Digitally Speaking...58 "Neil Gaiman's Eternals"

 

 

Okay, so I've been doing a pretty lousy job of talking through my comiXology library, but really it's because there hasn't been much to speak of.  I guess the material was kind of top-loaded or something.  But the good news is that very shortly I'll have finally read all of it, all the Submit stuff and the Image stuff that came in those massive bundles and everything else I got several years back.  What I'm talking about today, actually, is something I added recently because of that dwindling supply, something I'd read when it was originally released but hadn't thought that much about at the time, but having now reread it...

 

So yeah, I wish I'd read the whole thing.  I guess I wouldn't have appreciated it at the time, but at least I'd have read it.  I'm talking about Neil Gaiman's Eternals, a rare Marvel project from about a decade ago, when he was dabbling in comics again, figuring out where he might still fit in after having left the medium for a full-time career writing books.  Part of why I had a look at the freebie first issue comiXology had available was that I've now read the complete Sandman, and that's a great feeling in and of itself.  Part of it is that I've read a few issues of the comics adaption of American Gods, which is the Neil Gaiman book (along with its sequel Anansi Boys) that to date is my Neil Gaiman prose standout, and reading American Gods in any medium made me realize what Neil had done with it all over again, and so why not have a look at Eternals again, right?

 

I remember thinking, at the time, that Eternals didn't seem to live up to the reputation Neil had based on Sandman.  I don't know if it's Marvel's typical inability or lack of interest in keeping its back library visible, but Eternals seemed to blink in and out of existence.  It was Neil's version of a Jack Kirby concept that the King developed as his Marvel answer to his DC New Gods.  I thought that it was merely Marvel handing Neil something that seemed vaguely expansive in the Sandman sense, but that Neil didn't seem to have found as interesting as that, and so the result was easy to dismiss.

 

Well, I found it a great deal more interesting this time. It's a different story from Sandman, of course, although in a lot of ways you might consider the Eternals to be comparable to the Endless Ones.  I didn't really know much about the Endless Ones before actually reading Sandman, so I didn't know that.

 

But what really struck me was the art, from John Romita, Jr.  At the time he did Eternals, John was still very much a Marvel guy, and I was still very much a DC guy trying to figure out Marvel.  In fact, probably a large part of the reason I found it so easy to reject Eternals was because it was a Marvel project, and John was definitely a Marvel artist, whose style was something I'd never really tried to figure out.  Then I had a chance to associate it with something else, Mark Millar's Kick Ass, and still later, Superman, because John eventually became a DC guy. 

 

It's not because he became a DC guy that I suddenly started liking John's work.  I know plenty of DC readers who struggled a great deal with his Superman.  But it probably didn't hurt.  I know it was impossible to think of anything else when reading that issue of Eternals again.  All I could think was, I love this art!  And maybe that helped get me into the story, too.

 

Yeah, though, it's the combination of the plot, and my affinity for the writer and the artist.  I think that's a good equation for liking anything, really, what it is and who's responsible for it, and I guess whether they brought their best material to the table. 

 

Well, I guess at some point I will have to read the rest of it...