Eternals #1

Eternals #1, by Kieron Gillen, Esad Ribić and Matthew Wilson (Marvel Comics)

The Eternals were the centrepiece of Jack Kirby’s 1977 return to Marvel comics, a riff on the New Gods (themselves a riff on the Inhumans), mixed in with a dash of  world mythology and a thick layering of the theories of Erich von Däniken. Kirby meant them to be outside the Marvel Universe, but corporate Marvel wasn’t easily able to cope with that, and so, after Kirby left with the series incomplete, the dangling plot threads were tied up in Thor. Jim Starlin’s Titanians were retconned as another branch of Eternals, and Sersei and The Forgotten One ended up the Avengers for a while. Yet somehow, they never seemed quite comfortable in the Marvel Universe. No-one seemed to be able to answer the question of what they were for.

Neil Gaiman tried to answer that question in a 2006 miniseries about which I am now rather more enthusiastic than when I wrote this review. But even he didn’t wholly succeed. Jason Aaron, in the Final Host saga that launched the latest iteration of Avengers in 2018, killed the whole lot of them off. However, given both that it has been shown that dead Eternals can be reborn, and also that an Eternals movie had already been announced, their revival wasn’t going to be far away. Fortunately, Marvel handed the job of bringing them back to Kieron Gillen.

Gillen’s task is not an easy one. He has not only to avoid repeating Kirby and Gaiman, but he also has to do something distinct from his own work with similar themes in The Wicked and the Divine. It ends up being a bit early to judge how much he succeeds. This is because Gillen has chosen to pace this opening issue quite slowly. Not for The Eternals the wham-bam-thank-you-mam of the first issue of WickDiv. This is not to say that nothing happens. There’s a couple of resurrections, a murder, a guest appearance by Iron Man and a fight with a Deviant in a sewer. But Gillen evidently feels that here, he can let the story breathe a bit. So, whilst key Eternals such as Ikaris, Zuras and Druig are here, we have yet to see the likes of Thena, Sersei or Ajak. There are Gillenesque touches; genderswapping a major character, for instance.

Esad Ribić’s artwork is impressive. It has the feel of a skilled European draughtsman working on Metal Hurlant, and helps distance Eternals from other Marvel titles. This, the artwork says, is not just a run-of-the-mill superhero title. Matthew Wilson colours with the apparently effortless ease that we have come to expect from him, making it look as if colour was always an inherent part of Ribić’s art.

It remains to be seen if Gillen can actually make Eternals work, in a way that it’s never quite worked before. But this is perhaps as good a start as we could have hoped for. And it’s certainly worth following to see where Gillen takes us.