Month: March 2025

Jack Kirby, the legendary king of comics, was one of the most imaginative, prolific creators who ever lived. Even towards the end of his career in comic books in the mid-1970s, when he was in his late 50s, he was doing really great work. One of the stand-out projects of this era was The Eternals, published by Marvel Comics.

The Eternals is a series I’ve wanted to read for quite some time now. Back in 2020 Marvel released the trade paperback Eternals by Jack Kirby: The Complete Collection, and at last I’ve obtained a copy.

The Eternals was written, penciled & edited by Jack Kirby. John Verpoorten inked the first four issues and Mike Royer inked the remainder of the series. It was lettered by Gasper Saladino, John Costanza, Irving Watanabe & Mike Royer and colored by Glynis Wein.

It’s important to put The Eternals within the context of Kirby’s career. He had departed Marvel in 1970 under a cloud, unhappy with the lack of creative control, accurate credit, and fair financial compensation. Kirby had hoped to find all of these things at DC Comics, Marvel’s chief competitor. And while he did indeed create some of the absolute best work of his career at DC during the first half of the 1970s, ultimately his tenure there proved to be a very frustrating & disappointing experience, so much so that he eventually felt forced to return to Marvel.

The Eternals was one of the projects Kirby worked on during his mid-1970s tenure at Marvel. The first issue was released with a July 1976 cover date. The Eternals would ultimately run for 19 monthly issues, with an Annual also being produced by Kirby during this time.

With The Eternals, Kirby was very much tapping into the pseudoscientific theories of Erich von Däniken, who popularized the idea of “ancient astronauts” in his book Chariots of the Gods? Running with the idea that primitive human civilizations had been influenced by alien visitors, Kirby devised the Celestials, towering, mysterious “space gods” who periodically visited Earth throughout the millennia.

During the Celestials first visit, the space gods experimented on apes and created three separate branches of human evolution: ordinary human beings, the genetically unstable, warlike Deviants, and the super-powered, immortal Eternals. The Deviants are responsible for humanity’s superstitions about the Devil, demons & other monsters, while the Eternals are the sources of inspiration for mythological gods & heroes around the globe.

Kirby was setting up some ambitious, wild concepts & ideas. What happens when humanity discovers that they are not alone, that in fact they share the planet Earth with two other intelligent species? What happens to all three groups – humans, Eternals and Deviants – when they are faced with the fact that the “gods” who shaped their development countless thousands of years ago have returned to judge if their “experiment” is a success or failure?

At this point in time Kirby very much just wanted to do his own thing. He wanted the freedom to write, illustrate & edit his own titles, without any outside interference. And it seems pretty clear that Kirby intended for The Eternals to take place outside the regular Marvel universe. After all, the entire concept really doesn’t work if you already have godlike beings such as Thor, Loki, Hercules and Galactus showing up on Earth like clockwork.

Unfortunately, Marvel editorial reportedly pressured Kirby to begin using characters & concepts from other titles in The Eternals. Early on a few agents of SHIELD show up and Nick Fury’s name gets dropped, but it’s not really intrusive, because these guys might as well be working for the FBI or CIA or some other agency.

No, it’s what happens next that really causes problems.

For the first 13 issues The Eternals really hums along nicely, with Kirby coming up with all sorts of great new characters, exploring the Eternal and Deviant civilizations, hinting at the mysteries of the Celestials, showing humanity’s reactions to all of this craziness. I found it absolutely riveting.

And then the Hulk shows up. Except that it’s not the really Hulk; it’s a robot duplicate of the Hulk created by a couple of college students which accidentally gets imbued with cosmic energy from the Eternals’ mental gestalt “uni-mind” and goes on a rampage. We then get two and a half issues of the Eternals fighting this “cosmic powered Hulk” and while it’s well-drawn (it IS Kirby artwork, after all) it just completely grinds the story to a halt. The momentum that Kirby was barreling along on just goes totally off the rails, and in the remaining few issues after the “Hulk” there’s just something lacking. It was as if the whole thing threw Kirby off his balance, and in the short time he had left he didn’t have the opportunity to regain it.

In spite of its flaws, though, I really enjoyed The Eternals. I think it speaks to Kirby’s immense creativity & imagination that even in this period of time when he was deeply dissatisfied, he could not help but create an amazing cast of characters. Ikaris, Sersi, Makarri, Thena, Kro, Karsas and the Reject were all interesting & full of potential.

I also want to offer up The Eternals as evidence that Kirby really could draw beautiful women. I’ve heard it argued that his women were unattractive, but just taking a quick look at Sersi and Thena will put the lie to that scurrilous accusation.

I’m not certain if The Eternals was cancelled due to low sales, or if Marvel simply decided to end it after Kirby made the decision to leave for the greener pastures of the animation industry, where at long last he was able to obtain health benefits & a pension. Whatever the case, within a few years the characters & concepts from The Eternals were fully integrated into the Marvel universe. Like a lot of people, I feel that the execution of this was a case of trying to put a square peg into a round hole. But after the fact the Eternals, Deviants and Celestials have regularly appeared throughout the Marvel titles.

In 2021 an Eternals movie was released by Disney as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I watched it after finishing the comic book series. While I liked parts of it, I felt in a lot of areas it strayed too far from the original Kirby concepts & designs, so ultimately it was something of a disappointment. But I hope that at the very least it led to Kirby’s family getting a nice fat check from the House of the Mouse.

If you haven’t read The Eternals, then I definitely recommend picking it up. It really shows the boundless imagination of Jack Kirby, and features some incredible artwork by him.