FRED Entertainment

This week I continue my examination of Neil Gaiman’s recent revival of Jack Kirby’s Eternals. But first, I want to mention briefly a subject that turns out to be related: the newly released The Last Fantastic Four Story, written by FF co-creator Stan Lee and drawn by John Romita, Jr., the illustrator of Gaiman’s Eternals. It’s like one of the old Superman “imaginary stories”: what might the FF’s final adventure be like? In this saga, the Adjudicator, a gigantic armored alien being with virtually unlimited godlike powers, descends to Earth to deliver judgment on humanity. Seems familiar, doesn’t it? It would not surprise me if Stan Lee had never read Jack Kirby’s Eternals, or, if he had, had forgotten it over in the ensuing thirty years. But surely someone at Marvel should have pointed out that the Adjudicator is uncomfortably similar to Jack Kirby’s Arishem the Judge.

Reading the Gaiman Eternals is more rewarding. When I left off last week, Ikaris had regained his full Eternal memories and powers by thrusting his hand into a waterfall in the Eternal city of Olympia. Having already experienced resurrection, Ikaris thus underwent another kind of Christian imagery: baptism.

Then Sprite, revealed as the principal villain of Gaiman’s Eternals, conforms to standard supervillain practice by “monologuing”: expounding on his grand scheme and motivations to the helpless Mark Curry, alias the Eternal Makkari.

Though he has lived for “the best part of a million years” (Gaiman Eternals issue 4 p. 15), Sprite, for unknown reasons, has never advanced beyond the physical age of eleven, whereas the other Eternals are all adults. He’s right on the verge of puberty, but, as long as he is an Eternal, would never reach it.

Sprite once appeared to the British playwright James Barrie, who based Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up, on him, “back when the only thing I had left to enjoy was messing with the transients,” by which Sprite means we mere mortals. Although most people today are probably more familiar with the heroic depictions of Peter Pan in the Disney film and the Broadway musical, Barrie’s original Peter Pan is a more ambiguous figure.

Sprite is a trickster, and his creator, Jack Kirby, established in the original Eternals series that William Shakespeare put Sprite in one of his plays (Kirby Eternals hardcover, p. 173). Presumably Kirby meant that Sprite was the inspiration for Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and those who know Gaiman’s Sandman story about that play know that Gaiman regards Puck as not some endearing, fun-loving sprite but as a potentially dangerous creature (see “Comics in Context” #65).

So, like Peter Pan, Sprite is a boy who will not grow up. There is a related figure in popular culture: the adult who refuses to admit to his or her true age, who refuses to move on from a time when he or she was younger. There’s Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, an elderly woman still wearing a young woman’s wedding gown, trying to make time stand still, and Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), fantasizing about playing the teenage Salome. In a more comic mode, there are Jack Benny and Absolutely Fabulous‘s Patsy Stone both insisting with increasing absurdity that they are only thirty-nine: Patsy and her friend Eddie are middle-aged women who behave as if the 1960s and their youth never ended.

A recurring variation on this figure is the adult who seems stuck in childhood. I wonder if this image originated with performers like Mary Pickford, the first great star of American silent film (and said to be a possible influence on Little Orphan Annie), who played prepubescent girls well into her thirties; apparently her public resisted her attempts to play characters her own age. Then there’s “Baby June” (later known as the actress June Havoc) who was forced to play little girls long into her adolescence, as dramatized in the classic musical Gypsy. In the 1960 book and 1962 film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? a fictional former child star by that name irrationally plans to revive her act.

Then there’s another variation that cartoon art makes possible: the adult with the body of a child, like Baby Herman in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), who looks like an infant but off-camera has a gravely adult voice and smokes cigars. Again, Baby Herman is a show business performer. Baby Herman is a comedic figure, but an adult mind in a child’s body represents a violation of the normal natural order that can seem sinister. One of the villains in Batman: The Animated Series is Baby Doll, a former television child star who suffers from a rare disease that forces her to remain a small child physically, even though she is psychologically an adult. Then there’s Family Guy‘s Stewie Griffin, the infant who not only speaks in an adult voice but has ambitions of ruling the world.

There is also the reverse: the child in the body of an adult, or with abilities that he or she lacks sufficient psychological maturity to handle responsibly. There’s the Billy Mumy role as the sinister, all-powerful child in the classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” based on the Jerome Bixby short story. The traditional portrayal of the Hulk is of a being with a tantrum-prone, childlike mind within a superhumanly strong adult body.

On first viewing, Gaiman’s version of Sprite is the emotionally immature child with vast “adult” powers. Enraged at being treated as a child by the other Eternals for a million years, Sprite misused his super-powers to punish them. Using his powers of illusion, he manipulated his fellow Eternals Zuras and Ajak into joining with him in a “Uni-Mind,” a collective consciousness, that drew power from the Dreaming Celestial. (Earlier in the series Gaiman established that it takes at least four Eternals to form a Uni-Mind, but perhaps only three Eternals are necessary if they are psionically linked with the Dreaming Celestial.) Through this Uni-Mind, Sprite stripped the other Eternals of access to their memories and super-powers, effectively turning them into ordinary human beings, with implanted, false memories of leading ordinary human lives. Sprite also transformed himself into a normal human, minus any Eternal powers, so that he could physically age.

But it seems to me that Sprite is also like the adult in the body of a child. Consider the complexity and execution of Sprite’s master plan. Leaving Sprite’s super-powers aside, could an actual eleven-year-old have conceived, planned, and carried out such a scheme? Although Sprite uses words like “cool” and “dumb” the way a real kid might, most of the dialogue that Gaiman gives him, including his monologuing here, reads like an adult speaking.

Moreover, one of Sprite’s principal motivations seems to be intense sexual frustration. He tells Mark about Sersi, “Of course, by then she’d had sexual relations with all the straight male Eternals, all sixty of them, except me. . .because I was eleven. . . “ (Gaiman issue 4 p. 15). This doesn’t seem like a typical crush an eleven-year-old boy might have on an attractive adult woman. That “sexual relations” phrase suggests to me that Sprite, despite being physically prepubescent, psychologically has a very active postpubescent sex drive.

That Sprite quotation also prompts me to digress for a bit. Out of roughly a hundred Eternals, sixty are straight males. So the other forty Eternals are either females or gay males? Seems a bit odd that the male/female ratio isn’t more even. And Sersi has had “sexual relations” with all the straight male Eternals past puberty? Sersi isn’t a first generation Eternal (in fact, you can see her as a child in ancient Mesopotamia in Captain America Annual #11, 1992), so what about her father (who is named Helios, by the way)? Or father figure Zuras? Well, this is the intensely jealous Sprite saying this, so perhaps he’s exaggerating. One of the points of this page of the fourth issue is that over their incredibly long lives the Eternals have sexually paired up in all possible combinations considering their individual sexual orientations. It is gratifying to know that Sersi never stooped to having sex with children, much as Sprite may regret it.

It seems to me that Sprite’s intellect and even his sexual desires have matured, but not his emotions or his capacity for moral judgment. Why does he want to become an adult? “I wanted to be a film star and a rock star and a TV star. I wanted everyone to love me. I’m going to stay a star until I’m in my twenties, for the girls. And then. . .Well, that depends.” Actually, despite his claim that he wants to be treated as an adult, Sprite really seems to want to be an adolescent. He has no concrete goal for himself once he has passed the physical age of nineteen. His current goals are shallow, self-centered, and deeply immature: he just wants to be famous and to be universally loved, and, I suspect, to get laid a lot by “the girls.”

Sprite claims he wants to get older, but emotionally he represents an extreme case of arrested development, or, more specifically and appropriately, the mindset that pop psychology terms “Peter Pan syndrome,” which entails both irresponsibility and narcissism.

The clearest sign of Sprite’s narcissism is his ambition to be a “star” whom everybody loves. Like so many of the other characters I mentioned earlier who are simultaneously children and adults, Sprite is in show business, a field which encourages aging people to take extreme measures to hold onto their youth, and which bestows fame, celebrity, wealth and power upon people who may be too psychologically immature to cope with it wisely.

In Gaiman’s Eternals, television programs consist of Sprite’s lowest common denominator sitcom for tweens and a superhero reality show that turns the noble calling of the superhero into a quest for fame and fortune. (As the Spider-Man theme song observes, “Action is his reward,” not big bucks.) I wonder if Gaiman means to suggest that there is something emotionally immature and adolescent about, not just the current state of the superhero genre, but about American (or British and American?) popular culture as a whole, or perhaps even the American fascination with celebrity and wealth. No wonder that the immature Sprite prospers in such a culture.

I also recall that in Lev Grossman’s profile of Gaiman in July 26, 2007 issue of Time, Neil said that “Five years ago, I was absolutely as famous as I wanted to be. . . .I’m now more famous than I’m comfortable with,” and Grossman observed that Gaiman is “leery of selling out to the popular crowd.” I wonder if in Eternals Neil is using the platform of a Marvel comic, supposedly aimed at the more “popular crowd” among comics readers, to examine the dark side of fame and its pursuit and the dangers of selling out rather than following one’s true calling.

And this is a variation on a classic Marvel theme. Remember that Spider-Man started out as a boy who, upon acquiring super-powers, initially went into show business, until he had to face the terrible result of his self-centered pursuit of fame and fortune: his failure to prevent his uncle’s death.

“I could have done whatever I wanted to the world,” Sprite says. Remember when the Red Skull or Thanos acquired the Cosmic Cube in past Marvel epics, and how they wanted to use it to alter reality on a grand, visionary albeit evil scale. And then consider what Sprite says: “I could have made the seas run red, or made snow taste like chocolate. I thought about it.” Claiming to want to be merely an adult human, Sprite instead achieved godhood, yet he ends up seriously considering juvenile trivialities. “But in the end I settled for this. Stardom and puberty,” which in this context seem merely a higher order of triviality. “I’m a real boy now,” Sprite declares, as if he were Pinocchio’s evil twin (Gaiman issue 4 p. 20).

Trying to imagine his future beyond turning twenty, Sprite says, “But whatever I do, I do it as a human. I can leave the solar system, which is more than any Eternal can” (Gaiman issue 4, p. 20). Well, first, leaving the solar system is not something that humans ordinarily do. Unless Sprite thinks he can steal the Fantastic Four’s spaceship, just how is he going to do this? Second, back in Avengers #248 (October 1984) most of the Eternals, united into a Uni-Mind, departed Earth for outer space, and I do not think that the Eternals, who seem to be such social beings, would be interested in merely exploring the uninhabited planets in our solar system; I expect they left to visit other, inhabited worlds. This also means that Sprite must have used the power of the Dreaming Celestial to bring all those Eternals back from outer space and give them human identities on Earth. I suppose Sprite would think that was a safer course of action for him rather than worrying that the other Eternals might someday return and disrupt his plans.

Then Sprite tells Mark Curry, “I can even die–do you know how cool that is?” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 20). Yet it is hard to believe that someone who is so infatuated with being famous and universally beloved, goals which require being alive, has any comprehension of what death is. Perhaps here Gaiman is criticizing the shallowness of an adolescent fascination with death. Or perhaps Gaiman is indicating that Sprite, who has disposed of his entire community of Eternals, and who has bonded with the Dreaming Celestial, a potential bringer of death, is ultimately motivated by a death wish.

It seems odd that Sprite wants to be mortal when he shows such contempt for mortal humans, calling them “transients” and “mayflies”: remember, he used to devote himself to playing pranks on mortals. To become mortal himself may subconsciously be to direct that hatred towards himself, as if he were punishing himself–as well as his fellow Eternals–for his long life of continual frustration.

Sprite claims he wants to grow up, and “be a man” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 20), but what he really wants is to indulge all his childish fantasies without there being any adult Eternals to tell him no. He really is Peter Pan gone bad, after all. In drawing upon the power of the Dreaming Celestial, the Satan of the Eternals mythos, Sprite has metaphorically made a deal with the devil to remain eternally young–and dangerously immature–to the end of his life, which would come far more quickly than an Eternal could imagine, even if he lived to be a hundred.

Here’s another digression. Gaiman establishes that the prison of the Dreaming Celestial is beneath San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. This enables Gaiman to tie in the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake to his story, and look, Sprite indicates that Olympia was in Antarctica, not Greece, back then, too (Gaiman issue 4 p. 16). But past stories have placed the Dreaming Celestial’s prison beneath the Diablo Mountains (appropriate name) (see the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry). The northern part of the Diablo range lies near San Francisco, but not within the city limits. Well, I suppose this is close enough. It seems that even imprisoned space gods move in mysterious ways. It does seem rather impractical for the Celestials to have imprisoned the Dreaming Celestial in such a seismically active area, though.

A more important question is whether Neil Gaiman’s treatment of Sprite fits Jack Kirby’s original conception of the character. Kirby seems to allude to Shakespeare’s Puck, but Sprite also fits into the long tradition of boy pranksters in comics and cartoon art that encompasses the Katzenjammer Kids and Bart Simpson. Such characters are troublesome, but certainly not evil, and their rebelliousness against authority is appealing. “Kirby’s Margo Damian observes about Sprite, “He’s only a boy! Even young Eternals love to play pranks!” (Kirby p. 173).

Still, I can see from Sprite’s initial appearances in the Kirby series why Gaiman took the character in the direction that he chose. Sprite’s pranks are rather mean, inconsiderate, and even dangerous (see Kirby pgs. 147-149). When Ikaris punishes Sprite by spanking him, Sprite implies he will take revenge (Kirby pgs. 172-173). One Eternal even says, “That little fool, Sprite, will cause a war someday” (Kirby p. 150). Zuras comments, “the youth ignore all but their youth!!” (Kirby, p. 150), a remark which, in hindsight, takes on ominous implications considering Sprite’s behavior in the Gaiman series. It seems to me that Kirby’s version of sprite even vaguely resembles a boyish Loki.

It’s Sprite’s later appearance in the Kirby series that indicates that there may be more to Sprite than the “brat” Makkari claims he is (Kirby p. 173). While most other Eternals have merged into a Uni-Mind, Sprite learns that the Deviants are about to attack the Celestial mothership. I get the impression that the imminent danger has shaken Sprite out of his usual childish misbehavior and forced him to behave like a mature adult. “Oh, stupid Sprite–! Monarch of muddle-heads! You’ve seen too much! The fate of the Earth has been thrust into your quaking lap! Something must be done!” the frightened Sprite tells himself (Kirby p. 260). Sprite goes to the long-exiled Eternal known as the Forgotten One and asks him for help. One could argue that Sprite is merely trying to save his own skin, since he obviously fears that the Celestials might again devastate the Earth in retaliation for a Deviant attack. But it seems to me that Kirby portrays Sprite as genuinely impressed by the Forgotten One’s heroic qualities: “I call upon you for your strength. . .and one unselfish universal act. . .” (Kirby p. 262). (It seems that the outwardly childlike Sprite always spoke in an “adult” manner.)

The original Eternals series was canceled before Kirby could bring either Sprite or the Forgotten One back, so we will never know what he intended to do next with these characters. My hypothesis is that Kirby thought that Sprite was capable of redemption, and that perhaps he intended Sprite to become the Forgotten One’s sidekick when the latter presumably eventually returned to Earth as an agent of the Celestials. Neil Gaiman has taken Sprite in an intriguing direction, but I suspect that this represents Gaiman’s most significant deviation from what I guess were Kirby’s intentions for his Eternals characters.

In a dream Thena recalls a battle in which she single-handedly defeated a hundred thousand Deviant warriors (Gaiman issue 4 p. 21). The sequence reminds me of how much and how quickly Jack Kirby’s concept of superheroines evolved in a decade and a half. In the early Fantastic Four Susan Storm’s super-powers–invisibility and projecting force fields– seemed designed for hiding and shielding her from danger; her male FF partners took much more active roles in combat. The Wasp fired her sting, and Marvel Girl and the Scarlet Witch stood and gestured to use their powers; none of them grappled hand to hand with their adversaries. Big Barda, who debuted in Kirby’s Mister Miracle in 1971, initially seemed like a caricature of a woman warrior, but soon evolved into a more appealing, three-dimensional personality while remaining a formidable fighter. With Thena and Sersi in Eternals in 1976, Kirby created women warriors who were both fierce and feminine.

Chris Claremont rightly gets credit for reimagining the superheroine as the formidable equal of the male superhero in X-Men and other titles in the latter half of the 1970s, but it’s important to note that Jack Kirby was simultaneously moving in the same direction. Though they were from different generations, both Claremont and Kirby were responding to the emerging feminist zeitgeist.

Here’s another problem posed in attempting to deal with “Marvel time,” which moves more slowly than real time. Thena has a son who seems not much younger than Reed and Susan Richards’ son Franklin. But Franklin was born in 1968 in real time, while Joey was presumably born since Thena appeared in New Eternals: Apocalypse Now in 2000. All right, so maybe Sprite used the Dreaming Celestial’s power to alter reality to speed up Joey’s aging process, or maybe even to create him, and make Thena and her husband think he was born and grew normally. (I’m going to expect a pile of No-Prizes once I’ve finished solving all the continuity conundrums in these Eternals essays.)

Waking from her dream, Thena finds herself in her Eternal costume. She tells the confused Joey that “It’s still Momma,” but the omniscient narrator informs us that “And even as she says it, she knows it isn’t true” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 23). (By the way, it’s commendable that Gaiman employs third person narration in captions, which is a classic Marvel tradition but had fallen from favor in recent years.) Notice how John Romita, Jr. draws Thena holding her son up by the back of his shirt. This is hardly the way that a loving mother would carry her child: “Momma” has indeed changed. I disagree with what Gaiman and Romita are hinting here about the Eternals’ attitudes towards humans, but I will return to this subject later.

At the end of issue 4 Ikaris teams up with Thena to stop the Deviants from awakening the Dreaming Celestial, and at the beginning of issue 5 the Deviants Morjak and Gelt capture Sprite. Obviously in transforming himself into an ordinary human, Sprite badly blundered in not anticipating that he might need his superpowers in a circumstance like this. Another Eternal who was long thought dead, Ajak, acts as Campbellian “herald” to the Eternals” leader Zuras, who has been reduced to a mad derelict. Ajak issues the “call to adventure” to Zuras, who awakens to his true identity.

Ajak says that he sent Morjak and Gelt after Ikaris, thinking Ikaris would be safer in the “regeneration chamber” in Olympia. I don’t understand why Ajak couldn’t have just told Ikaris to lie low, or how much “safer” Ikaris really was considering that Ajak admits that he had those Deviants kill him. Ajak confesses that he made mistakes; yes, I’d agree with that.

Then Ajak tells Zuras, “Ikaris is fully reactivated. The other four”–Makkari, Sersi, Thena and Druig–“will not reactivate completely until they go though a death and rebuild, but they are no longer human” (Gaiman issue 5, p. 6). By the end of Gaiman’s series, Ikaris is the only Eternal who has gone through death and rebuilding. What does this mean about the others? They have their powers back, and Zuras and Ajak seem to have their full memories back. Does this mean that, except for Ikaris, the others can be killed, albeit with great difficulty, and then Olympia’s technology will resurrect them and restore them to full Eternal status?

Ajak warns that if the Dreaming Celestial wakes, then the “Horde” will come and wipe out all life, not just on Earth, but in “this part of the galaxy” (Gaiman issue 5 p. 6). This time the word “Horde” is not mistakenly being used to refer to a Celestial Host, nor is this horde to be confused with the Horde from Marvel’s 1980s cult series Strikeforce: Morituri, which is not set in the Marvel Universe and which was co-created by Peter Gillis, one of the authors of the second Eternals series. The Dreaming Celestial later describes the Horde as “the locusts of the universe” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 33). Kirby indicated that Arishem could use a “formula” imprinted on his hand to destroy the Earth. (This is reminiscent of the “anti-life formula” in Kirby’s Fourth World books.) Is Gaiman implying that the Dreaming Celestial isn’t powerful enough to destroy the Earth by himself, and needs to call in the Horde to do it for him?

Then again, Gaiman’s series never explicitly states that the Dreaming Celestial summoned the Horde. Maybe the Horde is used by the other Celestials as a fail-safe: if the Dreaming Celestial should wake then they will wipe out all life in his subgalactic vicinity, thus making sure that he is destroyed.

In a scene that follows, Druig uses his powers to perpetrate a massacre, which he plans to blame on a minority group as part of his plan to take control of the nation of Vorozheika. One of his captives calls, “Hail Druig!” (Gaiman issue 5 p. 13), which should remind readers of “Heil Hitler!”

Last week I observed that there is a trend in pop culture of supervillains succeeding in taking over countries. Several hours after posting last week’s column, I found myself watching an episode of Warners Animation’s Pinky and the Brain on Toon Disney, in which the Brain, mouse turned megavillain, provides me with further evidence by taking over a South Pacific island and renaming it “Brainania.” (From the vantage point of 2007, it strikes me that this 1990s animated series seems unwittingly to foreshadow the partnership of our current President and Vice President: Bushy and the Chene, if you will.)

Morjak tells his captive, Mark Curry, that the Second Host of the Celestials ate Deviants; that Ajak, who can communicate with the Celestials, told the Deviants this; and that the Dreaming Celestial was imprisoned for protesting the devouring of the Deviants (Gaiman issue 5 p. 16).

Readers should be wary of believing this. For one thing, later on, Mark Curry asks the Dreaming Celestial why the other Celestials put him “to sleep,” and the Dreaming Celestial says that Curry “wouldn’t understand” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 32). If the Dreaming Celestial was punished for trying to prevent the Deviants from being eaten, why wouldn’t Mark understand that? No, Gaiman appears to be signaling that the Dreaming Celestial’s offense was something different, something that humans–and Eternals–cannot comprehend. Besides, Kirby did not show the Second Host eating Deviants; rather, Kirby seemed to indicate that the Second Host remained aboard their mothership and struck down the Deviants from above. Moreover, if the Celestials regarded the Deviants as “delicacies,” why didn’t they take the Deviants into space with them, in case they get the munchies during those long interstellar journeys?

The main reason that I object to the idea that the Celestials eat Deviants is that it diminishes what should be the godlike grandeur of the “space gods.” The key to Kirby’s Celestials is their inscrutability. Their reasoning is beyond mortal comprehension; we do not know what they want or what they think. If they gobble up Deviants, who, remember, are closely related to ordinary humans like us, then the Celestials’ motives are all too clear: they are evil beings who regard their sentient creations as if they were livestock bred for the dinner table. The Eternals would therefore be evil themselves for serving such masters. Besides, it diminishes the Celestials’ godlike status even to suggest that they eat. We should not even be certain that the Celestials have physical forms beneath that armor: Kirby never let us see a Celestial without his helmet.

Notice that Morjak says that the Deviants “were the food of the gods” and that Celestials considered a Deviant soul to be a “delicacy” (Gaiman issue 5., p. 16). Morjak doesn’t seem appalled by this; he appears to be speaking with pride. That’s the key to recognizing that Morjak’s speech to Curry is merely self-aggrandizing fantasy. The Deviants want to believe that the Dreaming Celestial, who, like them, rebelled against the Second Host, is their benefactor. But notice that once the Dreaming Celestial wakes, he shows no interest in the Deviants whatsoever, not even as potential snack food. As for Morjak’s claiming that Ajak told the Deviants about this, well, this is hearsay, which would be inadmissible in court. Maybe Morjak genuinely believes Ajak told a Deviant this, but that could be an unfounded rumor. Or perhaps Morjak is just lying to Mark.

Ikaris and Thena, in Eternal costumes, visit Sersi, who says, “I get it. You’re super heroes. This is like an arrest. I’ll be dragged to a secret government CIA torture camp until I sign your frickin’ loyalty pledge” (Gaiman issue 5 p. 17). How interesting that, thanks to Marvel’s Civil War, Sersi now assumes that superheroes work as enforcers for the United States government. Moreover, isn’t it quite possible that by having Sersi talk about a “loyalty pledge,” Gaiman wants to remind us yet again about Civil War‘s superhero registration act? And hey, in Civil War, superheroes who refused to register did get locked up in a secret prison.

Only a few pages later, Sersi’s friend Abigail is watching the reality TV show America’s Next Super Hero, and hears its host say that “If you’re a super hero, doing the right thing is the important thing to do. The right thing.” Like saving lives? Like fighting thieves and murderers? The host continues, “Like getting registered.” And then he welcomes back Grace Darling, the super-powered contestant who had earlier defied “legal waivers” to help fight the terrorists at the Vorozheikan party. Apparently she has been pressured into knuckling under. “This is such a dumb show,” Abigail significantly comments (Gaiman issue 5 p. 21).

As the fifth issue comes to an end, Morjak and Galt utilize Mark Curry’s Eternal powers to free the Dreaming Celestial from his underground tomb. Then the two Deviants wait for sunrise, when the Dreaming Celestial, like dreamers in general, will awake. And you readers must wait a week for the sixth and, I hope, final installment of my critique of Neil Gaiman’s Eternals.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

In the October 9, 2007 edition of Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week, you can read my report on the New Yorker Festival’s “Superheroes” panel, whose participants included Tim Kring, creator of TV’s Heroes; novelist Jonathan Lethem, writer of Marvel’s revival of Omega the Unknown; Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy; and Grant Morrison, writer for Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Flash, JLA, Superman, X-Men and many more superhero comics.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Last Sunday I was watching Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on Turner Classic Movies, and recalled that Jack Kirby did a comics adaptation of this movie, and an ongoing series based on it, during the same period that he was writing and drawing The Eternals at Marvel. And both 2001 and The Eternals deal with mysterious godlike aliens who intervene in the course of human evolution.

Over the last several weeks I have been undertaking a close analysis of Neil Gaiman’s recent revival of Eternals. I pick up the story at the party that Sersi organized at the Vorozheikan consulate (not embassy), as Thena, in her human identity as Dr. Thena Eliot, arrives with her husband Thomas, who edits “famous authors” (Gaiman Eternals issue 2 p. 13). Since Thena is based on Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, it is appropriate that she should marry someone who works with literature. (This relationship also reminds me of the seemingly unlikely but decidedly charming liaison between Sersi and the academic Dr. Samuel Holden in the first two Eternals series.)

So Thena’s husband is Thomas Eliot, who works in publishing. Would his middle name be Stearns, like that of T. S. Eliot, the great poet who worked at the British publishing firm Faber & Faber?

Just as Sersi characteristically dresses in green in Gaiman’s series, as if remembering her Kirby costume, Thena arrives at the party in a gold-colored gown, evoking the colors of her costume from the original Eternals series.

Druig, the Vorozheikan Deputy Prime Minister, has secretly arranged for terrorists to invade the party and take hostages. The terrorists shoot Thena’s husband dead when he stumbles upon them. Then the terrorists confront the rest of the party guests.

Some of the contestants from the reality show America’s Next Super Hero are present, but one of them, Tantrum, says “we’re not allowed” to intervene: “We signed these legal waivers. If we use our powers without authorization, we’re out of the show” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 18). This may be another of the series’ comments on the current state of the superhero genre. A superhero traditionally follows the dictates of his conscience, and acts as an individual, or as a member of a relatively small team. But for Tantrum and company, their superhero careers are inextricably linked with show business. Tantrum won’t stop the terrorists and potentially save lives because he doesn’t want to be dropped from the TV show. The fact that the contestants are obliged by “legal waivers” not to use their powers “without authorization” (By whom? The government? The TV network?) also suggests the downside of putting superheroes under government control, as happened at the end of Marvel’s Civil War series.

Meanwhile, two Deviants, Morjak and Gelt, who are holding Ikaris naked and captive, in what resembles a crucifixion pose (Gaiman issue 2 p. 19), finally succeed in finding a way to destroy him, through what looks like disintegration.

With Ikaris’s demise this first phase of the series reaches a critical point: Sersi, Mark Curry and Thena are also in danger of being killed. These four Eternals have sunk to a low point, indeed.

It is then that the sheer stress of facing death finally forces the reluctant Mark Curry over the Campbellian threshold, in more ways than one. First, his Eternal telepathic abilities activate, and his eyes go blank, as if they were glowing, as an outward sign (Gaiman issue 2 p. 21, panel 3). Curry hesitatingly takes a major step in his budding relationship with Sersi by telepathically telling her, “I think I–I think I may possibly love you” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 22). Finally, at the point of his coming face to face with death, as the terrorists shoot at Curry and the woman he loves, Makkari’s principal Eternal superpower–super-speed–kicks in. As he reacts at superhuman speed, the bullets appear to slow down and stop.

Once again Gaiman reminds us of one of his characteristic themes by having Mark liken his situation to “some kind of dream” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 22), but the pain he feels when he touches the bullet provides evidence that it is real.

Then he realizes that “I’m not dressed for this” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 23). Perhaps he means that ordinary clothing cannot withstand the stresses of moving at super-speed. (Were this a Silver Age Flash comic, an editor’s note would inform us that the heat of friction at such speed would burn ordinary clothing off.)

Perhaps there is a second meaning to “not” being “dressed for this.” Maybe Curry is coming close to realizing that he should be operating in his Makkari costume and identity. Indeed, as he thinks about the kind of costume he should be wearing, we see it materialize about him. Is he imagining this? Or are his Eternal powers somehow bringing the costume partly into being?

Lately I’ve been wondering about the degree to which Kirby’s Eternals fit Dr. Peter Coogan’s definition of the superhero (see “Comics in Context” #162). Dr. Coogan contended that a superhero typically possesses powers, identity (ordinarily meaning a costumed identity that is separate from his everyday self), and mission (meaning an ongoing mission, usually to fight injustice and protect the innocent, not simply resolving a temporary problem). In the original Kirby series, the Eternals certainly had super-powers, but they did not have dual identities, except for Ikaris’s short-lived guise of “Ike Harris.” Moreover, although they responded when Deviants made trouble, the Eternals otherwise seemed to lack a sense of mission, except for Ajak, though his service to the Celestials doesn’t qualify as combating evil. In the Kirby stories, Sersi’s “mission,” if you could call it that, was having a good time, and she considered fighting Deviants necessary interruptions in her chosen life of hedonism.

The Gaiman series more clearly presents the principal Eternals as superheroes. Gaiman gives them human identities and roles in human society, so that their identities as Eternals more closely resemble the costumed identities of conventional superheroes. “Mark Curry” is a much more fully realized human identity for Makkari than “Ike Harris” was for Ikaris in the Kirby series.

Furthermore, Gaiman later explicitly states that the Eternals have a mission: their leader Zuras says that “We preserve life, We defend humanity. We will protect the Earth, until the Celestials decide that the Earth is done” (Gaiman issue 7 p. 10). Indeed, one of Sprite’s major sins is to forsake this mission for which the Celestials seemingly intended the Eternals.

So Mark Curry briefly perceives his own costumed identity. Initially he resorts to his default setting, the state of denial: “I’m hallucinating.” But he immediately corrects himself and crosses the threshold, accepting the truth about himself: “I’m not hallucinating. It’s happening. I’m moving at hyperspeed. . . ” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 24).

It’s rather surprising that Jack Kirby, creator or co-creator of a number of super-speedsters (including Quicksilver and the New Gods’ Fastbak) was rather uninventive in the uses to which Makkari put his super-speed in the original Eternals series. Kirby obviously wasn’t a reader of Silver Age Flash comics.

So it’s very rewarding to see how thoroughly Neil Gaiman has thought out what it would be like to move at super-speed, as he demonstrates in the opening pages of his third Eternals issue. I can’t recall ever previously reading a superspeedster story that makes use of the “red shift” and “blue shift” in the electromagnetic spectrum to indicate movement (Gaiman issue 3 p. 3, panel 1).

In the course of his super-fast battle with the terrorists, Mark explains that he “must have crashed into the gunmen at the speed of a racing car. . . .It was a miracle that no bones were broken, Mine, I mean. They weren’t so lucky” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 4). This makes me wonder about all those Silver Age tales with a racing Flash socking Captain Cold or the Mirror Master: The Flash would have had to slow down just before hitting them or he would have shattered his hand–and their jaws.

Two of the superhero reality show contestants watch the melee. One of them, Grace, wants to intervene, despite the legal waivers that bind them. Another contestant refuses, making his priority clear: “I’m going to be a star.” (Notice: his choice mirrors that of Sprite.) To her credit, Grace declares, “The show be damned” and goes into action against the terrorists (Gaiman issue 3 p. 4). Readers should recall at this point that Gaiman has established that although Grace is physically only seventeen, she was born in the 1820s (Gaiman issue 2 p. 10). Hence she is not as much a part of 21st century American culture as her fellow contestants are.

Narrating the battle and its aftermath, Mark says that “if I have super-speed, then I have to become a registered super hero, and I don’t really want to be a hero, registered or otherwise” (Gaiman, issue 3, p. 5). So Mark still hasn’t crossed his final threshold: emerging from his rut of an existence to become a superhero. Moreover, he still clearly does not understand or accept that being an Eternal means more than being a conventional superhero.

But notice that he immediately thinks that he has to become a “registered superhero.” Civil War has so redefined the status of superheroes in Marvel’s America that Mark doesn’t think superheroes–who should be symbols of individual liberty and conscience– have any other option than to report to the government.

“So I didn’t know what to say,” Mark continues, “But then there’s an amplified metal voice, and it says. . . .” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 5). Right on cue, it is Iron Man, the foremost advocate of superhero registration in the Civil War series and its tie-ins, and Gaiman seems to be suggesting that if Mark doesn’t know what to “say” about superhero registration, Iron Man will tell him.

When I started reading Iron Man stories back in the Silver Age, Iron Man–as Tony Stark–was the innocent target of government investigations. I recall how in the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War, Stark gave up making munitions, and how during the “Armor Wars” storytline of the 1980s Iron Man even defied the law in order to destroy what one might call battlesuits of mass destruction that had fallen into dangerous hands. So I find it hard to accept the Iron Man/Tony Stark of Civil War, who has become the spokesman for a federal government seeking to maximize its control over the nation’s superheroes.

Significantly, Iron Man smashes in through a window and then, not bothering to go back the way he came, exits by smashing a hole in the ceiling. He is government authority acting like the proverbial bull in the china shop. You may also notice that he doesn’t bother to inquire (unless it was between panels) if anyone is hurt. No, it’s not like the Iron Man who was once my favorite Marvel hero.

It appears that the crisis situation likewise forced Sersi over the threshold: Mark recalls that “I saw a knife turn into a flower” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 5), indicating that Sersi, perhaps unconsciously, used her psionic power to rearrange the atomic structure of matter.

Gaiman then reveals that so far in issue 3, Mark has been narrating his story to Sprite. Since Ikaris had told him that Sprite was also an Eternal, Curry sought him out. Mark tells Sprite that now that the crisis is over, he can no longer move at super-speed. Curry says that when he was at the “embassy” (Consulate!), he felt “as if I became part of some huge greater mind” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 7). This indicates that, in the face of extreme danger, Makkari, Sersi, Thena, and, as we learn later, Druig, had subconsciously linked together telepathically into a mini-version of the Eternals’ collective consciousness, the Uni-Mind. But perhaps another reason that Curry can’t use super-speed is that he still doesn’t want to be a “hero” or Eternal, and has therefore subconsciously blocked his super-powers. He has crossed an early Campbellian threshold by deciding to actively investigate his possible Eternal background, and even traveled to a sort of enchanted realm–California–but metaphorically Curry sttill has a long way to go.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, one of the subjects of Gaiman’s Eternals is religion, at least as a metaphor. In the next scene, in which Morjak and Gelt drop their human disguises and assume their true Deviant forms, Gaiman points to the dark side of religious faith: religious fanaticism, which is all too relevant a theme in the early 21st century. The warping of religion into something destructive was a theme of the Kirby Eternals series, through “Purity Time,” and in Peter B. Gillis’s Eternals Vol. 2, in which the principal villain was the Deviant priestlord Ghaur.

Morjak and Gelt worship the Dreaming Celestial, who has also been called the Black Celestial, the Great Renegade, and Tiamut in past stories.

The Deviants credit the Dreaming Celestial with creating their race. Actually, in What If Vol. 1 #23 (October 1980) a backup story (which was canonical, not a “what if”) established that the Celestial known as Ziran the Tester created Earth’s Deviants. So perhaps the Deviants are wrong. But it makes sense that they–or their ancestors–decided that the Dreaming Celestial created them, because the Deviants look upon themselves as outsiders and rebels, just as the Dreaming Celestial was with regard to the Celestials’ Second Host.

Morjak and Gelt’s error about who created the Deviants should remind us that we should not accept anything that they say about the Dreaming Celestial’s past as absolute truth. What they and the other Deviants say about the Dreaming Celestial is what they want to believe about him. For example, Morjak and Gelt state that the Dreaming Celestial was “the greatest of all the Celestials.” But this seems unlikely: Jack Kirby seems to have intended the “One above All,” who remained in a starship orbiting the Earth, to have been superior to any of the Celestials who descended to the planet. The Celestial known as Exitar the Exterminator, whose size dwarfs Arishem’s, and who was introduced in Thor #387 (January 1988), also appears to be “greater” than the Dreaming Celestial.

Though the Deviants believe that the Second Host punished the Dreaming Celestial for creating their race, this is unlikely. It is standard operating procedure for the Celestials to create Deviant races in their genetic experiments on various planets: for example, the shapeshifting Skrulls are an extraterrestrial race of Deviants (see The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry).

Rereading the Kirby Eternals in its new hardcover collected edition, I was surprised to realize how little he tells us about the Dreaming Celestial in it; Kirby never even calls him the Dreaming Celestial or gives him any other name. In the original Eternals series the Dreaming Celestial only appears on two pages (Kirby Eternals hardcover, pgs. 344-345). We see that the Dreaming Celestial wore golden armor, suggesting that he once shone like Lucifer. Kirby tells the readers that this golden Celestial was a member of the Second Host that visited Earth when he committed some mysterious, unknown act. The rest of the Second Host responded by utilizing a mighty weapon to destroy him. Kirby’s seems to use this outcast Celestial merely as a set-up for his storyline in which Druig attempts to locate this Celestial weapon. As far as the original Eternals series is concerned, the golden Celestial was dead.

It was the second Eternals series, from 1985-1986, and Walter Simonson, who wrote its concluding issues, that revealed that Kirby’s outcast Celestial was still alive, named him the Dreaming Celestial, and established that he was imprisoned, sleeping, beneath a mountain range in California. Should the Dreaming Celestial be awakened, catastrophe would ensue; either the Dreaming Celestial would perpetrate havoc of some kind, or the other Celestials would return to Earth to wage a battle against him that could cause incredible devastation.

In the original series Kirby had the Deviant warlord Kro pose as the devil by using his shapechanging powers to grow horns on his head. But, as reconceived in the second Eternals series, it is the Dreaming Celestial who is the true counterpart to Satan in the Eternals mythos. Like Lucifer, he once shone with light, but he rebelled against the “space gods” and was cast deep underground, the traditional location of hell: his shining golden armor turned black. Sleeping in a deathlike coma beneath the mountains, the Dreaming Celestial is like a combination of Dante’s brobdingnagian Satan, imprisoned, nearly immobile, at the bottom of the pit of hell, and Cthulhu or another of H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional monstrous deities, now imprisoned but awaiting a time when they will break free and reconquer the Earth.

In Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), a cult chants the line “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” Gaiman’s Morjak and Gelt refer to “our dead lord dreaming” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 10).

Considering Gaiman’s interest in Lovecraft’s work, as demonstrated by short stories in his collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things, it should be no surprise that he chose to use the Dreaming Celestial in his Eternals series.

Iron Man remembers Sersi from her stint as a member of the Avengers. Since the Avengers is such a high profile superhero team on Marvel-Earth, one might think that Sersi would have been recognized as a former Avenger by somebody–any member of the general public–long before this. Did Sprite wipe out everybody else’s memory of Sersi’s Avengers membership but somehow overlook Iron Man?

Mind you, it’s also odd that Sersi, who prefers to pursue a life of pleasure, would ever have chosen to become a full-time Avenger in the first place. But if I have to rationalize this, since Eternals lead such long lives, I suppose she might have decided to try being a full-time superhero for a while as a change of pace.

Iron Man is supposedly Sersi’s friend and colleague. In fact, it’s likely that as Tony Stark he would have known Sersi as the reigning hostess of Manhattan parties long before she went public as an Eternal. But rather than express any delight in seeing her again, Iron Man immediately tells her “to get registered” as a superhero or “face any potential consequences,” a not particularly veiled threat (Gaiman issue 3 p. 13). Suffering from Sprite-induced amnesia, Sersi denies having super-powers or ever being in the Avengers. You might think that it would occur to Iron Man that she has lost her memory and to show concern for her, but no, he decides that she’s just putting on an act to avoid registration.

I really liked Iron Man for decades, and as recently as when Kurt Busiek was writing his series. But that was before Civil War.

The formation of the Uni-Mind awakened Druig’s psychic ability to manipulate minds. Mark Curry can no longer access his briefly reawakened super-speed, perhaps because he is not yet willing to accept his super-powers and Eternal identity. In contrast, Druig wants power and embraces it: he retains his reactivated mental powers and uses them to kill his treacherous associate Prykrish. Notice how Druig’s eyes glow when he uses his powers. In the original series Jack Kirby established that the Eternals’ powers manifested themselves through their eyes.

Held captive by the terrorists, anguished over the murder of her husband, and concerned for her missing son, Thena is still undergoing the stress that played a role in activating her fellow Eternals’ powers at the party. Again, Thena was inspired by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Gaiman here establishes that Thena, as an Eternal, possesses superhuman intelligence as her distinctive super-power. I like the way he does this: as this power reasserts itself, the narrator tells us that Thena “is used to being smart. But her head is changing–strategies and tactics present themselves, are rejected or accepted faster than she can cope with on a conscious level” (Gaiman issue 3, p. 16). Compared with a normal human mind, Thena’s is becoming more like a computer: she has the “computer-like mind” that Legion of Super Heroes stories have long told us was Brainiac 5’s super-power.

Athena was also the Greek goddess of war. So that’s why, as Thena’s Eternal abilities resurface, she discovers that “she is a weapon” (Gaiman issue 3, p. 17). She hurls a plate at one of her captors as if it were a discus, an object that originated in ancient Greece.

Thena calls Iron Man for help, and when he arrives, he says “I don’t know what to say” about the death of his employee’s husband. When Thena asks him if he knows “who’s looking after my son,” Iron Man replies, “I don’t. I should have checked.” This armored Avenger seems to have let his capacity for human empathy grow rusty. Quietly angry, Thena observes that “The rules don’t apply to you,” which is a more ironic comment than perhaps she realizes, since Iron Man has been busily enforcing the superhero registration rule. Iron Man replies, “Thena. . .I said I was sorry” (Gaiman issue 3, p. 21). Actually, he hadn’t, but he’s saying it now, and that’s a good first step.

Then on the final page of the third issue, the scene shifts to Antarctica, where we find Ikaris’s body intact, and a voice, presumably that of a computer, states, “Ikaris complete. Prepare to reactivate” (Gaiman issue 3, p. 22). In the opening pages of the next issue Ikaris is indeed returned to life, and he finds himself in the Eternals’ city of Olympia. Having been “crucified” and killed, Ikaris has now undergone resurrection and finds himself in a science fiction equivalent of heaven, the home of the Eternals.

Jack Kirby set Olympia atop or near Mount Olympus, in Greece, which, according to Greek myths, was the home of the gods. I can see why Gaiman decided to move it: in an age of air travel and spy satellites, it would be impossible to keep a city atop a mountain in Greece secret. I assume that mountain climbers have been scaling Mount Olympus for centuries.

So Gaiman has moved Olympia to Antarctica, where human visitors are far less likely to intrude. Since Gaiman establishes that Olympia is apparently run by a computer system, perhaps this artificial intelligence has the ability to move the entire city from place to place. Or maybe Sprite, using the Dreaming Celestial’s power, moved it there to put the city out of the way. So, if Ikaris and Druig are Polar Eternals, I suppose that the Olympian Eternals are now South Polar Eternals.

Olympia’s new polar location is inevitably reminiscent of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Even Ikaris’s resurrection in an Antarctic chamber reminds me of Superman’s return to life within a “regeneration matrix” in his Fortress in the course of the 1990s “Death of Superman” storyline.

So now we have an all-purpose explanation for the resurrection of Eternals, like Zuras and Ajak, who were believed to be dead. Even if an Eternal dies far away from Antarctica, Eternal technology can retrieve his remains and reconstruct and reanimate them. So presumably the Forgotten One, a. k. a. Gilgamesh, who was supposedly killed in the “Avengers: The Crossing” storyline, is still alive somewhere out there.

A few pages after this Olympia sequence, Druig states that he has “a country to take over” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 5). It used to be that supervillains tried to take over countries, or even the world, and failed. But the supervillain actually controlling a nation is an increasingly common phenomenon. Doctor Doom, as monarch of Latveria, was the pioneer, and has been followed by Magneto with Genosha, Lex Luthor becoming President of the United States, and even the Master being elected Prime Minister of Great Britain in this year’s series of Doctor Who.

On the following page (Gaiman issue 4 p. 5) artist John Romita, Jr. draws Sersi wearing a string bikini. Jack Kirby never did this. This is an unquestionable improvement over the original series.

Sersi, still refusing to believe she has super-powers, playfully tries to turn a cat into a dragon, and to her horror, succeeds. Mind you, in terms of personality, there isn’t that much difference between dragons and many cats that I’ve met.

On a Campbellian hero’s journey, the protagonist often has a mentor or guide. I believe that various stories also feature what we could call the false mentor, who seeks to lead the protagonist astray. Mark Curry has turned to Sprite for guidance in solving the mystery of his true origin. The fact that Sprite, though he has lived for a million years, looks like an eleven-year-old child, rather than like the wise older man who usually fills the role of the hero’s guide, may be a sign that Sprite is a false mentor.

Sprite has always been characterized as a trickster, and tricksters come in many varieties: good (Figaro, Bugs Bunny, Spider-Man), morally ambiguous (like Star Trek‘s Q), and downright evil (like the Joker). Neil Gaiman wrote an entire novel about tricksters, Anansi Boys, which this column has analyzed at great length (starting with “Comics in Context” #105). Anansi Boys‘ protagonist, Charlie, gains the abilities of a trickster deity while becoming genuinely heroic. Sprite proves to be the primary villain of Gaiman’s Eternals.

Acting as false mentor, Sprite tricks Mark Curry into crossing an ominous threshold: Sprite persuades Curry to touch a black rock that provides them entrance to the underground prison of the Dreaming Celestial (whose armor, remember, is black like the rock). Of course, this is a symbolic descent into the underworld, especially considering that the Dreaming Celestial is the Eternals mythos’s counterpart of Satan.

Then Sprite manipulates Curry into trying to cross another threshold, a literal “barrier” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 7) which is likewise black. Curry hurls himself at this threshold but cannot breach it, and instead causes himself to start to “shut down,” as Sprite puts it. Instead of passing through a threshold and entering a world of new life, Curry, by following the false mentor’s guidance, has instead fallen victim to symbolic death.

Sprite explains that “as an Eternal, you’re hardwired not to be able to attack or harm a Celestial. . . You shut down if you try” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 8). Thena confirms this later in the series (Gaiman issue 6, p. 23). But the Eternals attacked Celestials in Thor #300 (October 1980) and in Eternals Vol. 2 #12 (September 1986).

Well, I suppose that in the case of the latter story, the Celestial in question was actually the Deviant Ghaur in Celestial form, so that might have made the difference. In Thor #300 the Uni-Mind’s unsuccessful attack on the Celestials caused the (temporary) death of Zuras, so perhaps Zuras somehow took the entire “shut down” effect upon himself. So here’s another case in which I can figure out how to reconcile revisionism with past continuity, but I wish the revisionism hadn’t occurred in the first place. So why didn’t the Celestials “hardwire” the Deviants not to attack them?

Meanwhile in Olympia, Ikaris symbolically crosses another threshold by thrusting his hand into what seems to be a waterfall. Water symbolically gives life, and Ikaris regains his full memories and thus his true identity (“I am Ikaris of the Eternals”), his full Eternal powers, and even his mission (“I was created to protect the Earth, and everything that moves upon it.”), thereby satisfying Dr. Coogan’s three requirements for being a superhero (Gaiman issue 4, p. 14). Ikaris’s literal resurrection and symbolic rebirth are now complete.

Dr. Coogan would surely be pleased that Sprite now engages in classic supervillain behavior: what The Incredibles termed “monologuing.”

But wait! Since when did Sprite, treated by Kirby and other writers as merely a juvenile prankster, become an archvillain? That is a question I will explore next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR OTHER PEOPLE

Last month I reviewed the exhibition “Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes” at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey (see “Comics in Context” #193). On Saturday night, October 13, at 7 PM, comics writers Danny Fingeroth, Tom DeFalco and Denny O’Neil, and Michael Uslan, an executive producer of the Batman live action movies and the forthcoming Spirit film, will be holding a panel discussion at the museum, thereby recreating the panel they did at the Smithsonian Institution last year. I recommend that those of you who live in the vicinity go see the exhibit and hear what these veterans of the superhero genre have to say.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson