Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, columnist Steve Bennett offers insight about the Eternals movie and the correlating media offered via Marvel’s various platforms.
Now that it’s streaming on Disney+, I finally saw Marvel’s Eternals and it was fine. My feelings about the film can be neatly summed up by the headlines of two recent stories about it. First, there was EW’s acknowledgment that the “comics are even better than the movie”, with which I heartily agree with. The current series by Kieron Gillen and Esad Ribic is beautiful, complicated, and compelling, and in spite of the genderswapping of several characters (Makkari, Sprite, Ajak), the characters remain both distinctive and faithful to Jack Kirby’s original version of them.
The piece also points out one of the problems with the movie. It turns The Deviants into not terribly interesting “inherently evil monsters” (sort of dinosaurs covered in the black oil from The X-Files ) instead of Kirby’s vision of them as being a “race of shapeshifters.” Though I can see why they made the change; there are already plenty of people in the cast, turning The Deviants into actual characters would’ve undoubtedly made a long movie even longer. But, I’m still disappointed that the movie didn’t include my favorite Eternals character, The Deviant Karkas, a peace-loving huge red thumb-shaped monster.
I’ve long been a fan of the Cartoon Network animated series Steven Universe (see “Believe In Steven), and had just been rewatching some episodes on HBO Max. Yet, I somehow didn’t notice that a scene from the MCU’s Eternals shares a plot twist with the Cartoon Network series Steven Universe until it was pointed out to me. In both Eternals and Steven Universe, there’s an incredibly powerful creature gestating at the center of the earth that will destroy the planet once it’s released.
I’ve previously written about Marvel’s vertical Infinity Comics (see “Where The Eyeballs Are”), and expressed my fondness for my favorite Infinity comic, It’s Jeff! by Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru. Well, since I’m already writing about Marvel’s Eternals, it has given me the opportunity to mention Eternals: The 500 Year War, a seven-issue series that made its debut January 12, 2022 on the Marvel Unlimited app; but is now also available on Webtoon.
What makes Eternals: The 500 Year War of particular interest, especially to me was that each installment will be set in a different country and will have a creative team from that country. The story is standard, the quality of the art varies, and some segments are stronger than others, but it’s an interesting experiment. And, it’s enough of a success that I’d like to see Marvel try something like this again. A Spider-Man World Tour immediately springs to mind.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
