The Eternals 1 (Neil Gaiman & John Romita, Jr.)
Marvel Comics, August 2006. $3.99
The Gaiman-Romita return to one of Jack Kirby's fanciest and most gorgeous creations is not without some interest. Unfortunately, the writing is gabby and conceptually blander than I’d hoped for. Pages of bucolic recap kill a lot of the essential cosmic mystery.
Story
Gaiman employs one of his favorite plot devices: “Surprise, young man, you’re a descendant of gods”; but here its usually lithe handling seems clobbered by editorial overrule. The success of the surprise-you’re-a-god device in Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) and Anansi Boys (2005) depends in each case on the crypto-divine character, and the reader along with him, gradually inferring what it might mean, in the fiction, to be one of the gods. In the new Eternals, apparently, being one of them means having to listen to an awful chunk of back story.Briefly, that story relates how a group of extraterrestrial deities, the Celestials, tinkered with proto-humans to create a pantheon of Eternals, each blessed with a particular proclivity for speed, flight, strategy, and so on, and a potpourri of Deviants. While the Eternals are few in number, apparently non-reproducing, and significantly blessed with talent, the Deviants are remarkable in that each one is a distinct species, and yet, against definition, these genetically incompatible monsters can breed “like rabbits.”
Time passes. Humans evolve. There is a war between Eternals and Deviants, and the Celestials intervene. The Eternals inspire religion, mythologies, and learning among the humans. More time passes, and we find the Eternals mysteriously losing much of their memory. Meanwhile the Deviants, when they are not breeding like rabbits, are scheming.
Language
Kirby’s unfamiliar yet liturgical-sounding "Host of Celestials" has been exchanged for the ridiculous and greedy sounding "Horde of Celestials." These plus-size entities may be huger than the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, which they resemble in form if not color, but nine of them do not a Horde make. (Of course, it might all depend on the size of the fingers on which one does the horde-counting.)Through its sacramental usage, moreover, "host" has a vertical connotation appropriate to the Celestials whereas "horde" has a charging, land-crossing horizontal connotation. A horde of Deviants, a tickle of spiders, a gangplank of dogs. . .
Art
In general, Romita’s artwork is crisp and comfortable to follow, but he's unable to register the morphological diversity of the Deviants in an effective or inspired manner. Rather than glorious, terrifying variety we get a mess of jolly yawning monsters that look as if they’re fighting to get out of their pajamas.On the other hand, Romita does add a fresh new trope to the challenge of rendering the Celestials. Where Kirby drew them as “pre-Columbian” space suits of metal obligated to laws of another universe, and Alex Ross painted them like a downtown of randomly illuminated skyscrapers at night, Romita has had the happy idea of depicting them as anthropomorphic furnaces, seething with captive suns and exotic matter.
Celestial leader Arishem's head burning inside on page 2 was for me perhaps the highpoint of the comic.
Figure 1 Head of Arishem by John Romita Jr (Eternals 1, fourth series)
Figure 2 Head of Arishem by Jack Kirby (Eternals 12, first series)
Figure 3 Head of Arishem by Alex Ross (Earth X 11)
Addendum
A rather different look for the Celestials can be seen a few scrolls down the page at Chris Tamari's Crisis/Boring Change.back to top
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