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In the interview in the back of the hardcover collection of Neil Gaiman’s revival of Jack Kirby’s Eternals, Gaiman says, “One of my favorite things about this – which… takes advantage of… the nature of time in the Marvel Universe–is that in my story, the Third Host did indeed arrive; Arishem came down to judge. In 1976.”

First, as those of you who have been reading this column for the last two weeks may recall, Arishem came to judge Earth as a member of the Fourth Host of Celestials. More importantly, Neil Gaiman has a different understanding of “Marvel time” than I do.

Time passes much more slowly for Marvel’s fictional characters than it does in the real world. Otherwise, Peter Parker (alias Spider-Man), who was fifteen in his first appearance, published in 1962, would now be sixty. When I was active at Marvel in the 1980s, the rule was that in Marvel time it had been seven to ten years (depending on who you talked to) since the events of Fantastic Four #1, published in 1961. My impression is that John Byrne, a staunch defender of the “Marvel time” concept, would contend that no matter how much time has now passed since the publication of FF #1, it is still seven-to-ten years in Marvel time since the FF’s origin (see “Comics in Context” #25). I also have the impression that the current editorial team at Marvel, if they think about Marvel time much at all, may have now stretched the seven-to-ten years to as much as fifteen. This is a mistake (Should Spider-Man be thirty?), but that’s a subject for another day.

Had the original Eternals series by Jack Kirby been completely divorced from other known characters in the Marvel Universe, I would have no problem with the idea that it took place thirty-one years ago in Marvel time. But in the Kirby series two kids put together a robot simulacrum of the Hulk, and Sersi temporarily turns a student’s face into a replica of the Thing’s (Kirby Eternals collection p. 106). There is no way that in Marvel time the origins of the Hulk and the Thing occurred thirty-one years ago. Therefore, the Fourth Host had to arrive sometime within the last seven, ten or fifteen years of Marvel time, depending on your interpretation.

Ultimately, though, exactly when the Fourth Host arrived is a minor matter in the story: what is important is that they did, some years before Gaiman’s Eternals storyline begins. In the context of the series, it is Ikaris, who confesses that he has a faulty memory, who says it was “thirty years” since the Fourth Host came, so we can easily interpret this reference as a mistake on Ikaris’s part that nonetheless serves as a winking acknowledgment to the readers that Gaiman’s series marked the thirtieth anniversary of Jack Kirby’s original opus.

As for what happened after the Fourth Host landed, Ikaris admits that “I don’t really remember all of it after that,” but he does recall that the Fourth Host returned to outer space (“I guess you must have been okay,” Ikaris says, and, indeed, Arishem literally gave humanity a thumbs-up in Thor #300 in 1980), and thinks (correctly) that he “succeeded Zuras as the leader of the Eternals” (Gaiman Eternals issue 1 page 33).

Ordinarily I believe in strict adherence to Marvel continuity. But I also believe in not dragging more references to past continuity into a story than are necessary. Actually, Zuras died (or so we readers thought), and he was initially succeeded as the Eternals’ leader by his daughter Thena, before Ikaris succeeded her. But there is no need in the present storyline to go into that much detail, so Gaiman wisely leaves it out. Similarly, for the purposes of the new series, we do not need to know the circumstances under which the Fourth Host departed Earth.

Thus the injured Ikaris, alias “Ike Harris,” finished recounting the backstory of the Eternals to a medical student named Mark Curry, who has lost his memory of his true identity, the Eternal known as Makkari. Curry reacts with utter disbelief, pointing out that if the Fourth Host had landed, then their existence would be public knowledge. Back in the first issue of the second Eternals series, in 1985, writer Peter B. Gillis established that when the Fourth Host left Earth in Thor #300, they wiped out humanity’s memories of the Eternals, Deviants and Celestials, making a few exceptions, such as Sersi’s companion Dr. Samuel Holden. (In fact, Dr. Holden discovered that even when he told his students about the Eternals, Deviants and Celestials, they immediately forgot!) Arguably this violates Jack Kirby’s intentions, since he not only did numerous scenes in which humanity reacted to the colossal Celestials in their midst, but even did an issue in which Dr. Holden publicly revealed the existence of the Eternals and Deviants at New York’s City College (in Eternals Vol. 1 #6, 1976). But I expect that Gillis and Gaiman both believe that, now that Eternals is so explicitly set in the Marvel Universe, whose denizens are already well aware of the existence of superheroes and aliens, that the Eternals and Deviants can retain a certain mystery by operating out of public view.

Curry then demands to know why, if there were millions of Deviants before the coming of the Second Host, why they haven’t rebuilt their numbers to millions again. Gaiman never answers this question in the new series. In Iron Man Annual #6 (1983) the Eternals got rid of many Deviants, including their leader Brother Tode, by rearranging their atomic structures into a gigantic block which they transported into outer space. This was probably an effort by Marvel to reduce sharply the number of Deviants on Earth, but it still doesn’t explain why the Deviant population had not soared into millions.

Kirby provided a possible answer in the original series through the Deviants’ “Purity Time,” described as “an infamous ritual which never ends” (Kirby, p. 137).

Each Deviant is radically different genetically from the others. The Deviants nevertheless believe that this genetic variety must be kept within certain bounds. Through the endless “Purity Time,” any Deviant whose genetic deviations are judged to be too extreme is sentenced to be destroyed. The Deviants’ leader Brother Kro declared, “Killing serves a practical purpose here! It rids us of the unwanted” (Kirby p. 141). It is unclear what the Deviants’ standards for acceptable genetic variety is, but Kirby shows us that one Deviant, whom he called the Reject, was condemned because he looked exactly like a handsome normal human being. Since all other Deviants look grotesque, and look different from one another, then Kirby is showing us that their standards of racial purity make no sense (and by extension, that any standards of racial “purity” are nonsensical). The Deviants in power are simply venting their violent hatred and exercising their will to power by seemingly arbitrarily seeking out and executing scapegoats.

Deviants condemned in “Purity Time” are transported in “death wagons” (Kirby, p. 137). What happens to them? The Deviant warlord Kro points towards a structure emitting flame, like a gigantic oven (Kirby, p. 139). Kirby also makes reference to “Purity Time” as a “solution.” As in “the Final Solution”?

Lately much attention has been given to the role of Jewish-Americans, including Kirby, in creating and developing the superhero genre. (For example, Danny Fingeroth’s new book on the subject, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, will soon be available in bookstores.) On rereading the Kirby Eternals series, it’s obvious to me that “Purity Time” was inspired by the Holocaust.

Hence, it was a serious mistake when the second Eternals series purported that “Purity Time” did not execute “unwanted” Deviants after all. Instead, it contended that the Deviant priesthood placed the supposedly condemned into suspended animation, so that they could eventually serve as the priesthood’s private army. The people responsible for this reinterpretation of “Purity Time” didn’t understand Kirby’s Holocaust imagery at all.

So, if we follow Kirby’s original vision of “Purity Time,” arguably the Deviants, through their fanatical obsession with genetic “purity,” have ended up self-destructively restricting the size of their own population.

Later in Gaiman’s series, after Druig takes over the government of a former Soviet republic and causes the brutal murders of numerous people, the narration informs us that “Tomorrow they will announce that atrocities have been committed by. . who? Gypsies, perhaps, or homosexuals or Slavs. And he will have them rounded up. And it will be necessary to bring back the secret police. And without knowing why, he feels like this is a return to the good old days, the very old days” (Gaiman issue 5, p. 13). So perhaps Neil Gaiman did spot the Holocaust imagery in Kirby’s Eternals, and this is his own allusion to it.

Elsewhere in the Kirby series, the Eternals and human guests Margo Damian and Sam Holden form a group “Uni-Mind” by plunging into what appears to be a gigantic flame. Sersi tells Sam, “That flame is life, not death! It is life as you have never known it before!” (Kirby p. 212). This is another variation on the familiar death and rebirth motif, with the Uni-Mind serving as a kind of afterlife, a higher spiritual state beyond mortal existence. But it also strikes me now that the Uni-Mind “flame” is the opposite of the flame that rises from the “Purity Time” oven. As Kirby intended it, the fires of “Purity Time” bring annihilation, but the “flame” of the Uni-Mind brings a higher, transcendent form of life.

Curry asks Ikaris if Eternals could “interbreed with humans,” and Ikaris replies, “I guess so” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 35). At this point Ikaris is unable to recall that long ago he had a human son, also named Ikaris, for whom he built a flying device. After the younger Ikaris fell from the sky to his death, inspiring the myth of Icarus [sic], his father took the name “Ikaris” in his honor. (See Eternals Vol. 2 #5, February 1986, and here.) Curry points out that Ikaris claims that Eternals can also breed among themselves.

So, Curry asks, why are there still only a hundred Eternals? With their genetic immunity to illness and death, why hasn’t the Eternal population risen into the billions? Through interbreeding, Curry points out, “we’d all be Eternals now.”

This is another question that Gaiman raises without answering. In the original series Kirby wrote that “The Eternals bred few in number” (Kirby p. 11). Perhaps this suggests that it is quite rare for a mating between Eternals to produce Eternal offspring. It also appears, from such examples as Ikaris’s son in Eternals Vol. 2 and Thena’s son in the Gaiman series, that when Eternals interbreed with normal humans, their offspring are normal humans. My hypothesis is that this is all a result of the Celestials’ “intelligent design” of the Eternals. The Celestials did not want the Eternals to dominate Earth, and so they genetically designed the Eternals to prevent their numbers from rising significantly.

Curry accepts the fact that Ikaris is a superhuman; he simply does not accept Ikaris’s explanation for his powers: “If Spider-Man told me that he got his spider-powers from reading Chariots of the Gods, I guess I’d figure he was full of it too” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 35). Obviously Mark Curry is unaware of J. Michael Straczynski’s recent stories in Amazing Spider-Man asserting that Spider-Man’s powers are in part mystical in origin, and that he is the “totem” of a spider-like force.

This Curry-Ikaris scene serves as a transition into a section of the first issue in which Gaiman begins exploring what makes the Eternals different from the many superheroes who populate Marvel-Earth. One of the differences appears to be that, despite Straczynski, most superheroes’ powers are rooted in science; therefore Curry, a man of science, can believe in them. But the Eternals origins have religious overtones, since they claim to have been created by “space gods.”

We next see Ikaris in his hospital bed watching another of the seemingly dreadful American TV shows that Gaiman has devised for this series: America’s Next Super Hero (Gaiman issue 1 p. 36). I wonder if Neil Gaiman knew about Stan Lee’s reality TV series Who Wants to Be a Superhero? when he started work on this Eternals series. (Neil’s show has a “super hero house” a la Big Brother, whereas in Stan’s, the hero wannabes room together in their secret “lair.”) I rather like Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, which is not only entertainingly kitschy, but also, surprisingly, enforces moral standards for superhero conduct that contemporary comics often ignore (see “Comics in Context” #142).

Then again, the New Warriors, one of Marvel’s superhero teams, was appearing on a reality TV series at the time of the disaster which led to the events of Marvel’s Civil War series. Before that, Marvel’s new X-Force team, later renamed X-Statix, were primarily out to become rich and famous media celebrities, relegating fighting crime and saving innocents to secondary importance.

There should be an inspirational majesty to the superhero concept: the idea of a human being who achieves godlike status. I wonder if Gaiman is suggesting that the image of conventional superheroes is being overwhelmed by their status as commercial properties. So here are the contestants for America’s Next Super Hero–Tantrum, ZeeBee, Trucker, and others–who aren’t following the traditional origin path of going out of their own to battle evildoers, but are competing against each other on a tacky TV show. Janet Van Dyne, alias the Wasp, flies in to make an appearance. (So Stan presides over Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, and Jan appears on America’s Next Super Hero. Stan and Jan. Hmm.) Then we see Mister Fantastic doing a Public Service Announcement on behalf of reading. lowering himself with a kitschy catchphrase (“It’s fantastic!”). However, the contestants rave with praise not over these classic Marvel superheroes, but over Sprite, who, as far as they know, is only a TV star for “˜tweens. They’d rather be TV celebrities than champions of justice. Trucker says, “I am now officially the coolest kid in my school” because he’s going to meet Sprite. Shouldn’t he be more impressed that he’s working with a co-founder of the Avengers? Mind you, she seems to have sold out by appearing on this show.

(However, I like the fact that Mr. Fantastic is holding up a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, which is arguably a forebear of science fiction novels. According to Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the book’s title character, Lemuel Gulliver, is an early member of the League, making him a forerunner of today’s superheroes.)

In the interview in the back of the hardcover collection of his Eternals, Neil Gaiman says, “You know, you’ve got the sort of “˜Marvel Civil Warry’ stuff going on in the background, in a way that I hope won’t bug anybody who has no idea what this is but will actually be kind of fun for anybody who does.” Well, I know what this “Civil Warry” stuff is, and I’m bugged. I am no fan of Civil War and its repercussions, and I should think that Gaiman’s many readers who are not superhero fans might indeed be puzzled by his references to Civil War in Eternals. Aren’t superheroes traditionally supposed to act on their own or in small teams? So what’s all this about government registration of superheroes?

Indeed, I contend that the superhero is a metaphor for the freedom, power and potential for greatness within the individual. Clark Kent and Peter Parker are nobodies, swallowed up by contemporary urban society, who assert themselves as individuals by shifting into their superheroic identities. By the end of Civil War Marvel’s superheroes are instead forced into the roles of government servants.

I would like to think that decades from now, Neil Gaiman’s Eternals, as well as Sandman and 1602 and his other works in comics, will still be in print, whereas Civil War, like virtually every other Marvel and DC company-wide crossover series event, will have faded into obscurity. Decades hence new readers of the Gaiman Eternals may well need footnotes to explain the Civil War references.

So why did Gaiman put the Civil War references in Eternals? Did Marvel urge him to put them in, just as back in the 1970s Marvel allegedly pushed Kirby into putting Marvel Universe references into his Eternals?

In Gaiman’s case, though, I tend to think that if he worked Civil War connections into Eternals, he did so for thematic purposes.

In the episode of America’s Next Super Hero that is excerpted in this first issue, Jan tells a contestant, “You see, Grace, when you’re a government-registered super hero, you’ll need to record public service announcements, like this one,” whereupon we see Mr. Fantastic in his aforementioned PSA (Gaiman issue 1, pgs. 36-37). Some readers may recall when government registration of mutants was considered a Bad Thing in Marvel stories, a first step towards the dystopian “Days of Future Past.” How interesting that Jan says that once Grace has registered with the government, she will “need” to do public service announcements. One might have thought that recording PSAs was done on a volunteer basis. Just what else does the government require registered superheroes to do? (Hint: consult Avengers: The Initiative.)

Then, with her characteristically cheerful demeanor, Jan tells the contestants they are off to visit the set of It’s Just So Sprite, “where the lucky winner of today’s hero trial is going to record a PSA about getting registered” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 37). Oh, Jan, I always thought of you as an irreverent free spirit, not a smiling propagandist. And that phrase “hero trial” seems disconcertingly ominous.

Soon afterwards we see Sprite himself on television with Orlando, an America’s Next Super Hero contestant. Sprite is secretly an Eternal, so, like other Eternals, he should be a “protector of the Earth.” But, as we shall see, he has devoted his life to becoming a celebrity instead. On television Sprite reels off his show biz credits, and tells us, “I’m not a super hero. If I were, I’d get registered,” just like Orlando here (Gaiman issue 1, p. 38). So Sprite is a willing propagandist for the government as well.

To reinforce the point, Gaiman has Orlando tell us, “It’s just so Sprite. If you’re gonna be a super hero, get registered” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 37). Gaiman thus links the Civil War superhero registration program to Sprite and the mind-numbing mediocrity of his TV show. By linking the registration program to Sprite, Gaiman also links it to Sprite’s sinister agenda, which is later to be revealed.

The TV show excerpt ends with a close-up on Orlando as he concludes about superhero registration, “It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 37), which carries an implicit threat. This is a rather different slogan for a superhero than “With great power must come great responsibility,” isn’t it? And isn’t there something odd about Orlando’s wide-eyed look in that closing panel, a hint of innocent fanaticism, perhaps?

Come to think of it, doesn’t the fact that the government is putting PSAs about superhero registration on television imply that there must be an awful lot of superhumans out there? Is Gaiman suggesting that perhaps the Marvel Universe has too many super-people? Maybe the limited number of Eternals is another factor that sets them apart from other Marvel superheroes.

Ikaris tells Curry, “There are so many mysteries to solve, and I need you by my side” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 39). At this point Ikaris reminded me of Fox Mulder in The X-Files, a man who believes in and investigates the paranormal but is considered by many to be delusional. Maybe that’s one reason why Gaiman put in a reference to Roswell earlier on (Gaiman issue 1 p. 34). And hey, Mulder’s partner was Dana Scully, a medical doctor, and Mark Curry is a medical student.

But Curry instead injects Ikaris with a sedative to put him to sleep; perhaps Curry was also motivated, consciously or unconsciously, to keep him from talking any further. Considering Ikaris’s high level of “durability,” as The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe puts it, I’m surprised that a hypodermic needle could penetrate his thick skin. And wouldn’t it take a dose of sedative that was far higher than normal to knock Ikaris unconscious? (Think of the various past stories in which someone uses knockout gas on the Hulk and says that it’s a dose sufficient to put something like a herd of elephants to sleep.)

Gaiman will establish that Ikaris’s Eternal powers still aren’t back to full working order at this point. Nonetheless, the issue ends with two Deviants, whose names are later established as Morjak and Gelt, returning to capture Ikaris, and in issue two, Ikaris seems pretty damn resistant to the physical tortures they put him through.

Issue two is titled “Identity Crisis,” which is an obvious reference to Mark Curry’s questioning of his own identity, which reaches the crisis point when armed men who invade a party at the Vorozheikan embassy attempt to kill him. I wonder if it may also be an allusion to DC’s Identity Crisis series, which also concerned characters who lost and regained their memories (see “Comics in Context” #57, 58, 63, 67).

By the way, here’s something that I discovered when I was researching my forthcoming book, The Marvel Travel Guide to New York. Countries usually situate their official embassies in the capitals of other nations. Their official outposts in other cities are known as consulates. Hence, what Marvel calls the Latverian, Symkarian and Wakandan embassies in New York City (for the respective nations of Doctor Doom, Silver Sable, and the Black Panther) are really consulates. And the “Vorozheikan embassy” in New York City in Gaiman’s Eternals is probably a consulate, too.

Not responding to the Campbellian “call to adventure” always has bad repercussions. In issue 2 we learn that Mark Curry has not just refused to heed the “call” but has gone so far as to turn the “herald” who issued the “call,” Ikaris alias “Ike Harris,” over to two men who, as Curry’s superior points out, only “claimed to be doctors” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 8). In actuality, they are Deviants who are busily experimenting in efforts to kill their allegedly unkillable captive Ikaris. Curry’s active rejection of the “call” has imperiled Ikaris.

Ikaris desperately sends another “call,” a telepathic call for help, to Curry, calling him “Makkari,” but Curry fails to respond. This time his refusal to heed the call is immediately followed by catastrophe for himself: Curry’s superior tells him he is “suspended from working here,” and that a policeman “wishes to talk to you” about Harris’s disappearance from the hospital. (Gaiman issue 2 p. 8). In plainer words, the police suspect Curry is involved in the illegal abduction of Ike Harris (and, in a sense, they are correct) and intend to interrogate him. Already in a low position at this start of his “hero’s journey,” Curry has descended to an even lower one.

This issue contains many Campbellian “calls.” There is Ikaris’s telepathic call for help. Another “call” comes through his chance encounter with Sersi, another Eternal who is unaware of her Eternal identity. They are immediately attracted to each other, and we shall learn later that, in their Eternal identities, they are former lovers. Perhaps part of their attraction to each other now is that they subconsciously remember each other: “I feel like I’ve known you forever,” Sersi tells him (Gaiman issue 2 p. 5). She also says that she wishes she could invite him to the party she is organizing at the Vorozheikan embassy; not having been suspended yet, Mark responds that the hospital probably wouldn’t give him the night off. So here’s Sersi wanting to “call” Mark to a party–and to romance, and perhaps subconsciously to a connection to a fellow Eternal–and deciding that she can’t, and Mark, who seems a rather passive fellow, not seeming all that disappointed about it.

After Curry is suspended, Gaiman provides us with a major revelation: Mark has been refusing another “herald’s” “call to adventure”: his own. Curry had been dreaming about Ikaris, the Deviants and the Celestials “before I’d ever met him” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 9). Curry is so far into denial that “I wanted to think that I was going crazy” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 9) rather than accept the truth about his origins. Makkari is the counterpart of Mercury, messenger of the gods, and here we see that Makkari’s subconscious self is acting as messenger to “Mark Curry.” Of course it is right that Mark dreams of his higher potential, as do we all. It is also appropriate to find Neil Gaiman, auteur of Sandman, utilizing dreams once again as a motif.

Right after Mark says he would prefer to be “crazy” rather than accept the call of his dreams, Sersi’s friend Abigail tells her she is “crazy not to” invite Mark to the party (or, if you prefer, issue her call to romantic adventure to him) (Gaiman issue 2 p. 10). Abigail argues that this could be Sersi’s “only chance” to “impress” Curry. This reinforces the idea of the importance of accepting the “call” when it occurs. lest the opportunity never again present itself. (Mark/Makkari is fortunate in that he keeps getting “calls” to return to his true identity, rather like those innumerable invitations to attend Hogwarts that owls keep delivering to Harry Potter until the Dursleys finally give in).

Sersi tells Abigail that there will be some superheroes attending her party, namely “the kids from America’s Next Super Hero“; Abigail disapprovingly comments, “That’s kinda C-list. Any word from Julia Roberts?” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 10). Notice that Sersi and Abigail are discussing superheroes as if they were simply celebrities, not heroic champions or godlike figures. Abigail talks as if Captain America and Julia Roberts were interchangeable. It’s as if Spider-Man were no different than Tobey Maguire.

As Sersi and Abigail chat, they ignore another “herald,” an apparently insane homeless man who shouts, “They took it all away!” Longtime Eternals aficionados should realize from the man’s red beard that he is Zuras, monarch of the Eternals and counterpart of Zeus. “They took it all away!” is his mad reference to what happened to the Eternals, and his cry of “All one!” may be a reference to the Eternals’ Uni-Mind. But Sersi, lacking her memories of being an Eternal, cannot understand Zuras’s message.

Reducing a powerful being into a homeless, amnesiac derelict is a familiar trope in Marvel history”: it has happened to the Ancient One, to Odin (I think), and most famously to the Sub-Mariner in Fantastic Four #4 (May, 1962).

Eternals aficionados should be surprised to see Zuras, since he was killed in combat with the Fourth Host in Thor #300 (even though Gaiman’s series contends that the Eternals are mentally programmed not to fight Celestials); Zuras’s spirit departed from his body in Iron Man Annual #6. However, I always thought that killing off Zuras was a mistake, so I am pleased to see him back. (In general, killing off characters created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, or any combination thereof, is usually a bad idea. Most such characters have too much potential for further stories.)

Usually I expect that when a writer resurrects a supposedly deceased character in the superhero genre, he or she will explain how the character survived. Later in this Eternals series Gaiman does reveal how an Eternal can literally be resurrected, and in issue four Sprite indicates that Zuras, as well as Ajak, who was killed off in The Eternals: The Herod Factor (1991), went through this same “reactivation” process.

Sersi and Mark Curry turn out not to be hopelessly stuck in their respective ruts: she invites him to the Vorozheikan party, and he accepts.

But then Mark receives the most disturbing of his “calls”: a vision of Ikaris tormented by flames, pleading telepathically for his help. Like the Apostle Peter denying Christ, Curry rejects the call yet again. His face set in anger, and even cruelty, Curry demands that Ikaris “Get out of my head!” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 12).

Mark Curry has now gone too far, and soon it is he will be in dire need of help. Rejecting the call will once more be followed by serious consequences, as we shall see next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I haven’t done one of these sections for awhile, but I’ve continued to do writing for Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week. You can find my interview with David Michaelis, author of the psychologically penetrating biography Schulz and Peanuts, to be published in October, here, and my review of R. C. Harvey’s Meanwhile. . . , a lengthy and extensively researched biography of Milton Caniff, creator of the classic comic strips Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, here.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

This week I continue my exploration of the recent Eternals series written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by John Romita, Jr., reviving the characters and concepts from Jack Kirby’s last great comics series. Both series are now available from Marvel in hardcover collections.

When I left off last week, I wrote about the scene in Gaiman’s first issue in which medical student Mark Curry is first confronted by a blond stranger with gold-colored eyes who says that Curry is actually “an immortal, indestructible being” who has lost his memory. Readers who are familiar with the Eternals will recognize the stranger as Ikaris the Eternal and will deduce from the name “Mark Curry” that Mark is another Eternal, Makkari.

As I noted last week, readers of Kirby’s original Eternals series may be surprised by Mark’s physical appearance. Whereas in the original series and his other previous appearances, Makkari has been portrayed with typical Caucasian skin color, in the Gaiman/Romita series he has brown skin. I am advised that this was intended to show that Curry was from either Greece or Italy, since people from Mediterranean countries have darker skin. Well, then, wouldn’t the other “Olympian Eternals” from Greece–Zuras, Thena, Sersi, and Ajak–have dark skin, too? There’s no established convention at Marvel or DC of portraying characters with Greek or Italian background with brown skin: think of Kirby’s Hercules in Thor, or Gaiman’s Orpheus from Sandman, or even Wonder Woman! Moreover, although Kirby never depicted Makkari without his helmet (A crash helmet for traveling in super-fast vehicles?), subsequent stories have established that he has reddish-blond hair (as noted here) and sometimes portrayed him with just plain blond hair (look at the picture of Makkari as a member of the Monster Hunters here), not Mark Curry’s black hair. John Romita, Jr. draws Mark Curry’s facial features distinctly differently than the unmasked Makkari’s looked in his appearances in series like Quasar.

So to make sense out of this in terms of continuity, I have to assume that Makkari’s physical appearance underwent a change at some point. As I hypothesized last week, possibly Sprite did it when he created a new identity for Makkari, or perhaps Makkari, as an Eternal with “absolute mental control” his body, did it himself.

By the way, in doing further research, I have discovered that Makkari previously went under the alias of “Mac Curry” (rather than Mark, which I still find preferable) in Roger Stern and John Byrne’s Marvel: The Lost Generation #2 (January 2001). (Lost Generation was a very imaginative series that created an enormous number of superheroes who operated between the Golden Age of the 1940s and the debut of the Fantastic Four–including a delightful female Eternal named Pixie–and deserves to be revived in a trade paperback reprint collection.)

Ikaris is indeed correct that Mark Curry has lost his memory of being Makkari. Further research has reminded me that Marvel has done this theme of godlike beings suffering amnesia before, only a decade ago. To stave off the threat of Ragnarok, Odin wiped out the memories of the Asgardians and created new identities for them on Earth. This “Lost Gods” story arc ran in the 1990s Journey into Mystery series while Thor was off in the “Heroes Reborn” version of The Avengers. This is a further indication that Gaiman is working with what seems to be an archetypal storyline: the seemingly ordinary mortal who is unaware of his true heroic or even godlike identity. Even Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s origin of Marvel’s Thor (Thor #159, December 1968), in which Odin transforms him into the mortal Don Blake, who is unaware of his godly identity until he finds his hammer, fits this pattern.

Mark Curry dismisses Ikaris’s message and walks away from him, but Ikaris has nonetheless triggered a memory: Curry thinks of Ikaris’s “gold-colored eyes I’m sure I’ve seen before” (Gaiman Eternals #1 p. 5).

Significantly, Curry thinks of Ikaris as “a religious maniac” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 6). Of course, Ikaris is correct about who and what Curry truly is. I am not arguing that Gaiman is literally making a case for religious faith in his Eternals series. The superhero genre deals in metaphors, and the Celestials, who created the Eternals, are “space gods” who are metaphors for God. But I suspect that through Eternals Gaiman is making the case that there is more to life, the universe, and individuals including ourselves, than meets the eye, or that can be defined by science. Indeed, this is a case that the literature of the fantastic makes just as religion does.

It is also significant that, following his encounter with Ikaris, Curry tells us how empty his life (which, Ikaris knows, is not his true life) is: he goes home to an empty apartment to find an unpaid bill, “no girlfriend, no cat, and nothing on TV” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 6).

The “nothing” that is on TV is a stereotypically stupid sitcom for “˜tweens called It’s Just So Sprite, whose title is its catchphrase. (Gaiman may have the same negative attitude towards sitcom catchphrases that Ricky Gervais shows in Extras.) This banal show, complete with a nonstop laugh track, fits the impression of emptiness in Curry’s solitary life.

Past Eternals readers will realize that the show’s lead character, Sprite, is another Eternal from the Kirby series. The TV refers to Sprite’s upcoming “all-star concert at the Hollywood Bowl.” In interviews Gaiman has said that he wanted to define the role of the Eternals in the Marvel Universe, as opposed to its other superheroes. Here Gaiman subtly introduces this theme. The Eternals are meant to serve the “space gods” and protect the Earth; Sprite, on the other hand, has embarked on a show biz career appealing to the lowest common denominator. (The Eternals‘ other show business star, Kingo Sunen, apparently worked with Akira Kurosawa and had a much more artistically respectable career.) It’s as if in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) Spider-Man continued performing stunts on TV instead of becoming a costumed crimefighter.

Curry is overwhelmed by exhaustion, which he attributes to his busy life. But I wonder if the real cause is his deep dissatisfaction with his life. “I want to sleep. I want to sleep so bad it hurts” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 6). This looks like a symptom of deep depression to me. It’s as if he wants to be dead to the world.

And then comes a tapping at Curry’s window, he responds, and it turns out to be Ikaris again, the Campbellian herald issuing the call to adventure for a second time, standing out on the fire escape. This time he identifies himself as “Ike Harris,’ his alias from Kirby’s The Eternals #1.

Again, “Ike” speaks in terms that could be interpreted as religious: “I’m talking about the purpose of life. The meaning of everything. Why we’re here” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 7). As a medical student, Curry responds with a scientific explanation, arguing that the creation of life came about by sheer accident. As far as Curry is concerned, there is no higher meaning to existence. Without allowing “Ike” to make his case, Curry rejects his “nutso-religion.” Notice how Curry identifies himself as a man of science, not of religion: “Dude, I’m a doctor. Well, I’m a med student.”

Even that “dude” has a certain significance. As The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe put it, Makkari “retains an adolescent fervor, especially for his interest in building and riding vehicles that move faster than he himself can with his superhuman powers.” (Trapped in a life that does not suit him, Mark Curry is pictured immobile and exhausted in his apartment, rather than racing at high speed. As “Ike” tells Mark on page 8, “You like going fast.”) The late Mark Gruenwald used to write Makkari in Quasar as a counterpart to the youthful, somewhat naive Lightray in Kirby’s “Fourth World” books. Mark Curry’s calling Ikaris “dude” suggests a certain adolescent spirit.

But rereading Kirby’s Eternals, I didn’t see his version of Makkari as having “adolescent” high spirits so much as he was short-tempered. Kirby’s Makkari is repeatedly short-tempered with Sersi, impatient with her lighthearted attitude. And you see Makkari’s temper in Mark Curry’s early interactions with “Ike Harris.”

Notice how in the fire escape scene Ikaris’s coat flies out behind him, as if it were a superhero’s cape. (Frank Miller employs the same trick for his heroes’ coats in Sin City. The black and white shot of Ikaris in the rain in the third panel of page 12 even looks like a Sin City panel.) Ikaris heads off for the “Royer Building” (Gaiman issue 1, page 8), whose name is a homage to Mike Royer, inker of the Kirby Eternals series.

The next pages reintroduce another Eternal, Sersi. She does not recall being an Eternal either, but one of her main interests in life–partying– remains intact: Sersi is embarking on a career as a party planner. She even wears green, the color of her Eternal costume, throughout the issue.

Gaiman’s handling of Sersi reminds me of other latter-day bohemian characters in his work. Sersi may be unkillable, but I can imagine her getting along quite well with Gaiman’s Death character.

On page 12 “Ike” stands on a small tower atop a building, which is the closest he can come to standing on a mountaintop, as “gods” traditionally do. Making the point explicit, Gaiman and Romita shift to what appears to be Ikaris’s memory of standing on an actual snowy mountaintop with his fellow Eternal, Thena, as they discuss their race’s affinity for cold climates. according to Kirby, Ikaris is a “Polar Eternal,” who dwelled on mountains in Siberia. On the other hand, Thena’s home was the Eternals’ city of Olympia, atop Mount Olympus in Greece, and Kirby drew the city to look as if it had an idyllic, sunny, warm climate. Thena may not really be that fond of cold weather; then again, we discover later in Gaiman’s series that Ikaris’s memories are imperfect.

Thena compliments Ikaris on being “a delightful bedmate. . . .But you do not think” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 13). Thena is modeled on Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, so thinking is especially important to her. Gaiman’s revelation that Ikaris and Thena are former lovers fits in with his later revelation that Sersi was once Makkari’s lover. Gaiman is suggesting that since the Eternals are so long-lived, over the millennia they would inevitably have gotten around to such sexual liaisons. (Now there’s an appealing fantasy: if only I and certain women I know were unaging immortals. . . .)

“Ike” is confronted by two sinister strangers, who will eventually be revealed as members of the Deviants, the Eternals’ perennial enemies. The Deviants attack Ikaris, clearly hurt him, and knock him unconscious. It is unclear whether Ikaris possesses his Eternal superhuman strength at this point in the story, but the two Deviants probably do. (These assassins, traveling in a pair, may remind Gaiman readers of Mr. Croup and the taller, stronger Mr. Vandemar of Neverwhere, albeit minus Mr. Croup’s gift for language. See “Comics in Context” #18.) The larger Deviant throws Ikaris off the top of the building, perhaps reminding us that Ikaris’ namesake, the mythological figure Icarus, fell from the sky to his death. The large Deviant throws a bomb after him, which detonates.

Sersi gets her first party planning assignment from Ivan Druig, Deputy Prime Minister of the fictional former Soviet republic of Vorozheika, which is now an independent nation. I’m amused by the lettering style used to indicate that Druig and his associate are speaking in Russian, translated for our benefit, with “N’s” and “O’s” made to look like letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. (Actually the letter resembling a backwards “N” represents an “E” sound, and the letter resembling a bisected “O” represents our “F.”) Walt Kelly used to use a similar trick for the dialogue of the Russian characters in Pogo.

“Ivan Druig” is really just plain Druig, who. like Ikaris, is one of the Polar Eternals. It’s appropriate that Druig is an official in a former Soviet republic, since he was a member of the K. G. B. in the Kirby series.

Druig was also the villain in the Kirby Eternals‘ final story arc. One of the flaws in the Kirby series is its lack of a great villain, to provide a worthy adversary for its noteworthy heroes. Zakka, Tutinax, Dromedan and the Deviants’ leader, Brother Tode, all suffer from one-dimensional personalities; they lack the sort of grandeur, color, and memorable individuality that we would expect from the co-creator of Doctor Doom. It’s as if, having created such a monumental figure of evil in Darkseid for the Fourth World books at DC, Kirby felt that he couldn’t top himself. (However, while he was doing The Eternals, Kirby was also writing and drawing Captain America and the Falcon, in which he admirably handled the Red Skull and created another memorable villain, Arnim Zola, yet another of his genetic engineers.)

Druig and Ikaris are cousins, reminiscent of Kirby’s many pairings of heroes with evil siblings: Thor and Loki, Professor Xavier and the Juggernaut, Black Bolt and Maximus, Orion and Kalibak. Druig also enjoys engaging in torture, a passion that links him to Darkseid’s underling Desaad. But Druig pales in comparison with all of these predecessors. As Gaiman’s Eternals continues, he improves upon Kirby’s characterization, sharpening the portrait of Druig’s sadism, but still doesn’t elevate him to star villain status.

The one truly distinctive and memorable adversary in Kirby’s Eternals series is the Deviant warlord Kro (who is not to be confused with Gaiman’s Deviant named Kra), yet Kro is arguably more an antihero than a true villain. Kro is one of the greatest characters in Kirby’s Eternals, so it surprising that Gaiman chose not to use him.

There is a potentially great villain in the Eternals mythos, but he appears in neither Kirby’s series nor Gaiman’s, as we shall see.

Learning of a “miracle survivor” of a bombing, Mark Curry somehow realizes that it is Ikaris (perhaps because Ikaris had implied that he was indestructible) and goes to his bedside for their third meeting. It seems right that it is in their third encounter that Curry finally responds to the “call,” at least in limited fashion. “Are you ready to listen?” asks Ikaris. “I guess,” Curry responds (Gaiman issue 1 p. 18). That may not seem a very positive response, but notice that this time Curry went to Ikaris, rather than Ikaris coming to him. Perhaps Curry is willing to listen this time because Ikaris’s survival of the fall and bombing does seem like a literal “miracle.”

Longtime Eternals aficionados might be surprised to see Ikaris covered with bandages and clearly seriously injured. In the past Marvel stories and Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entries have treated the Eternals’ physical “durability” as if it were like Superman’s invulnerability. This is true even in what we see on panel in the Kirby Eternals stories. For example, when Ikaris combats the “cosmic-powered,” superhumanly strong Hulk robot in issues 14 through 16, Ikaris’s face is not bloodied and his bones are not broken.

In issue one of the Gaiman series, Ikaris has not fully regained his Eternal powers, as later issues make explicit. But it also appears that Gaiman is playing the Eternals’ indestructibility more like the “fast healing” ability popularized by Wolverine.

Dialogue in the Kirby series supports this approach. He emphasizes that “Eternals can be hurt but they cannot die” (Kirby Eternals hardcover, p. 48). When the cosmic-powered Hulk threatens to drop Makkari off a rooftop (a fate similar to what Ikaris suffers in the Gaiman series), Sersi worries that “the fall will not kill him–but it could injure him for eternity” (Kirby p. 284), suggesting there are limits to the fast healing power, Shortly afterwards during the battle with the robot Hulk, a concerned Ikaris warns Sersi that “you have a lovely neck, but it can easily be snapped” (Kirby p. 290). Some of us at Marvel found amusement in Kirby’s contention that “Eternals can’t die. . .but they can be twisted out of shape for all time!” (Kirby, p. 305).

Gaiman indicates that there are seemingly no limits to the Eternals’ self-healing power. In his last issue Makkari challenges the Deviant leader: “Take my head, and I will still come back, stronger, faster” (Gaiman issue 7, p. 16), implying that he could even grow his head back. (Or would the head grow its body back? This might also be an allusion to a classic work of medieval literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the latter survives beheading.)

On page 19 we learn that Thena, now known as Dr. Thena Eliot, is currently working for Tony Stark, developing a new weapon. This makes sense, inasmuch as Thena is based on Athena, the Greek goddess of both war and wisdom. Designing advanced weaponry combines both fields.

Although Mister Fantastic makes a brief cameo appearance, there are three longtime Marvel superheroes who play important roles in the Gaiman Eternals: Iron Man (Tony Stark), Yellowjacket (Henry Pym), and the Wasp (Janet Van Dyne). These are three major heroes of Marvel’s Silver Age who were not included in Gaiman’s previous Marvel series, 1602, so it is gratifying that Gaiman found ways to use them in Eternals.

This brings up the subject of whether Jack Kirby intended the Eternals to be part of the Marvel Universe. One of the premises of the series is that the people of ancient civilizations believed the Eternals to be gods. Hence, the ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped Zuras as Zeus, Thena as Athena, and Makkari as Mercury. Yet Kirby and Stan Lee had already introduced Zeus, Hercules, Pluto, and other Olympian gods into the pages of Thor.

Moreover, there is something odd about Kirby’s references to other Marvel characters in The Eternals. SHIELD agents turn up in issues 6 and 7, but they are new characters, not Nick Fury or any other previously established member of the organization. As noted, it is a Hulk robot that battles Eternals in issues 14 through 16, not the actual Hulk. The robot is referred to as “a computerized replica of a popular Marvel character” (Kirby, p. 301) and one character comments that “these comic fans think that all of Marvel’s characters are running amuck!” (Kirby, p. 297). The fact that people in these stories refer to superhumans as “Marvel’s characters” doesn’t mean that they aren’t also real. After all, as far back as Fantastic Four #10 (January, 1963), Doctor Doom visited Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at the Marvel offices, where they were doing the Fantastic Four comic! Still, this is strange.

Various people have hypothesized that Kirby did not intend the Eternals to be part of Marvel continuity, but Marvel put pressure on him to integrate the series into the Marvel Universe, so Kirby responded in these ambiguous ways.

This is certainly possible. However, it could also be that Kirby preferred working on new concepts and characters, and had no real interest in using past Marvel characters, even those he had co-created. Maybe he preferred not using his old characters since so many other writers had been using them during his absence from Marvel. It may be significant that even in Kirby’s work writing and drawing Captain America and the Falcon in the 1970s, he used surprisingly few of his previously established characters: Sharon Carter, the Red Skull, Magneto in an annual, and Bucky in Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles (1976). So maybe Kirby did intend the Eternals to be part of the Marvel Universe, but simply chose not to use any guest stars from other series.

It’s possible, too, that Kirby didn’t care one way or the other whether the Eternals fit into Marvel continuity. There have been plenty of Marvel editors and writers whose attitude has been to ignore continuity and leave it to others to try to make sense of it all (as any longsuffering writer of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, past or present, can tell you). Except for Stan Lee himself, it is writers and editors of later generations who care about continuity, not those of Kirby’s generation.

Not that long after the cancellation of the original Eternals series in 1977, a full thirty years ago, Roy Thomas began unmistakably integrating them into the Marvel Universe, first with a flashback in which Thor encountered Eternals at the time of the Third Host in Thor Annual #7 (1978), and then with stories set in the then-present day beginning with Thor #284 (February 1979).

Should this have been done? I believe Roy Thomas acted wisely, in that the Eternals would probably have vanished from sight if they had not started appearing as guest stars in series set in the Marvel Universe. The second Eternals series did not start until 1985, but it too was not a commercial hit, and so the Eternals resumed their guest star stints.

But in Kirby’s Eternals the Eternals and Deviants appear to be the only superhumans around, and the Celestials the only extraterrestrials. As Gaiman has said in interviews, he had to define what makes the Eternals and the Celestials unique on a Marvel-Earth in which super-powered beings and alien visitations are commonplace.

Tony Stark does not recognize Dr. Thena Eliot as one of the Eternals. At first I thought this was a mistake, but no, the Iron Man who visited Olympia and met Thena in Iron Man Annual #6 (1983) was a substitute, James Rhodes. But wouldn’t Tony Stark as Iron Man have met Thena when the Avengers and Eternals teamed up against Ghaur in Eternals Vol. 2 #12 (September 1986)?

Ikaris begins telling Mike Curry the backstory of the Celestials, the Eternals and the Deviants, while advising him that “There are. . .a few things that I don’t remember” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 21). In other words, Ikaris–and Gaiman–are warning that this flashback sequence will not be entirely accurate. The most obvious example is that Ikaris states that there were three “hordes” of Celestials that visited Earth. Actually, they were known as “hosts,” a word with Biblical overtones, and there were four of them, as Sprite points out later (Gaiman issue 4 p. 8). Similarly, Ikaris claims that the Egyptians called Makkari “Osiris,” but Sprite says (if he can be trusted) that they actually knew Makkari as Thoth. (By the way, the ancient Egyptian pantheon also exists in the Marvel Universe: the real Osiris made his Marvel debut in Thor #239, September, 1975. And the “Horde” in Gaiman’s Eternals turns out to be something different from the Celestial Hosts.)

It seems to me an odd strategy to present the series’ backstory through an admittedly unreliable narrator. In the Kirby Eternals, it was also Ikaris who recounted the history of the Celestials, Eternals and Deviants, but he was in full possession of his memories then and had no reason to lie; moreover, that version has been thoroughly established as canonical through subsequent retellings. However, the fact that the Ikaris of Gaiman’s Eternals #1 has a faulty memory gives me an excuse me to dismiss anything that he gets wrong.

For example, in the Kirby series the First Host experiments on human ancestors who are covered with fur and are clearly more apelike than human. In the Gaiman/Romita version, the “proto-people” don’t have fur and look more obviously human.

Through the Celestials’ genetic experiments on these “early hominids,” they created both the Eternals and the Deviants. Romita’s picture (Gaiman issue 1 p. 26) implies that Ikaris and Sprite were directly created by the First Host. Actually, Ikaris was a member of a later generation: Ikaris is the son of an Eternal named Virako and the nephew of Valkin, who is Druig’s father. Even Zuras is a second generation Eternal, being the son of Chronos; Zuras’s brother A’lars is Mentor, the leader of the Eternals of Titan, and father of Thanos, as seen in various stories by Jim Starlin. There’s no need to go into all this complexity in Gaiman’s series, but the picture is misleading.

According to the Kirby series, the Celestials also created the normal human race, namely us. In his interview in the back of his Eternals collection, Neil Gaiman reports that people at Marvel “mentioned that they were very concerned about Celestials creating humanity. They said, “˜Nope! Celestials definitely didn’t create humanity, but they did create the Eternals and the Deviants!'”

This was also the policy that Marvel applied to The Eternals when I was working there in the 1980s, and I understand why: they correctly didn’t want to alienate readers with strong religious beliefs about the creation of humanity.

It’s too bad that apparently no one at 21st century Marvel knows the alternate explanation that Mark Gruenwald’s editorial office established for what the Celestials did to the “normal” human race. As I myself wrote in the “Celestials” entry in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: “the First Host created two sub-species of humanity, the Eternals and the Deviants. Their sole legacy to the mainstream human race was the implantation of a dormant DNA complex which would one day permit benevolent mutations” (reprinted here). By this I meant not only X-Men-style mutants but all super-powered humans that arose in the late 20th century on Marvel-Earth. (I first postulated this in an article for the unpublished third issue of Mark Gruenwald’s magazine Omniverse, and this was long before DC came up with the similar “metagene” concept.) Presumably this explains why Arishem gave a literal “thumbs up” when Gaea, goddess of the Earth presented the Fourth Host of the Celestials with the “Young Gods,” humans whose evolution had been accelerated, giving them superhuman abilities, in Thor #300 (October, 1980). As far back as the end of the Kree-Skrull War in Avengers #97 (February, 1972), when Rick Jones briefly exhibited cosmic powers, Marvel (through Roy Thomas) had established that humanity would evolve into a super-race.

Gaiman titled his first issue “Intelligent Design” and has Ikaris say, “It’s like the arguments for intelligent design. I know my designers were intelligent. I just don’t know what they wanted me for” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 26). That neatly sums up the quandary that characters face in Kirby’s and Gaiman’s versions of Eternals: they know that the “space gods” (representing God with a capital “G”) are real, but they don’t know what the gods expect of them. Kirby’s Eternals is, surprisingly, the superhero genre’s venture into existentialism.

Here’s something I consider a mistake. It is true that the Deviants conquered the human race in prehistory, but Ikaris claims that the Eternals “called” the Second “Horde”/Host from outer space for help in defeating the Deviants (Gaiman issue 1 p. 30). I find it hard to believe that Kirby’s Celestials were at the beck and call of their creations.

In the Kirby version the Second Host arrived, presumably to monitor the progress of their genetic experiments. “When the gods appeared in those times, they were met by massive, hostile action.” we are told (Kirby p. 27). The Deviants “struck first and failed” (p. 28). In other words, this is a classic case of hubris and overreaching. The Deviants launched an unprovoked attack on their creators, thereby arousing the Celestials’ terrible wrath.

The Gaiman/Romita series shows the giant Celestials of the Second Host striding through the Deviants’ realm, picking up Deviants or shooting energy beams at them (Gaiman issue 1 pages 30-31). This seems to me to be rather mundane behavior for beings who are supposed to be “gods,” not just science fictional giants.

Kirby devised a much more resonant image. “The gods struck in turn, and succeeded in toppling the Deviants with a weapon “˜til then unknown to them.” Kirby shows us what is unmistakably a mushroom cloud, implying that this was a nuclear weapon powerful enough to affect the entire world.

Of course this image taps into our own fears of nuclear bombs, which not only haunted America during the Cold War but have revived in the present, due to the possibility that terrorists could acquire atomic weaponry.

Moreover, the “space gods'” destruction of the overreaching Deviants should remind readers of divine punishments from the Old Testament, such as the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah. The detonation of the Celestial weapon unleashed “tidal waves the size of mountains” that “drowned the land and all that lived upon it.” The Deviants’ homeland of “Lemuria and its sister continents vanished in just one dark day” (Kirby, p. 28). I suspect that Kirby meant us to identify one of those “sister continents” as Atlantis. And then comes the capper: Ikaris tells the archeologist Doctor Damian and his daughter that during the flood he guided a great ship to safety, and believes its passengers mistook him for a dove. The Damians realize that this is the Flood from the Book of Genesis, and the ship was the Ark (Kirby, p. 29).

Now doesn’t the Kirby version have considerably more mythic resonance?

And, yes, I know, I haven’t even gotten to the end of the first Gaiman/Romita issue yet. So please come back next week for further exploration of Jack Kirby’s last great creation, the Eternals mythos.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Having spent the last several months covering this summer’s major movie and DVD releases associated with comics, animation, and megaheroes, and reviewing comics exhibits at two museums, I can at last turn to a subject that I’ve wanted to address for a long time: Neil Gaiman’s revival of Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, illustrated by John Romita, Jr., which was collected into a hardcover edition earlier this year. It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of my close readings of a comics series in this column, and Eternals affords me a perfect opportunity.

Last year, to pave the way for the Gaiman revival, Marvel reissued Jack Kirby’s original Eternals series from 1976-1977, collected into a handsome hardcover edition. This was long overdue, and I suspect that it would not have happened when it did if Gaiman had not agreed to write an Eternals series. In the course of critiquing the Gaiman series, I will be referring to and critiquing the Kirby Eternals as well.

One of Kirby’s inspirations for The Eternals was Erich von Daniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, which purported that extraterrestrials visited Earth in ancient times, that they became the “gods” of ancient religions, and that they were responsible for amazing achievements such as the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. One of my friends in my school days was a staunch believer in von Daniken’s book, and I found his efforts to convert me tiresome and irritating. The book is scientific nonsense, but it provided Kirby with a fruitful basis for his fantasy epic.

According to The Eternals, in prehistoric times the First Host of the Celestials, enigmatic aliens of colossal size and tremendous power, came to Earth and experimented on humanity’s apelike ancestors. Although the phrase did not exist in the 1970s, as far as I know, the Celestials were engaging in genetic engineering. As a result, the Celestials created three species of humanity. There were the Eternals, immortal, handsome beings who could not be killed, who lived upon mountaintops, and who developed superhuman abilities, enabling them, among other things, to fly through the air. There were the Deviants, grotesque creatures who lived beneath Earth’s surface, and who were genetically “unstable”: whereas a normal human child may resemble his or her father and mother, a Deviant child was radically different genetically from his parents. Finally, there were the “ordinary” human beings, like you and I, who lived on Earth’s surface, midway between the Eternals of the sky and the subterranean Deviants.

Humans of ancient times thought of the Eternals as gods or superhuman heroes. Hence, the ancient Greeks thought that Zuras, ruler of the Eternals, and his daughter Thena, were Zeus, ruler of the gods, and his daughter Athena. The people of ancient Rome mispronounced the name of the Eternal called Makkari as “Mercury.” Ordinary humans thought of the grotesque Deviants as devils and demons.

In The Eternals Kirby further developed certain concepts he had been developing since the 1960s. He previously demonstrated his interest in genetic engineering by co-creating the High Evolutionary, who debuted in Thor #134 (November, 1966). This master geneticist accelerated the evolution of animals, transforming them into his “New Men,” who had human intelligence, the power of speech, and semi-human physiques. In Thor #146-152 (1967-1968) Kirby and Stan Lee revealed that the Inhumans were the result of genetic experimentation by the extraterrestrial Kree. Later, in stories for DC’s Jimmy Olsen, Kirby created “The Project” (later dubbed Project Cadmus) and its sinister counterpart, the “Evil Factory,” both of which experimented in genetic engineering and cloning.

More importantly, through the 1960s and 1970s, Kirby returned time and again to the concept of two warring races of “gods” or “superhumans,” with ordinary humanity caught in the middle. There were Thor and his Asgardian allies against Loki and the forces of evil. There was Professor Charles Xavier and his team of X-Men pitted against Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. There were the “good” Inhumans such as Black Bolt arrayed against Maximus the Mad and his Inhuman allies. There were the HIgh Evolutionary’s noble New Men, called the Knights of Wundagore, and his archfoe, the Man-Beast, an wolf that evolved superhuman powers, who would lead other renegade New Men. Most prominently, in his “Fourth World” comics, Kirby depicted the benign New Gods of New Genesis in conflict with the satanic Darkseid and his fellow gods of the planet Apokolips.

In various respects the Eternals and Deviants are similar to the New Gods of New Genesis and Apokolips. Darkseid and his minions seek the Anti-Life Formula and conquest of the universe. In Kirby’s Eternals series the Eternals go to war with the Deviants to prevent them from conquering the Earth and attacking the Celestials.

But if the focus of the Fourth World books was on thwarting Darkseid’s quest for ultimate domination, in The Eternals Kirby appeared less interested in the battles between the Eternals and Deviants than in a more challenging subject: the nature of God. In my columns about the second Fantastic Four movie (see “Comics in Context” #184–185), I have investigated how in Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy,” the Watcher and Galactus represent different visions of God: a benevolent God who is unwilling to interfere directly in human affairs, and a God of wrath who has sentenced all of humanity to death. In the Fourth World books God is represented by “the Source,” who is unseen and mysterious. The gods of New Genesis consider the Source to be benevolent, and their leader, Highfather, who significantly resembles an Old Testament patriarch, can communicate with him. But those who attempt to breach the Wall in outer space which separates us from the realm of the Source are punished by being transformed into “Promethean giants,” imprisoned, immobile, on the wall.

The Eternals represent the gods with a small “g” of ancient mythologies, who possessed human-like personalities and emotions, whose powers, though vast, were nonetheless limited. The Celestials represent God with a capital “G”: all-powerful and beyond human comprehension. The Source was mysterious, but was nevertheless clearly benevolent towards the New Gods of Apokolips. In contrast, the motivations and goals of the Celestials are almost wholly enigmatic. In the present day of Kirby’s Eternals series, the Fourth Host of the Celestials arrive on Earth, apparently to spend fifty years studying human civilization. At the end of that time, the leader of the Fourth Host, Arishem the Judge, is to deliver his verdict. If it is negative, humanity and the Earth will be destroyed. The odds do not look good: the series’ omniscient narrator tells us that over the ages the Celestials have performed genetic experiments on numerous worlds, and that not one world so far has received a favorable judgment.

But what is the basis for Arishem’s judgment? What do the Celestials expect of us? In Kirby’s vision the Celestials created humanity for reasons that remain unknown and expect us to fulfill some purpose that likewise remains unknown. This is the human dilemma in real life. Why are we here? If God exists, what does He expect from us?

Like the Galactus trilogy, Kirby’s Eternals is a tale about the possible end of the world. According to Christianity, the end of the world is the time of the Last Judgment; “Arishem’s” name looks as if it were a Hebrew word, but he too is to deliver a Last Judgment. Moreover, as I’ve suggested in the past, the end of the world can serve as a metaphor for one’s own mortality. Arishem’s “fifty-year judgment” fits the metaphor. One’s own death may seem a long way off–perhaps fifty years–but within a period of time that nonetheless seems uncomfortably short.

Although Kirby is considered an icon today, and his Eternals remains a remarkable achievement, back in the mid-1970s it was a commercial flop.
But why?

One reason might be that, when it is read one issue at a time, the series seems to meander. As with the Fourth World, Kirby had created a vast tapestry, and would move from one set of characters in one issue to another set in the next issue. So, for example, the efforts of Ikaris, Thena, Sersi and Makkari of the Eternals to thwart Deviant Warlord Kro’s attack on Manhattan in issues 3-5 are followed by Ajak’s confrontation with three SHIELD agents in issues 6-7, and then Kro and Thena’s journey to undersea Lemuria in issues 8-10, which introduce two new significant characters, Karkas and the Reject. This series isn’t like, say, Spider-Man, which keeps its star, Spider-Man, in the spotlight in every issue.

Nor do Kirby’s Eternals storylines always receive conventionally satisfactory conclusions. Kro’s invasion of Manhattan halts not because he was defeated, but because he meets his former lover Thena and, his feelings for her aroused, he agrees to a truce. In Kirby’s Eternals Annual #1 a super-strong being named Tutinax is transported through time to the present, where he begins a titanic battle with the Reject. But the fight abruptly ends when Tutinax simply fades back to the past, and possibly because the story had run out of pages. Though Kirby’s dynamic battle scenes in Eternals make fight scenes in contemporary superhero comics look tame, he understandably seems less interested in standard superhero combat than in unveiling the next set of wonders he has devised for the audience.

It should be no surprise that the Kirby Eternals reads better collected into a single volume than it did as separate issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kirby thought of it as a serialized version of what we would now call a graphic novel, in the days before that format existed.

There’s also the problem that Kirby was less adept at dialogue than Stan Lee, or Roy Thomas, or various other writers who were working at Marvel and DC in the 1970s. At times Kirby definitely shows a tin ear for dialogue: “That’s funky corn,” Makkari tells Sersi (Kirby Eternals collection, p. 73), as the rest of us go “Say what?” However, rereading the Kirby Eternals, I find the dialogue to be much better than I remember, sometimes producing truly well-turned phrases, as you shall see. It’s true that the dialogue may seem dated by today’s standards, but Kirby was working in the melodramatic style that was standard in superhero books at Marvel and DC at that time. (I recall one editor instructing me in the 1980s, “Write more purple.”)

A particular problem with the Kirby Eternals may be that its heroes really did not conform to the Marvel mode. One thinks of a Marvel superhero as a seemingly ordinary human who lives a realistic daily life, but who assumes a costumed identity to go on fantastic adventures. Even Lee and Kirby’s Thor, a Norse god, transformed into the human surgeon Don Blake. The Marvel heroes’ everyday identities make it easier for the readers to identify with them. Kirby’s lead character in Eternals, Ikaris , may initially pose as a human called “Ike Harris,” but he drops this “secret identity” almost immediately. Kirby’s Eternals lack “normal” human identities and lives: they are full time “gods,” if you will. Normal humans, such as Margo Damian and Dr. Samuel Holden, may hang out with the Eternals, but very much remain subsidiary characters. Moreover, in classic Marvel series of the 1960s, the heroes had ongoing personal problems, which many have condescendingly referred to as “soap opera,” but that allowed for still further reader identification. Again to cite Thor, there was the thunder god’s doomed love for the mortal Jane Foster, forbidden by his father Odin. Kirby’s Eternals has no such subplots. Marvel introduced three-dimensional personalities to the superhero genre in the 1960s, but Kirby’s Ikaris, Makkari, Ajak, and Zuras, seem flat in comparison. This isn’t true of the entire Eternals cast: Thena, Sersi, Kro, the Reject, Karkas, and Sprite all develop multidimensional personae as the series goes along. But none of them is the central figure of the series. Indeed, Kirby’s Eternals really has no central figure, since not even Ikaris appears in each issue.

Recently in his blog Mark Evanier pointed out that Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, disagreed with what became the classic Marvel approach to portraying its superheroes: “The company dynamic had evolved into offering a diet of “˜heroes’ who were either flawed or uncertain of their own heroism and values. That’s not the way Ditko saw the world.” (http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2007_09_11.html#014000). And indeed, Ditko characters like the Question definitely don’t go in for self-questioning.

All of this suggests to me that it really was Stan Lee who was primarily responsible for something that is considered a quintessential Marvel concept–the flawed, self-doubting hero–since his principal collaborators in the 1960s, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, pursued a different direction when they subsequently wrote their own superhero comics.

So The Eternals was canceled in 1977, apparently so fast that Kirby did not have the time to devise a satisfactory conclusion to the series, or perhaps he simply did not want to; the final issue, 19, simply wraps up the concluding three-parter about Ikaris’s attempt to stop his evil cousin Druig from finding and using a Celestial weapon. As far as loyal readers were concerned, Arishem was still standing in the Andes, contemplating the forthcoming fifty-year judgment.

Marvel writer/editor Roy Thomas reintroduced the Eternals in Thor in the 1980s. In Thor #300 (for which I was a consultant on the plot) the gods of Earth’s pantheons, such as the Asgardians and Olympians, attempted in vain to defeat the Celestials, but Arishem delivered an early judgment in Earth’s favor, and the Fourth Host departed the planet. There was a twelve-issue Eternals series in 1985 and 1986, illustrated by Sal Buscema and initially written by Peter B. Gillis; editor in chief Jim Shooter disliked Gillis’s scripts, so Walter Simonson wrote the final four issues. Of all the attempts to portray the Eternals before the Gaiman revival, the Gillis-Simonson series was by far the most interesting and creative, but it has been grossly underrated and did not lead to an ongoing series. Subsequently Marvel demonstrated no interest in using the Eternals outside of one-shots and guest appearances, and certainly none in reprinting the original Kirby series. In 2003 Marvel even produced a ghastly mini-series called The Eternal, which utilized the names like “Eternal” and “Celestial” from Kirby’s series but otherwise had nothing to do with it. I expect that if Neil Gaiman had not accepted the offer to write a new Eternals series, the recent flurry of interest in the characters would not have occurred.

Gaiman’s first issue opens with a medical student named Mark Curry, and perceptive readers who already know the Eternals will realize that if you pronounce that name fast, you will get “Makkari.”

In interviews Gaiman has expressed amusement over the fact that in the Kirby Eternals series Ikaris used the transparent alias of “Ike Harris.” But “Ike” only uses that alias in the first issue, before he begins operating openly in the modern world as Ikaris. People are not about to suspect that “Ike Harris” is Ikaris, because at that time they don’t know that Ikaris exists.

Gaiman’s alias for Makkari, “Mark Curry,” is in the tradition of Kirby’s “Ike Harris.” When Makkari appeared in Marvel’s Quasar series, the late Mark Gruenwald gave him the alias “Mike Kahry.” Gaiman’s alias is an improvement.

And here’s an interesting coincidence–or is it? A while back I was watching a rerun of The Sopranos on A & E–the first episode of Season 3, “Mr. Ruggiero’s Neighborhood,” I think–and discovered that the nickname of a recurring character, FBI Agent Dwight Harris, is “Ike.” Well, that’s probably because President Dwight Eisenhower was nicknamed “Ike.” Then again, one of The Sopranos‘ writer/producers, Robin Green, used to work at Marvel and wrote the celebrated 1971 Rolling Stone cover story about the company (http://www.geocities.com/jonhulkholt/rs91.facefront.1.html). The first explanation is probably the correct one, but the second is certainly tempting.

Back on page 1 of issue 1, Mark Curry is “trying to remember why I want to be a doctor.” This may be because the Roman god Mercury, known to the ancient Greeks as Hermes, carried the caduceus, a wand that had wings at the top and that was encircled by two serpents. The caduceus has been adopted as a symbol of medicine by various organizations. However, these groups have confused Hermes’ caduceus with the staff of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, which has only one serpent and no wings (http://drblayney.com/Asclepius.html). Most medical associations, it seems, use Asclepius’s staff as their symbol, not the caduceus.

If Gaiman is aware of the difference between the caduceus and the staff of Asclepius, then perhaps that further explains why Mark Curry is questioning his decision to become a doctor. As we shall learn later in the series, another Eternal, Sprite, has removed Makkari’s memories and given him this new identity and role in life. But just as the caduceus is not supposed to be a symbol of medicine, Mark Curry/Makkari/Mercury is not meant to be a physician.

Curry states that “I’d hoped that I’d dream of racing a Ferrari down an open track forever.” Hermes/Mercury was the swiftest of the Olympian gods, and Kirby gave Makkari a “mania for fast vehicles” (Kirby p. 74). That’s reminiscent of Johnny Storm’s fascination with hot rods, come to think of it. It’s a bit strange that Makkari is so interested in “fast vehicles” since he can move at superhuman speed, but perhaps it’s because at times he needs to transport others at superhuman speed (as in Kirby’s Eternals #5).

Of course, Sandman readers should pay attention to Gaiman’s references to dreams, whether it is Curry’s dream or the Dreaming Celestial.

Mercury/Hermes is also the messenger of the Olympian gods, and this fact may explain why later in the series Gaiman turns Makkari into the “messenger” of the Dreaming Celestial.

The reader who realizes that Mark Curry is Kirby’s Makkari then faces an unexpected question. Why does Mark Curry have dark skin? Kirby made Makkari look Caucasian, which would be appropriate for someone who was mistaken for a Greco-Roman god, and all other artists who have portrayed Makkari have done the same, until now.

The likely answer is that Gaiman wanted his Eternals to have a multiracial cast.

In the interview in the back of the hardcover edition of this Eternals series, Gaiman states that he red the Kirby Eternals but acknowledges that he has not read all of the subsequent stories featuring the characters. It is possible then, that Gaiman is unaware that in the second series, Peter Gillis already supplied the Eternals with racial diversity.

In a brief sequence set in the Eternals’ city of Olympia (Kirby pgs. 184-185), Kirby introduced Kingo Sunen, an Eternal who dresses in samurai armor, and who associated with actual Japanese samurai in centuries past. Ikaris’s companion Margo Damian recognizes him as “a famous Japanese movie star,” and we are informed that he stars in samurai movies. In other words, what if Toshiro Mifune were one of the Eternals? Gillis gave Kingo Sunen a much larger role in the second Eternals series, which made clear he had Asian features.

Moreover, in the second series Gillis and artist Sal Buscema created a black Eternal, Phastos, who was based on Hephaestus, the blacksmith (get it?) of the Olympian gods.

However, in this same interview Gaiman explains that he did not want his Eternals to have as large a cast as his previous Marvel series, 1602. So perhaps he knew about Phastos and Kingo Sunen but felt he did not have room for them. So he turned Makkari non-Caucasian instead.

I would have preferred sticking with Kirby’s visual depiction of the character, but this change doesn’t bother me much, since I can explain it away.

Sprite altered reality, transforming his fellow Eternals into seemingly ordinary humans, unaware of their true natures, by creating a “Uni-Mind” (a group mind) that drew power from the Dreaming Celestial. It’s possible that Sprite could thus have altered Makkari’s physical appearance, although then one must ask why he didn’t bother doing that to the other Eternals.

Another possibility is that since Eternals have “absolute mental control” over their bodies (as established in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe), then each can alter his or her own physical appearance at will, at least within limits. So Makkari may have altered his own appearance at some point in the past. Later, Gaiman and Romita present a flashback showing Makkari in ancient Egypt, where he was believed to be the god Thoth (Gaiman issue 3 page 2, see also issue 4 page 8). Makkari has dark skin in this flashback, which would be appropriate for looklng Egyptian. So possibly Makkari has altered his physical appearance at various times in the past in order to match those of the people of the countries to which he travels.

Instead of dreaming about a Ferrari, Curry instead has on of his “weird dreams,” in which he is wearing his Makkari costume, is rescued by Ikaris from captivity by Deviants, and finally sees three immense Celestials (including Arishem on the left) in an extraordinary double-page spread drawn by John Romita, Jr (Gaiman issue 1, pages 2-3).

Far more successfully than any other visual sequence in the new series, this double-page spread captures the feeling of awe that the Kirby Eternals induces issue after issue. Perhaps the greatest difference between the two series is that the Gaiman-Romita Eternals tends to keep to a (comparatively) more human scale, since so many of the Eternals in Gaiman’s story have been reduced to living “ordinary” human lives. The epic grandeur of Kirby’s art and visual concepts for The Eternals is an essential part of that series. Perhaps Gaiman and Romita did not believe they could match Kirby in this regard for more than an occasional sequence like that double-page spread. But Gaiman takes a more psychological approach to his Eternals cast, making the relatively more human scale of his series more appropriate.

By the double-page spread even readers who have no previous experience of the Eternals may recognize that Gaiman is working a variation on a familiar trope of fantastic storytelling. This is what may be the archetypal story of the person who is seemingly ordinary and who leads a normal life, but who discovers that he has another, truer identity with extraordinary potential.

Gaiman’s novel Anansi Boys follows this pattern: the protagonist Charlie discovers that he is the son of the trickster spider god, and that he is the brother of another trickster deity, known as Spider, and Charlie ultimately wields the abilities of the spider god himself (see “Comics in Context” #105, 106, 107 and 108).

This is a variation on the traditional story device of the protagonist who is unaware of his true parentage and hence of his true station on life. Similarly, in Gaiman’s Stardust, the young hero Tristran does not learn until the story’s end that he is not a simple villager but the heir to the throne of Stormhold in the realm of Faerie (see “Comics in Context” #191 and 192).

According to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey, the protagonist starts out in a lowly position, perhaps having fallen from a higher one. So the protagonist may even be unaware of his rightful status. In the Star Wars films Luke Skywalker first appears as a farmboy, who does not know that his father was a Jedi Knight until Obi-Wan Kenobi tells him and, as herald in the monomyth, issues what Campbell terms the “call to adventure” for Luke to become a Jedi himself.

In Anansi Boys Charlie learns about his true identity from other characters, including Spider, just as Ikaris will inform Mark Curry that he is actually Makkari. But in other variations of this story pattern, the protagonist senses or glimpses his true identity through dreams or visions, or through having thoughts or exhibiting abilities that surprise even himself. His normal, everyday life is therefore a lie, preventing him from achieving his real, greater destiny. Hence Curry dreams about himself as Makkari, about Ikaris, the Deviants, and the Celestials.

It did not take me long to come up with an extensive list of other stories that follow this pattern. There’s Alan Moore’s Marvelman a. k. a. Miracleman, as well as Paul Jenkins’ The Sentry for Marvel: in both, middle-aged men have forgotten their past careers as superheroes, but reclaim their memories, powers, and heroic identities. There’s Moore and Dave Gibbons’ story “For the Man Who Has Everything” in Superman Annual #11 (1985), which was later adapted into an episode of the television series Justice League Unlimited: in the story, Superman is trapped in a fantasy of leading a “normal” life as a husband and father on Krypton that never exploded, from which he must wake to his real life as a superhero. Similarly, in the episode of Batman: The Animated Series titled “Perchance to Dream” (1992), in which the Mad Hatter captures Batman and gives him a dream in which his parents never died and Bruce Wayne never became a costumed avenger, and yet the dreaming Wayne comes to realize that this “life” isn’t real.

In live action television there was the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Far beyond the Stars” (1998), in which Benjamin Sisko finds himself as a science fiction writer in the 1950s who may only be imagining his life as a starship captain, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode significantly titled “Normal Again” (2002), in which Buffy is temporarily persuaded that she is an inmate in a mental institution who has only fantasized being a super-powered Slayer of vampires. This year there was the two-part Doctor Who story, “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood,” in which the alien Doctor has transformed into a human being, and is living as a teacher in 1913 England, unaware of his true identity, but experiencing memories of his past through dreams. The Doctor’s companion Martha and ewven his enemies, the Family of Blood, attempt to convince him of his true identity, but he initially refuses to believe them and to give up his “normal” life.

Then there’s Philip K. Dick’s 1966 science fiction novelette, “We Can Get It for You Wholesale,” and the 1990 film adaptation Total Recall.

There’s even Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ, adapted onto film by Martin Scorsese in 1988: these not only deal with a Christ who regards himself as human but struggles with the realization that he also has a divine nature, but also climax with the “last temptation”: a vision of a happy life as an ordinary human being, which proves to be merely a fantasy and a diversion from Christ’s true mission as Messiah.

So Mark Curry finds himself dissatisfied with his “normal” life, wondering why he is trying to become a doctor, while being puzzled by his “weird dreams” of being a superhuman in a world of superhuman beings and gods. On page 4 Curry seems in a lowly position in life, all right: he is exhausted, his girlfriend has left him, and he just got a phone call from a student loan company that “wasn’t good news.”

And then, the Campbellian herald arrives with the call to adventure: Ikaris, who tells Curry, “I’ve got some good news for you.” Curry replies, “Great. I need good news.” The word “gospel” means “good news,” and this religious allusion may be no accident.

Ikaris has come to tell Curry his true identity: “that you were an immortal, indestructible being” who has “power you’ve never dreamed of.” But Curry refuses to believe Ikaris and rejects the call. Those who know Campbell’s work know that rejecting the call to adventure is never a good thing.

Moreover, Curry tells Ikaris, “I’d say I don’t need a religion” (issue 1, page 5). Here Gaiman’s Eternals begins one of its major themes: the role of religion in a contemporary, rationalist world, as we will examine further next week.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson