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Post by dbutler69 on Jan 11, 2021 12:57:55 GMT -5
I actually kinda liked the Eternals in Thor, but then again, I had never read the Eternal series at that point. If I were to re-read it now, having read Kirby's Eternals, I might not like it as much.
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Post by profh0011 on Jan 11, 2021 15:03:36 GMT -5
I had that reaction to OMAC. My introduction to OMAC was Jim Starlin's 4 episodes... which then led into something that seemed far less. Some years later, I got ahold of Kirby's 8 issues, and it became my favorite of all the work he did for DC in the early 70s. I still can't believe he was doing so many questionable projects for them, yet OMAC was only a bi-monthly, and cut off IN THE MIDDLE of a 3-part story!
Anyway, after reading Kirby's issues, I suddenly realized that what Jim Starlin had done was COMPLETELY mis-guided and off-kilter. It's like he was being "John Byrne" a decade early...
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Post by berkley on Jan 17, 2021 4:03:43 GMT -5
The whole Hulk robot in the later issues was Jack giving in to bringing in the MU. He fought it,, but had to give concessions. The interference in the later issues did hurt the series. My impression is that Kirby was still resisting this pressure and thus the "cosmic-powered Hulk" was from one POV a grudging concession to connecting the Eternals with the MU while actually keeping them their own thing for a little longer. But the presence of even this false Hulk killed the unique atmosphere of the book for me. It just looked and felt so wrong, the Hulk visually and in every other way was so much less interesting than the Eternals, Deviants, and Celestials.
And the story itself was a simple extended chase and fight scene that went on far too long and would have suffered in comparison to the earlier issues even with a different opponent. Because the other big concession Kirby made in those last 6 issues was to simplify the book and write more straightforward super-powered adventures with a single lead character, Ikaris, who was the closest thing the Eternals had to a traditional alpha-male superhero (and at times, in fact, a critique of that very trope).
He did manage to sneak in a Thena + Reject & Karkas story in the Annual and there are still many interesting and informative moments scattered throughout all those late issues - scenes and incidents, bits of dialogue and narration that are important for reaching an understanding of what the whole Eternals thing was about. But they're sprinkled here and there in the midst of these relatively conventional stories: the epic scope was gone, the innovative ensemble narrative structure, with no single lead character, that was gone, the whole thing felt less exciting and original in comparison to the first 13 issues.
I should finish my re-read soon and get back to talkng about the Eternals concept in general and how it's been misconstrued by later writers up to the present day.
Having finished my re-read, I've had to re-adjust my attitude towards those last six issues, just a little: yes, the book wasn't quite the same cohesive, firing on all cylinders, tour de force (IMO) it had been in #1-13; yes, Kirby made concessions to market or editorial pressure, whether felt or real; and yes, Eternals #14-19 can be compared to the last several issues of Mister Miracle (forget the exact numbers) in how the spirit of the book changed in response to those pressures - but I think Kirby had learned from his Mister Miracle experience and when the same thing happened to the Eternals he tried to find different ways to deal with it.
Or to put it another way, on this latest read, I'm more impressed with those scattered references to the grander scheme of things Eternal that Kirby managed to sneak into those last few issues, and I'll be making some reference to them when I get into talking about that scheme - hopefully within the next few days.
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Post by berkley on Feb 25, 2021 5:41:18 GMT -5
I've been putting this off too long, partly because I fear many people here have heard me say it all before, but also because the whole question is starting to make me feel depressed the more I see of Kieron Gillen's new series and the online responses to it - I've made the mistake of reading all the related news and reviews and twitter posts I can find and it's hard to overcome a sense of futility in the face of what seems to me a relentless barrage of Marvel, Inc centred chatter.
Perhaps I'm making a mistake, but I feel so appalled by the shallowness, the disdain, the sheer ignorance of all this online talk in regards to the original Eternals series, that I've reconsidered my earlier intention: I'd meant to make this a straightforward celebration of those comics with a few brief criticisms of later Eternals appearances or revivals added at the end; but now I feel I have to spend more time than I'd intended talking about what Kirby's Eternals is not, in addition to what it is. So please bear with me while I lay some groundwork that most people here probably don't need to read.
Anyway, with all that in mind, here are a couple of the most obvious things Kirby's The Eternals, is not:
- It is not a superhero comic.
- It is not a recycled New Gods/Fourth World.
I make these two distinct because The New Gods is itself not a superhero comic. However, it does have one thing in common with the superhero genre that The Eternals does not: it is a about a dramatised struggle between good and evil. The New Gods treats this theme in a mythic, primal way, while superhero comics treat it in a relatively sophisticated, romantic way. I know I don't need to spell this out to everyone here, but the distinction I'm drawing is between primal and sophisticated, and between mythic and romantic - as in, say, the contrast between Judaeo-Christian myth and Arthurian romance.
And that leads us to another, more general but still negative observation:
- It is not about a combat between good and evil.
"So far, so obvious", you might say. But we're just beginning.
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Post by berkley on Feb 26, 2021 0:15:54 GMT -5
OK, so if The Eternals isn't any of those things, what is it? In a nutshell, it's a science-fiction/fantasy about humanity, as represented by the three branches of Eternal, Deviant, and Human, striving to reach a new level of consciousness that will allow them to exist and work together and avoid self-destruction. An obvious parallel, though I have no idea if Kirby was directly influenced by or not, would be Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End.
And even wikipedia mentions Clarke's book in its Eternals entry, so this idea has at least been accepted to some degree - but, it seems, only at the most superficial level: IOW, its implications have not been taken seriously or even thoguht about much. And I thnk the reason for this is simple: most Marvel readers and creators continue to read the series in terms of the superhero comics they're used to, and/or as New Gods-lite.
Thus, for a long time, the Deviants were written as straightforward villains; but then writers were puzzled by the absence of a Darkseid equivalent - how could Kirby have been so stupid? What an idiot! he couldn't even come up with a good imitation of his own previous work!
More recently, this idea has been put aside (finally!) and in the last two or three Eternals revivals the Deviants have been written more sympathetically. But this doesn't mean writers have freed themselves from the idea that there has to be a villain, so now we see the Celestials taking the Deviants' place as antagonists. Instead of Deviants as strangely Darkseid-less Apokoliptans, we have the Celestials as Galactus-like giant alien threats that must be fought and driven off to save the earth.
But this was not at all the role of the Celestials in Kirby's series: like Clarke's Overlords (though I don't want to draw these parallels too closely), they were not alien threats to be resisted, they represented a higher stage of development that humanity must try to reach - not all in one leap, Kirby's Celestials are far too advanced for that to be possible, but towards which humanity must try to take a first step. IOW, they are not an enemy to be fought, they are an enigma to be solved. Hence their silence, the sense of awe and mystery that surrounds them - and which is crucial to their proper functioning within the story and thus should never be tampered with by any writer who appreciates what's going on with this book.
If this seems unheroic, remember: it isn't a (super)heroic story. One way to look at it, is for example, something like global warming: how are we going to solve this problem? By changing our collective behaviour, which means changing our priorities, changing our whole way of looking at things, our most fundamental attitudes - IOW reaching a new level of consciousness, as a species. We are not going to solve it by superheroes punching oil executives in the face.
So the conflict in The Eternals is an internal one, played out in symbolic terms by the actions of Humans, Deviants, and Eternals squabbling amongst themselves and with each other - and, hopefully, eventually getting their act together before it's too late.
Later writers, either missing all this or just not finding it to their taste, have drained the Celestials of mystery by incorporating them into the MU's already over-cluttered cosmic hierarchy, having them fight and even be defeated by earth's superheroes and so on.
A further development is that writers then ask themselves, wait a second, since the Celestials are alien threats, what's the problem with the Eternals? How come they just roll over and don't fight back like heroes? What a bunch of losers! Neil Gaiman, Jason Aaron, and now Kieron Gillen have taken this misguided view to its logical extreme and have made the Eternals mere robots, programmed humanoid machines, cogs in a greater machine called earth, bereft of free will, living only to perform their programmed functions.
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Post by kirby101 on Feb 26, 2021 8:47:50 GMT -5
I agree that the Eternals were not just a reiteration of The New Gods or Thor. He was looking at beings that were Godlike, not just perceived as gods by superstitious mortals. It was much more purely religious than the previous books.
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Post by brutalis on Feb 26, 2021 9:53:33 GMT -5
Celestial were never meant to be Galactus like beings or antagonists. They are "above" and "beyond" such things and are meant to be the catalyst which sets up the races of humanity, deviant and eternal for fulfilling or failing the grand experiment.
If anything the 3 races are the antagonists of the stories when showing fear and ignorance in attempts to attack the Celestial presence. If instead the 3 unite in understanding of what is truly occurring then perhaps Earth passes the test!
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Post by berkley on Feb 26, 2021 10:49:28 GMT -5
I agree that the Eternals were not just a reiteration of The New Gods or Thor. He wasn't looking at beings that were Godlike, not just perceived as gods by superstitious mortals. It was much more purely religious than the previous books. I think I understand what you mean but I also think we have to be very careful how we use the word "religious" in the Etrnals context: there is no question of blind worship or of the Eternals bowing down to the Celestials - this is the mistake I suspect Gillen is going to make, from hints he's dropped in interviews, and derives once again from the mistaken idea that there must be must some explanation why the Eternals don't resist the Celestials the way superheroes resist the threat of Galactus.
Zuras says in one bit of dialogue late in the series "The Space Gods are not omnipotent. Merely ... older!" There is no hint of worship or slavery in the Eternals relationship to the Celestials. They don't fight against them because they are intelligent and insightful enough to understand that fighting is not the response called for by the problem they represent. That is the mistake the Deviants make over and over again.
So religious, yes, in the sense that they are literal creators and that they represent the mysteries of reality and existence, but not in the sense of blind worship.
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Post by kirby101 on Feb 26, 2021 12:57:45 GMT -5
That is what I mean. Not religion within the series, but Kirby looking a Godlike beings. I miss wrote a sentence, I meant "He was looking at beings that were Godlike, not just perceived as gods by superstitious mortals."
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Post by berkley on Mar 3, 2021 19:58:39 GMT -5
Celestial were never meant to be Galactus like beings or antagonists. They are "above" and "beyond" such things and are meant to be the catalyst which sets up the races of humanity, deviant and eternal for fulfilling or failing the grand experiment. If anything the 3 races are the antagonists of the stories when showing fear and ignorance in attempts to attack the Celestial presence. If instead the 3 unite in understanding of what is truly occurring then perhaps Earth passes the test! Yes, the way the Celestials are dealt with in any Eternals story is absolutely crucial to getting it right - and for the most part, later writers have not done so. Most recently, Neil Gaiman and others, including Hickman, Aaron, and soon (I suspect) Gillen, have gone all in ith the idea that they are Galactus-like predators that have to be fought off by earth's super-heroic defenders.
And thus to the conclusion that the Eternals, since they don't fight the Celestials, are their hapless slaves. That Gaiman and Gillen think this is going to make the Eternals more interesting as a group or as individuals isbizarre, to say the least. Aaron actually took this ridiculous idea to its logical conclusion and had the Eternals commit mass suicide out of shame!
I wp't be surprised if sometime down the road, writers have the Eternals and Deviants switch roles, because to them, it's the Deviants who have done the right thing by attacking the Celestials in the past. Gaiman has already "ret-conned" this into an act of self-defence, by turning the Celestials into evil aliens who devour the innocent Deviants as a luxury. So a logical next step might be to characterise the Eternals as evil lackeys of these dastardly cosmic villains.
Gaiman and Gillen haven't gone that far yet, but nothing would shock me at this point.
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Post by berkley on Mar 3, 2021 22:51:04 GMT -5
But anyway, to get back to the Kirby Eternals rather than the new stuff, one of the thngs that make it work is that humanity has not yet ventured farther from the earth than we have actually done in real life: IOW, hardly at all. The greater universe is far beyond our reach in terms of hummanity going out into the galaxy, other star systems , and exploring or colonising them, let alone encountering other beings. So when Ikaris says "Behold the Universe! The vast home of the Gods!", it has a far greater resonance than it would in a superhero comic where earth heroes pretty routinely travel in spaceships, meet alien races like the Kree, etc, and generally find the universe a pretty small place, conceptually.
So the fact that the Space Gods come from the far reaches of the universe means something at the symbolic as well as the story level. Lines like "the Space Gods are creatures of space and time and the fibre of unknown equations.", scattered throughout the series, indicate that they represent something more than just cool-looking aliens from outer space. When Ajak says "To dwell on him [Arishem] is to challenge the cosmos itself", it doesn't mean challenge as in resist or fight, as superheroes fight their alien enemies, it means the challenge of understanding, of learning something about the nature of the universe, of space and time, of reality itself, or at least of taking the first steps on that path. The challenge of science, IOW.
I think this is one of the major themes of the series: that science, the search for understanding, the quest for truth, is the key to our future. And Kirby reiterates this message repeatedly throughout the series, verbally and visually.
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Post by profh0011 on Mar 4, 2021 8:47:03 GMT -5
THE ETERNALS had no business in "The Marvel Universe". NONE.
As usual, other writers DON'T GET Kirby's writing. At all.
And yet, they INSIST on mutilating his work, and claiming he "wasn't a good writer", wasting their time instead of taking his advice and CREATING their own characters.
This is one of the main ongoing core problems with corporate-owned characters.
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Post by Duragizer on Mar 4, 2021 14:37:05 GMT -5
The Big Two love to make their shared universes as cluttered as possible. It's no wonder I'm not much of a fan of the concept anymore.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 5, 2021 12:40:50 GMT -5
Yes, the way the Celestials are dealt with in any Eternals story is absolutely crucial to getting it right - and for the most part, later writers have not done so. Most recently, Neil Gaiman and others, including Hickman, Aaron, and soon (I suspect) Gillen, have gone all in ith the idea that they are Galactus-like predators that have to be fought off by earth's super-heroic defenders.
And thus to the conclusion that the Eternals, since they don't fight the Celestials, are their hapless slaves. That Gaiman and Gillen think this is going to make the Eternals more interesting as a group or as individuals isbizarre, to say the least. Aaron actually took this ridiculous idea to its logical conclusion and had the Eternals commit mass suicide out of shame! I wp't be surprised if sometime down the road, writers have the Eternals and Deviants switch roles, because to them, it's the Deviants who have done the right thing by attacking the Celestials in the past. Gaiman has already "ret-conned" this into an act of self-defence, by turning the Celestials into evil aliens who devour the innocent Deviants as a luxury. So a logical next step might be to characterise the Eternals as evil lackeys of these dastardly cosmic villains.
I like both Gaiman and Gillen but have not read either series. This is very disappointing.
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Post by berkley on Mar 5, 2021 14:03:59 GMT -5
Yes, the way the Celestials are dealt with in any Eternals story is absolutely crucial to getting it right - and for the most part, later writers have not done so. Most recently, Neil Gaiman and others, including Hickman, Aaron, and soon (I suspect) Gillen, have gone all in ith the idea that they are Galactus-like predators that have to be fought off by earth's super-heroic defenders.
And thus to the conclusion that the Eternals, since they don't fight the Celestials, are their hapless slaves. That Gaiman and Gillen think this is going to make the Eternals more interesting as a group or as individuals isbizarre, to say the least. Aaron actually took this ridiculous idea to its logical conclusion and had the Eternals commit mass suicide out of shame! I wp't be surprised if sometime down the road, writers have the Eternals and Deviants switch roles, because to them, it's the Deviants who have done the right thing by attacking the Celestials in the past. Gaiman has already "ret-conned" this into an act of self-defence, by turning the Celestials into evil aliens who devour the innocent Deviants as a luxury. So a logical next step might be to characterise the Eternals as evil lackeys of these dastardly cosmic villains.
I like both Gaiman and Gillen but have not read either series. This is very disappointing.
They're two of the most talented and intelligent writers in comics, which makes it all the more disappointing, but possibly not as surprising as it should be, since when you read their interviews on the subject it's clear that they were both given the same job: integrate the Eternals into the superhero-MU in a convincing way. Everything was subordinated to that objective so changes to the most basic elements of the original series, including to the very essence of its characters, were not just allowed, but IMO even encouraged.
And another way of putting that would be to say that right from the beginning, from the moment they began to think about what an Eternals series might be like, they weren't much concerned with looking too closely at the original or with trying to figure out what it was all about. Not that they haven't read it - I'm sure they've done that as part of heir research for their respective books, but not much more than that.
It's been a long time since I read the Gaiman articles but from memory, he didn't know much about them beforehand and never developed much of a rapport with the Kirby material - at least, never found much to say about it in interviews.
Gillen, OTOH, had as a young reader encountered the Celestials in the pages of Starlin's Infinity books - where IIRC their function is basically to show how all-powerful Thanos is by the ease with which he defeats them - so obviously not much connection with the Kirby series. He has talked a little more than I think Gaiman did about the original series, but at a very superficial level. Once he starts getting into details, it's pretty clear he's working mostly from the premises set up by more recent writers. e.g. Gaiman, Aaron, Hickman.
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