, is the art. There’s Kirby Crackle, weird complex machinery, and his wonderful, grid-and-circle designs all over this. The Celestials and their machines are staggering in size, something his dramatic angles and full-page splashes sell magnificently. You end up being awed by the scope of it all, from Russia to America, mountain to street, past to present, and stars to soil. Kirby creates a tapestry of the universe. In reading this, you discover why he’s lived so long in the comics consciousness and how his art has lived beyond so many others. Kirby rightly remains… Eternal.
The Eternals Vol.1: Day of The Gods (UK edition) is available now from your local comic shop.