Product Description

Jack Kirby reveals a secret history of heroes and horrors as humanity's cousins, the Eternals and the Deviants, vie to inherit the Earth! It's a time of titans, terror, and time travel as only the King could conceive - collected across two softcover volumes! Collecting Eternals #1-11.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #368549 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780785133131
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Customer Reviews

Kirby's last hurrah at Marvel Comics.
Jack Kirby was one of the leading lights of comics in the 1960s; along with co-creator Stan Lee (just how much each had is a matter of debate; Lee, a huge media personality and Marvel's public face, dominates the popular imagination, while the more vicious Kirby partisans envision him as a malevolent corporate fat-cat fiendishly taking all the credit while doing no work), he created the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men, Thor, and many other important characters. Following his departure from Marvel in 1970, he spent a few years at DC, supplying them with an oddball assortment of creations such as Kamandi, Etrigan the Demon, O.M.A.C, and, most importantly, the Fourth World. The Fourth World was an expansive four-title saga chronicling a race of cosmic gods. Kirby never got to finish it, as it was cancelled out from under him. Returning to Marvel in the mid-70s, he clearly wasn't done with the concept, and thus "The Eternals" came to be.

While the Fourth World was at least nominally in DC continuity (though mostly divorced from their line proper), "The Eternals" was meant to be its own world, where no superhumans could be found. Kirby posits that all life on Earth was created by the experiments of the Celestials, massive cosmic beings referred to be all as the "space gods" (and, unlike the usual Kirby "gods as superheroes" motif, the Celestials actually project a sense of unmatched power suitable to gods). The Celestials brought forth three races: the Deviants, genetically-unstable creatures who dwell beneath the surface after the Celestials destroyed their first civilization; humans, the middle of the three, inhabiting the surface; and the Eternals, a race of immortals who live on the mountaintops and roam the skies (and live among us). Humanity knows nothing of their brother species, apart from old legends (most of the main characters have been mistaken for at least one mythological figure), until the return of the Celestial Fourth Host at the beginning of this series for the judgement of the Earth prompts both the Eternals and the Deviants to appear in the open.

Comparing this to the Fourth World property, the use of only a single title allows for a much more wholistic feel. The focus switches fromc character to character, but there is a solid driving narrative. And Kirby offers up a wide range of chracters in these first eleven issues. The story opens with Ikaris (Icarus, alias Ike Harris), the closest thing that there is to a main character in this book, and also one of the less compelling Eternals, as well as the two token human viewpoint characters, Professor Damian and his daughter Margo (the latter is not one of the stronger female characters around, even by the standards of the era; she oscillates between doing whatever her dad says to doing whatever Ikaris says, and the one occasion when she disagrees with both of them the two agree to overrule her own opinion). More interesting are Sersi (Circe/Kirke), Thena (Athena), and Deviant General Kro (who bears a passing resemblance to the Devil). Sersi (by far the most successful of the Eternals characters when later integrated into the Marvel Universe proper, including a few stints on the Avengers) is a fun, free-spirited enchantress with as much of a sex drive as the Comics Code would permit in the 70s. Thena and Kro, meanwhile, enact a cross-species flirtation, with amusingly stilted dialogue ("Let the space gods empty this world -- and leave but you and I!").

Recommended for fans of Kirby and the best of Marvel in the 1970s.

First of 2 collections of Jack Kirby's Eternals saga.
The Eternals was probably for Kirby one of the major projects he worked on at Marvel after returning there from DC. In some ways, it was an attempt at duplicating the 'cosmic saga' such as had been done with the "Fourth World" titles at DC. But somehow it just doesn't match.

Oh, its a great series, but it ended before Jack could take it to its conclusion. Instead of having 4 series to play with, he had to do it all in one. Unlike the "Fourth World" series that touched on the larger DC universe, it seems clear that (despite the appearance of SHIELD Agents early on), this series was intended to be in a separate reality from the Marvel universe. Really, NO Marvel characters appeared in Kirby's run. It was only later in Thor that the Eternals were tied into the Marvel Universe (this storyline reprinted in 2 Thor TPB called "The Eternals Saga", btw).

Now, this volume is the first of 2 that reprints Jack's entire saga. If you missed the Eternals Omnibus, these 2 contain the same stuff.

Like the Fourth World saga, its full of great characters, human, eternal, and deviant.

I wonder if Marvel will reprint Jack's other 'cosmic series' he did at Marvel, his work on the 2001 comic, which later became Machine Man. There would probably be problems of licensing, so they'd probably have to do something about that. Atlesat give us back Mr Machine/Machine Man. We have reprints of his Captain America, Black Panther, and Devil Dinosaur.

eternals by jack kirby
for all of you that enjoyed comic books as i did one name comes up before all others Jack Kirby I just wish i had been able to keep my originals but there graphic novels bring back so many memories. enjoy them and pass them on to the next generation.