When Gods Walk the Earth

The Eternals was the last major series that Jack Kirby created for Marvel.  It made its debut in the spring/summer of 1976.  And I vividly remember pulling issue 7 off the racks at a local 7-11, and realizing "hey - this is the guy that used to draw The Fantastic Four!"

You must know - in the 70's, we were UFO-crazy. Reports of UFO sightings and encounters made the regular evening news - no lie!  Documentaries aired in Prime Time.  And UFO-related plots turned up on nearly every show - from the sitcoms to the cop shows.  At decades end, there was even a series inspired by the files of Project Blue Book, the U.S. Govs official UFO investigation department, entitled Project: UFO. UFO books poured off the shelves - my local library - which was quite small - must have had a new one at least every month!

Into this fray also came one Erich Von Daniken, a Swiss author of a best-selling book entitled Chariots of the Gods. Chariots put forth the proposition that archaeology and mythology revealed that man had come into contact with extraterrestrials in ancient times, and that they may have imparted technology and wisdom, as well as being the inspiration for gods, heroes, and demons of folklore.  Von Daniken was widely attacked and is pretty much discredited these days - though I should note the criticism actually had less to do with the basic concept of extraterrestrials visiting earth in ancient times - even uber-skeptic Carl Sagan considered that within the realm of possibility - but with sloppy research and blatantly false claims.  Nevertheless, the book (and a cheapo documentary film based on it) were widely popular in the Disco Decade.

Jack Kirby was always interested in UFOs (a friend of mine once spent an evening talking with him about them at a convention), and a voracious sci-fi reader.  Take Von Daniken and a healthy dose of Arthur C. Clarke's classic Childhood's End, and you've got the basis for The Eternals.

The Eternals tells the story of a revelation.  Somewhere in Central America, Dr. Daniel Damian, his daughter Margo, and a mysterious, studly young fellow named Ike Harris locate an ancient, secret temple full of artifacts Damian believes are proof of extraterrestrial contact in ancient times.  An important discovery - but something is amiss.  That something in particular is Ike, who seems way too familiar with the place, the artifacts, and a number of other things.  He also seems to have a purpose in being there - one to which the Damian's research is incidental.

Things start to get really weird when Ike begins to explain that man was not only visited by an alien race - he was, in fact, created by one.  Man - and his cousins.  It seems, millennia ago, a powerful and unbelievably advanced race known as The Celestials dropped in, performed genetic experiments on the primates of Olde Earth, and produced not one, but three races - man, The Eternals - a race of beings who looked like men, but were gifted with immortality, near-indestructibility, and what we might term as super powers, and The Deviants - warty, reptilian humanoids who once dominated the earth but were driven below the ocean depths when they had the nerve to try and attack The Celestials.  The Eternals inspired the tales of heroes and gods of our mythology.  The Deviants - the demons, devils and monsters.

The Damians are pretty much ready to write Ike off as a nutcase - when they are suddenly attacked by a force of Deviants, led by a general named Kro.  The Deviants are there to stop Ike - whose real name is "Ikaris", from starting a beacon which will welcome a Celestial ship back to earth.  This doesn't work out for the Deviants - as Ikaris starts the beacon and fights with his superpowers - the fracas interrupted when the Celestial ship prepares to land right there before the ruin.  It seems the Celestials revisit their experiments every multi-thousand years or so.  This visit is to be a fateful one.  The Celestials are here to make a 50-year survey of the world the species they've sired has created.  If they like what they see, they will deem the experiment a success and move on.  If not - earth and everything on it is toast.

This became the canvas the story would be painted on.  The Deviants, seeking vengeance, hoped to drive The Celestials off.  The Eternals pondered how, exactly, to engage with them (this pondering, ultimately, took the form of something called The Uni-Mind; a kind of ceremony in which hundreds of Eternals essentially transformed themselves into a single entity - a giant floating brain that drifted around in space for awhile.  Seriously.  Only Kirby could have pulled this off).  And mankind - well, mankind stood around and watched in bewilderment. 

The Eternals was nothing if not controversial.  Hapless nerd Marvel-philes groused continually about how  Etermals could fit into the existing Marvel Universe, in which the Greek and Norse gods had already been established as being entirely real.  Though it was clear Kirby had no interest in continuity with said Universe (references to the FF and The Inhumans, for example, were treated as references to fictional characters), the Powers That Be insisted that The Eternals was taking place in the same milieu as the rest of the Marvel titles. It's easy enough today to shake one's head at why this was so damn important to the fans, but even moreso, it's hard to say with Marvel editorial didn't simply concede that this was a free-standing story with a free-standing setting, and not part of their regular "universe".  Stubbornness?  Shortsightedness? Regardless, the controversy raged across the letters page throughout the title's run.

The Eternals ran for 19 issues; about 2 years.  Kirby partisans (and know that I am, most assuredly, a Kirby partisan) blanch at the thought, but conspiracy theories to the contrary, the likely story is it just didn't catch on.  None of Kirby's 70's series really did.  At 19 issues, The Eternals did a little better than most.

There are many possible reasons.  The Eternals was not a superhero book - though it resembled one.  It would be better characterized as a science-fiction title.  Those looking for standard superhero action would have been disappointed. This was clearly Kirby's intent.  In issue 4, Ikaris flies into action against a Deviant invasion of NYC - and is almost immediately taken out.  It's the diplomatic intervention of Eternals Sersi, Makkari and Thena - and the NYPD - that ultimately ends the Deviant attack.  

Like the Fourth World titles, it was something of an extended novel - a tale told in monthly chapters. In this, Kirby was way ahead of his time - the only contemporary project would have been Jack Katz's First Kingdom title. Perhaps Kirby might have been better off trying to produce these sagas privately than through the Marvel/DC grist mill. As an extended tale without the simple frames of reference of the superheroes, it wasn't something you could easily drop into the middle of.



Again, like the Fourth World, The Eternals was not flawless.  Kirby's dialog was stilted and odd, out step with the verbal style of the times, and lacking Stan Lee's sometimes purple and corny but nonetheless more naturalistic ear.  Some readers couldn't and still can't stand it.  His art, too, looked different. Without the leavening of Joe Sinnot or Vince Colleta's inks, which tended to pretty things up and smooth out the rougher edges, the Mike Royer-inked pages of The Eternals et al gave us Kirby unfettered.  For some, it was too stylized, too strong.  The dynamism was unquestionable, but Kirby's big square hands and homely faces were not what Marvel-ites expected, or were used to.  To those who knew Kirby's art from the mid-60's, he seemed to have changed.  Those who'd cut their teeth on Neal Adams and Jim Steranko wondered what all the fuss was about. 

Yet focusing on these ignores the many strengths.  Aside from concept, the characterization was some of the strongest of any Kirby solo title.  While the human characters were little more than passive bystanders (its worth noting that, out of a large cast, only three of the characters were humans), several strong personalities emerged from The Eternals - especially the women - the powerful and noble Thena, and the playful and frequently cruel Sersi stand out.  Likewise, there was the tricksterish Sprite, and the tragic and mysterious "hero" of issue # 13.  Possibly the strongest and most complex was the Deviant general, Kro.  Essentially a villain, yet Kro was driven by ambition, and capable of a certain flawed nobility and even love.  In issue 8, "The City of the Toads", Thena, for whom Kro clearly has a major, and not entirely unrequited, crush, accompanies him to the Deviant city of Lemuria.  There she is witness to the genocidal cleansing of mutated Deviants, accidents of birth even more monstrous than the already gloopy Deviant breed, and the gladiatorial games used to eliminate the stronger mutants.  Disgusted, Thena takes her leave, accompanied by two of the gladiatorial "mutates" - The Reject, who's mutation is that he looks like a handsome human, and Karkas, who looks something like a swollen carrot with legs and a gash of a mouth.  But the studly Reject is, in fact, a brutal killing machine, whereas Karkas is an articulate and sensitive soul.  The two of them argued constantly.  Finally, there were The Celestials themselves - towering giants who looked as much like colossi in ornamental armor as they did robots.  Never given a word or thought balloon, they remained a complete mystery, both beautiful and terrible.

Editorial pressures got the better of the series in its last days.   Forced to introduce some element of Marvel continuity - The Hulk made an appearance in the next two issues.  Sort of.  In actual point of fact, it wasn't really The Hulk, but rather a super-powered android built by a pair of Hulk-loving college students (again, The Hulk was treated as a seemingly fictional character).  This was the nadir of the series.  Things picked up a bit with the next stories, including a powerful mutant Deviant in NYC, and a duel between Ikaris' and his Loki-like cousin Druig that felt like a throwback to late-period Thor.  The Celestials, once the real center of the book, seemed to fade to the back almost entirely, and The Eternals finally became a superhero series after all.

With The Eternals laid to rest, Kirby finished out his contract with the strange but interesting Devil Dinosaur and the odd superhero Mister Machine, before moving on to animation and his even odder work at Pacific.  He would never attempt anything this ambitious again.
















Re-reading The Eternals today, I find it a bit of a shame he never got to continue.  Kirby 
was way ahead of his time in his attempt to create a long-form comics novel - such a project is commonplace today.  Conceptually, he was dealing with issues such as the origins of man and myths, man's place in the universe, and man's future - and suggesting there might not be much future for humankind, and earth.  To an kid of 11 (my age when I first read the early issues), this was heady stuff.  To a middle-aged dude with an arsenal of knowledge behind him unavailable in my youth - it's still heady stuff.  Announcing his return to Marvel in 1976, Kirby had promised that whatever he did would "electrocute you in the mind".  Still in his prime, as an artist, creator, and storyteller Kirby kept his promise. This was the kind of wild innovation that had marked the explosion of creativity that had been the Marvel Age of the 60's.  But the Marvel-philes of the day just wanted him back drawing the FF and Thor.  With Stan writing.  They didn't know what they had.