The Comics Rack

Eternally yours, Jack Kirby

   "It's sort of weird and lumpy.” These words are part of Neil Gaimen's take on Jack Kirby's series The Eternals. For those of you out of the loop, Gaiman is doing a new mini-series based on Kirby's 30 year old work, which he hopes will reconcile the original series, along with the other appearances of the characters, into the current Marvel Universe. While I feel that Gaimen is up to the task, I realized that I had no real memory of the original series: good, bad, indifferent or even "weird and lumpy." So, I dug out all nineteen issues of The Eternals (along with the single annual) and gave them a re-reading, to try to understand just what Jack was attempting to do with the series and to see how the series holds up today.
   First, however, a bit of history. The Eternals was one of the original concepts that Kirby brought to Marvel upon his return in 1975 after his contract at DC was allowed to expire. The years at DC had not been wholly pleasant and, aside from the desire to support his family in the only way he knew, I'm sure that Jack was also hoping that Marvel would allow him the freedom to explore new concepts and characters. Unfortunately, there were a couple of problems. Marvel wanted Jack tied to some established Marvel characters, so he had to agree to return to Captain America and to also launch a new series featuring the Black Panther: two characters he had co-created. I also believe that Jack's interest in super-heroes had pretty much run its course by this time. If you look at his late Marvel output, his stories are filled with words (such as in Captain America) as if he is trying to tell stories that have more depth than the standard book allows (and it was somewhere around this time that Jack did some prose writing). And while two of the strips done at the same time, Devil Dinosaur and Black Panther, appear to be strictly for entertainment, The Eternals has a deeper message behind it, one often overlooked due to the way the series was presented.
   Contrary to what some may have thought at the time, The Eternals was not New Gods lite. Rather, I believe Jack was attempting to make a statement about how he viewed the relationship of man to a higher power. This was a theme that he had explored many times before in both Thor and Fantastic Four, but here Kirby took the stakes up a bit. Since his previous series had been about "new" gods, this new work was about "old" gods. By intertwining themes from Kubrick's 2001 (a property he was working on for Marvel), Chariots of the Gods (which was popular at the time) and mythology, Kirby created the premise that there were "gods", highly advanced beings, who were responsible for life on Earth. After their initial seeding of life on Earth, the race of "gods" helped shape mankind, which eventually evolved into three groups: the human race; the eternals, a benevolent and advanced race; and the deviants; a malevolent race who were advanced, but were also set on the conquest of the Earth. These ideas don't seem very far afield today and, for the time in which they were written and the way Jack tied the various threads (Stonehenge, Lemuria, etc.) together actually made the book a bit ahead of its time. One can even imagine what the book might have become had Jack been paranoid or prone to conspiracy theories (Kirby's X-Files, anyone?).
   With a strong and inventive premise, one would assume that, under Kirby's guidance, the book would have taken off for a long and successful run. The first 3 issues read almost as a unit (leading me to believe that they may have been the initial proposal that Jack presented to Marvel to sell the book) and not only establish the basic premise of the series in short order, but are also filled with some great Kirby art that combines ancient cities with hi-tech machinery. The 4th issue, however, is a bit fragmented, the 5th even more so (although the art is helped by Mike Royer's arrival as inker), and, by the 6th issue, the series begins to unravel into a series of incidents with no real direction, too many central characters and, eventually, becomes one fight sequence after another.
   So, what happened? This is a question that was discussed in the fan press at the time the series originally came out and still crops up in conversation among Kirby enthusiasts today. The standard answer seems to be that a) Kirby was just tired of doing comics and/or b) his late Marvel work reflects the output of someone past his prime. While there may be a bit of validity to both these answers, I do believe that there is more to the failure of The Eternals than can easily be explained.
   Upon his return to Marvel in 1975, Kirby was nearly 60 years old and had been producing comics for nearly 40 years. I don't believe that he was past his prime in the least, but was, deservedly, tired, especially after the disaster of his time at DC, where promises were made, but never fulfilled (more on this at a later time). Marvel, for their part, were not especially gracious about Jack's return and rather than welcoming him as the chief architect of the Marvel Universe, they treated him as just another freelancer. Even his title of writer/editor was ignored by Marvel and one of the major battles Jack had to fight during his last years in comics was the constant re-drawing and re-writing of his work by the editorial staff of Marvel (more on this too at a later date). The reason I mention all this is that I believe that the quality of Kirby's later work was not due to any one factor, but was, instead, a combination of circumstances that led to his producing acceptable comics that just were not as great as the body of work he had previously produced.
   As this applies to The Eternals, I think that Jack had a good idea which Marvel wanted to publish, but they just didn't want the Kirby version of the series. By the mid-70s, the Marvel universe had gained a structure that had not been in place when Jack was last at the company and, Jack being Jack, he ignored all that had occurred between his last issue of Fantastic Four and the first covers he did upon his return. The Eternals not only bypasses the Marvel continuity of the time, it tosses it out the window, creating a new origin for the world that has nothing in common with the Marvel version of those same events. Basically, Kirby was writing and drawing a series that could have existed in the Marvel Universe he had created, but that could not exist (at least comfortably) in the Marvel Universe of the 1970s.
   To further complicate matters, sources at the time made mention of how Marvel wanted Jack to integrate The Eternals into the Marvel continuity and to feature guest stars. In answer to this, Jack featured a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent or two in the early issues. But Marvel wanted costumed heroes and more of the "COSMIC" type of tale that they felt only Jack could tell (which is in itself amusing, since Jack's best work may have had cosmic events as a part of the plot, but the stories themselves were about very human situations and emotions) and this is where I think that Jack gave up and lost the central premise of the series. Except for one short sequence where Jack reveals that there is a "god" who is above the other gods (#13), any mention of man's relationship to a higher power ceases to be central to the story. By issue #14, which guest stars the Hulk (but, to Jack's credit, it's a robot Hulk), the series is about how the Eternals squabble among themselves, how the Eternals and Deviants battle one another and how all of them, rather than mankind, react to the appearance of the gods.
   Exactly how The Eternals would have turned out had Jack been able to work without editorial interference is interesting to speculate about, but also futile in the end. Kirby is no longer with us, nor are some of the other creators who were involved with the series. The best we can do is try to do is read between the lines to try to discern what was intended and what finally made it into print. Like many other projects that might have managed to tell a more adult story, The Eternals eventually fell victim to circumstances, whether they be editorial or personal.
   For those of you who have in interest in Kirby's work, there were a few issues of The Eternals that you might want to sample to get a feel of where the series might have gone:

• Issues #1-3 stand pretty much on their own and set up the premise for the series and are quite enjoyable, the John Verpoorten inking non-withstanding.
• Issue #7 features the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents mentioned above and probably comes quite close to the interaction between gods and men that Jack may have intended for the series
• Issue #13 again features men and their reaction to gods as a group of astronauts encounter the main ship of the space gods. The issue also establishes that there is a god above the other gods, again stessing what I believe was the theme of the original series.
• Annual #1 features a stand-alone story that probably points to one direction that Jack might have taken with some of the stories. It features one Eternal teamed with two Deviants against the evil scheme of a third Deviant. Lots of good fun and one of the stronger stories of the entire series