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Post by brutalis on May 23, 2021 10:21:17 GMT -5
There's a reasoning for things in Eternals if folks take the time to think them through. Which was Kirby's intent all along for readers; to introduce new ideas, thoughts and concepts all meant for having us think beyond our "normal" imaginings.
A 50 year Celestial judgement is mythic and cosmic in its scope. It isn't meant to be solvable within "issues" as our judging is the core motivator. The impending doom is only going to evolve over time. Do the three families of humanity unite or not to resolve the judgement?. Does mankind just become "numb" to a Celestial presence which looms over us but is NOT an immediate threat? Will the introduction of Eternal and Deviant to the humans help reveal our shortcomings causing us to grow and evolve beyond our ignorance and hatred or does it send us reeling back to manic zealots out to extinguish or change anything or anyone that is considered as different?
Kirby didn't consider comicbooks to be simple or just for kids. Comic books were a modernized way of teaching all who read them. To fire up one's imagination, to give us dreams and thoughts over the past, the present and the future. Born of family tales spun around an evening fire, giving birth to fables, fairy tales, to myths to plays, to novels, to radio shows, to television shows, to movies, to comics, to video games and who knows what is next. It was Kirby's goal to entertain while showing us the world we live in.
Eternals is the grandest adventure known to mankind and it is called LIFE. And we get to read it as imagined by the King, Jack Kirby.
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Post by berkley on May 23, 2021 14:57:33 GMT -5
Yeah, the 50-year judgement was for our bnenefit, not the Celestials. One last chance to get our act together,, as it were. Also, less than the blionkk of an eye to Eternals, let alone Celstials, so not that long. Criticism of this idea usually comes down to the problem that it doesn<t fit well with the established serial format of superhero comics - which is a plus, to my mind, not a negative.
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Post by berkley on May 23, 2021 15:05:42 GMT -5
If you're going to create an original Eternals series, you either need to go back into their past and add new layers to the mythos, or you press forward and create some new reality that that they're faced with. I agree. One non-Kirby Eternals storyline that I really enjoyed was how their origin was tied to that of the Titanians (the Jim Starlin ones) and the Uranians (of Marvel Boy fame). I think it was published in a few issues of What if..?Independently of whether it was a good idea to bring the Eternals to the Marvel universe proper, it added to their mythology, even indirectly, and helped explain how super-powered humanoids could live on two decidedly uninhabitable celestial bodies. It's the mythology aspect that I think is the most important, hence my thorough enjoyment of Thor #300. The Eternals as just another super-team (or even as just another super powered people) holds little interest.
That's the Eternals helpng the Titanians/Uranians, though, not the other way around. Opinions will differ, but for my money, adding Starlin's characters to the Eternals has done nothing constructive for the latter. If Gillen's attempt to make integrate Thanos more convincingly into the Eternals framework works, It won't be an improvement, to my mind. Quite likely, the tail will end up wagging the dog, given the relative popularity of the characters, and the Eyernals will become an obscure appendage to the Thanos mythos.
More likely, it'll just be ignored, as it seems to have been for the most part ever since Gruenwald or whoever it was came up with the idea.
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Post by berkley on May 23, 2021 15:28:30 GMT -5
I haven't read any of the other Eternals series, and it's highly unlikely that I will get to them any time soon. For all I know, they could be terrible. However, I still believe that if you're going to reboot a series like The Eternals, then you need to reimagine the concept. Otherwise, it's not worth doing. Now I realize this leads to problems. You have problems with writers building off the history of previous retcons or reinventions and not staying true to the spirit of the original series. It also seems that Kirby fans, as a whole, don't appreciate creators mining his work and would prefer it to be left alone. Be that as it may, even if the reboots fail, I don't think it's a good reason to stop trying. Someone, at some point, may come up with a brilliant take on The Eternals. My question would be, why is it so hard? Aside from the difficulties creators have had trying to shoehorn The Eternals into the Marvel Universe, I think there are problems with the source material. When the book was cancelled, it left us with an unfinished story with unresolved plotlines. Did Kirby ever tell anyone how he planned to end the book? Did he think that far ahead? One of the criticisms I've read of the series is that it doesn't flow that well from one issue to the next. You get the impression that Kirby is making up the story as he goes along. Now, I could be way off base about that, but I don't think the plotting of the story is as strong as the world building and the mythos. I also keep thinking to myself whether the book was viable as an ongoing series. Clearly it wasn't sales-wise, but the concept Kirby created seemed better suited to a mini-series, a graphic novel, or even those magazine formats Marvel flirted with in the 70s. If he'd created it in the 80s, perhaps it would have suited the Epic imprint. If Kirby had quit the series with issue 19 and a new creative team had come on, what could they have done with the series? Even Kirby had to start digging into The Eternals' past to create villains for them to fight. It's not as though the entire 19 issue run is a tightly plotted race against time to unite humanity, the Deviants and the Eternals before their judgement day. If you're going to create an original Eternals series, you either need to go back into their past and add new layers to the mythos, or you press forward and create some new reality that they're now faced with. It would be great if they were in their own universe and someone finished the story Kirby started, but that's clearly not what Marvel wants to do. I don't know the trends in modern comics very well, but it seems to me that if you want to have an ongoing Eternals series then you can't keep going back to the Kirby well over and over again. The writer of the current series says he always thinks of what Kirby would do and that's create something new. I suppose that's what he's trying to do, for better or for worse.
The framework is thoroughly worked out and it fits together into a cohesive whole. I don't think it's necessarily important whether Kirby had an ending in mind: he may well have thought of the 50-year judgement as aprt of the setting for the rest of the series, as 50 years is a long time in the life of a comic series and would have seemed like an indefinite span at a time when the MU itself had been around for only 15 years or so.
"doesn't flow well from issue to issue":
for me this is simply an indication of conservatism and narrow-mindedness on the part of the audience. I think the ensemble nature of the series, with the protagonist shifting from issue to issue or from multi-part story to multi-part story is one of its strengths.Abd even though the focus changes, all of it works together to present the overall design from a new perspective.
"If Kirby had quit the series with issue 19 and a new creative team had come on, what could they have done with the series?": I plan to get into that question once I finish going through the original series.
" It's not as though the entire 19 issue run is a tightly plotted race against time to unite humanity, the Deviants and the Eternals before their judgement day. No, of course it wasn't: Most of the characters don't even realise that's the key: and even those who do, probably don't yet understand how deep and fundamental this issue is. It's only we readers who have the overall perspective that allows is this insight - and even then only if we're paying attention and reading between the lines. Because at a superficial level it still looks soemthing like a good Eternals vs bad Deviviants scenario.That's part of the genius of the thing. I think it would have been a very slow burn, with hints dropped here and there until the truth finall dawns, perhaps years down the road had the series lasted long enough.
"if you want to have an ongoing Eternals series then you can't keep going back to the Kirby well over and over again.": On the contrary, I think writers would be well-advised to keep going back to the Kirby well - in the sense of making sure they get the fundamentals right, just as a the writer of a new Sherlock Holmes or James Bond story should try to get the basic essence of those concepts right beofre performing their modern variations on the theme. Besides, one can hardly say "over and over": they haven't even done it once! And look at the ideas they choose to work with instead: the most tired clichés of superhero comics. SO yeah, I think they'd be much better off going to the Kirb well - for once at least.
"The writer of the current series says he always thinks of what Kirby would do and that's create something new."
I think this is disingenuous and misleading on Gillen's party: What Kirby meant was to come up with your own creations, not "re-invent" someone else's. Gillen's twisted that into a free ticket to make up whatever random additions or changes he feels like without rgard to the basic essence of the original work. And half the time he isn't even creating anything new, just taking someone else's bad idea - e.g. Gaiman's idea of the Eternals as programmed robots, replaceable cogs in a machine.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on May 23, 2021 17:53:21 GMT -5
I agree. One non-Kirby Eternals storyline that I really enjoyed was how their origin was tied to that of the Titanians (the Jim Starlin ones) and the Uranians (of Marvel Boy fame). I think it was published in a few issues of What if..?Independently of whether it was a good idea to bring the Eternals to the Marvel universe proper, it added to their mythology, even indirectly, and helped explain how super-powered humanoids could live on two decidedly uninhabitable celestial bodies. It's the mythology aspect that I think is the most important, hence my thorough enjoyment of Thor #300. The Eternals as just another super-team (or even as just another super powered people) holds little interest. That's the Eternals helpng the Titanians/Uranians, though, not the other way around. Oh, I agree. The Eternals would have been better off left in their own universe. However, if they must really be brought to the Marvel universe, I'd rather have that kind of story than have them be "The Inhumans, except different". Most probably. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the parsimony of having one concept (The Eternals) be used to explain two other concepts (Titanians and Uranians)*, I preferred to have them be their own thing, a Von Daniken "ancient cosmonauts" story. But what can we do? Everyone has to meet Spider-man and be related to Wolverine eventually, apparently. *It's actually three, because Thor #300 also used the Celestials to explain what the new gods that Odin created shortly before issue #200 were about.
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Post by commond on May 23, 2021 18:13:14 GMT -5
Yeah, the 50-year judgement was for our bnenefit, not the Celestials. One last chance to get our act together,, as it were. Also, less than the blionkk of an eye to Eternals, let alone Celstials, so not that long. Criticism of this idea usually comes down to the problem that it doesn<t fit well with the established serial format of superhero comics - which is a plus, to my mind, not a negative. To me, this highlights the fundamental flaw with the entire series -- that it's all set-up and premise with no payoff. Even in the letter column where readers are complaining bitterly about the Hulk storyline, you have Kirby reiterating his fascination with the concept that ancient humanity was visited by aliens multiple times. His editorials all revolve around the Chariots of the Gods premise except for that bizarre one where he claimed that mutates with super powers would soon live among us. Speaking of Kirby's editorials -- I don't have a problem with Kirby's scripting on the series even though the dialogue and narration isn't particularly good. It's Kirby's voice, and I can accept the idiosyncrasies. I don't even mind the needless exposition. That was the type of comic book writing that was prevalent throughout Kirby's career. His editorials, though. Those things are out there. That's some funky corn right there. I did like the last two issues. They got the story back on track even if the ending was anti-climatic. I can easily imagine the frustration readers had at the time with the lack of development. The Hulk thing was a huge blow. Kirby mishandled that. I can understand why he didn't want the real Hulk in his book, but sometimes you've got to give the public what they want. My overall take on the series was that it was a flawed title. Some great concepts and great artwork, but Kirby could have done with either a co-writer or an editor to help with the plot. My biggest takeaway from the series was that The Fantastic Four would have been significantly worse if Kirby had written and drawn the entire thing.
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Post by berkley on May 23, 2021 19:19:49 GMT -5
We have fundamentally differing views of what constitutes good writing. For me, giving the people what they want is often the sure road to mediocrity - depending of course on what they want, where reader opinions will differ widely again. The last two issues are OK but for me they are depressingly less inspired than the first 13 or so: more like an average superhero story with a slightly exotic background.
The wish for a pay-off with the 50-Year Judgement is - once again, to my way of thinking - another instance of the reader demanding that everything fit the standard pattern. As you point out, perhaps if the Eternals had been an Epic series or GN or what have you, the complaints would have been fewer. But that's a problem with the audience, not the work.
Besides, even within the narrow limits of the superhero genre, do we always need a "pay-off" a resolution of every premise? Do we demand, I dunno, that the status of Marvel's Mutants be resolved once and for all? Or do we just accept that a certain unease, varyng degrees of anti-mutant prejudice, periodic crises, etc, etc, continue to happen over and over again because it's just part of the background of MU's mutant characters. (Prossibly not the best example I could have chosen, as I have no idea what's been happening with MU Mutants the last many years and have never much liked the concept anyway).
A lot of the criticism directed towards the Eternals reminds me of a Harlequin Romance addict reviewing Wuthering Heights on amazon.com: "This is the worst Harlequin Romance ever!" Well, yeah, from the POV of Harlequin Romances, Wuthering Heights is a complete artistic failure. But who said Emily Brontë was trying to write a Harlequin Romance? And what kind of reader thnks she would have been a better writer had she done so?
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Post by commond on May 24, 2021 8:51:07 GMT -5
Well, when I say there's no payoff or resolution, it's not Kirby's fault. There's no payoff because the book was cancelled. What you get is an incomplete story with some great ideas that are never fully realized. The appeal of The Eternals, as far as I can tell, is the premise. That seemed to be what excited Kirby, anyway. It's a book bursting with potential. As I said, I was really starting to get into it during the first half. It's possible that if the book had lasted 100 issues, it could have been Kirby's magnum opus. But it was cancelled, and not because people couldn't understand Kirby's genius. People thought the pacing was slow, there were too many characters, the main character, Ikaris, was boring compared to Thor and Orion, there was no archvillain like Darkseid, and fans who wanted the series to be set in the Marvel Universe were bitterly disappointed by the bait and switch Hulk appearance. A lot of those choices may seem brilliant if you apply auteur theory to the book -- they defy the norms and run against the grain -- but they also killed the book.
Does it matter that there's no payoff to the 50 year judgement? Not necessarily. If you think the heart and soul of the book is something else then who cares if we never have any resolution to the central mystery of the Space Gods. The 50 year judgement is something Kirby borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke and isn't the type of thing you should think about too hard otherwise you'll get a headache trying to figure out whether the scientist will stay the same age trapped in the Inca ruins while his daughter ages in the outside world (I'm sure the Eternals would have found some way to keep her forever young, and that professor that Sersi was besotted with.) The thing is, Kirby spends so much of the series banging the same drum -- The Space Gods have returned! The Space Gods have returned! -- and everyone from the Deviants, to S.H.I.E.L.D agents, to the Russians, and Ikaris' cousin, try to destroy the damn things -- that you expect that through line to come to a head. If the series had lasted, there would have been time for other side plots -- character relationships, more lore from the past, the representatives of the three strands of mankind striving to bring able an end to war and the other ills that plague mankind. However, I don't think you can compare the ongoing premise of the X-Men to the Eternals' hook. It doesn't matter what the time frame is -- it could be a day, a month, a year -- if you begin a story by saying that everything will end in X amount of time unless the heroes do XYZ that becomes the pulse of the story. If the premise had simply been that there were two races of beings that humans never knew existed -- the Eternals and the Deviants - but suddenly they're made aware of them, then sure, you could maintain an ongoing premise like the X-Men. But as soon as you introduce an endgame, who's going to ignore that? I thought the Eternals, humans and Deviants were supposed to unite together and bring peace to the world to show the Celestials that their experiment wasn't a failure. What I want to know is whether Jack Kirby thinks that mankind can do it. But Kirby himself was still lost in the premise that aliens had visited the Earth and were responsible for all of mankind's mythology and achievements.
I don't see why Kirby couldn't have wrapped up the Fourth Host storyline in the first dozen issues then moved onto the next arch, so to speak.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on May 24, 2021 8:58:10 GMT -5
That's some funky corn right there. This is officially going to be my new go-to expression.
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Post by commond on May 24, 2021 9:18:50 GMT -5
I stole it from the King.
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Post by mikelmidnight on May 24, 2021 11:42:54 GMT -5
One non-Kirby Eternals storyline that I really enjoyed was how their origin was tied to that of the Titanians (the Jim Starlin ones) and the Uranians (of Marvel Boy fame). I think it was published in a few issues of What if..?Independently of whether it was a good idea to bring the Eternals to the Marvel universe proper, it added to their mythology, even indirectly, and helped explain how super-powered humanoids could live on two decidedly uninhabitable celestial bodies. I personally disliked that move. From my perspective, we'd had decades post-Lee&Kirby of development and modernisation of the Norse gods, while the Greek gods had been stagnant. This, finally, gave us something new about the MU Greek gods and gave Thanos a tie to them as well as to an alien (albeit not extra-solar) race.
Instead, now, he's just some sort of mutant Eternal, purebred (albeit from two distinct strains), which makes him far less interesting.
I agree that with the already existing Inhumans, adding the Eternals to the mix feels redundant.
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Post by berkley on May 24, 2021 12:47:49 GMT -5
Does it matter that there's no payoff to the 50 year judgement? Not necessarily. If you think the heart and soul of the book is something else then who cares if we never have any resolution to the central mystery of the Space Gods. The 50 year judgement is something Kirby borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke and isn't the type of thing you should think about too hard otherwise you'll get a headache trying to figure out whether the scientist will stay the same age trapped in the Inca ruins while his daughter ages in the outside world (I'm sure the Eternals would have found some way to keep her forever young, and that professor that Sersi was besotted with.) The thing is, Kirby spends so much of the series banging the same drum -- The Space Gods have returned! The Space Gods have returned! -- and everyone from the Deviants, to S.H.I.E.L.D agents, to the Russians, and Ikaris' cousin, try to destroy the damn things -- that you expect that through line to come to a head. If the series had lasted, there would have been time for other side plots -- character relationships, more lore from the past, the representatives of the three strands of mankind striving to bring able an end to war and the other ills that plague mankind. However, I don't think you can compare the ongoing premise of the X-Men to the Eternals' hook. It doesn't matter what the time frame is -- it could be a day, a month, a year -- if you begin a story by saying that everything will end in X amount of time unless the heroes do XYZ that becomes the pulse of the story. If the premise had simply been that there were two races of beings that humans never knew existed -- the Eternals and the Deviants - but suddenly they're made aware of them, then sure, you could maintain an ongoing premise like the X-Men. But as soon as you introduce an endgame, who's going to ignore that? I thought the Eternals, humans and Deviants were supposed to unite together and bring peace to the world to show the Celestials that their experiment wasn't a failure. What I want to know is whether Jack Kirby thinks that mankind can do it. But Kirby himself was still lost in the premise that aliens had visited the Earth and were responsible for all of mankind's mythology and achievements. I don't see why Kirby couldn't have wrapped up the Fourth Host storyline in the first dozen issues then moved onto the next arch, so to speak.
Perhaps this is a matter of personal taste, but for me, it was far too big a story to wrap up even in a 20 or 30 issue epic. It's really dealing with one of the most important, most basic of all questions: can we survive? In the real world, we don't know the answer to this, so it feels right to me that the question is left open in the Eternals. And as I say, the idea that humans, Eternals, and Deviants have to learn to coexist is something that I think would have unfolded very slowly over a long time - and then their efforts to do so, their successes and failures, would have been an important part of the series, but not necessarily presented explicitly in those terms - it might well have bee kept as something beneath the surface narrative. thena, the Reject, and Karkas would have been at the forefront of this but to the characters in the book bringing these Deviants to Eternal Olympia might have continued to appear a bizarre whim of Thena's, not the vitally important decision it was, the success or failure of which could determine the fate of the earth.
Also, learning to co-exist is by its nature an ongoing proposition: you couldn't have them just sign a peace treaty and say, "OK Celestials, we're going to get along so you can leave now! Bye-bye!" I think if there were to be a resolution it would always have to be a provisional, contingent one because of the nature of the problem. I think it would have taken a long time to get there, assuming they did, and then it would have been an ongoing problem even after the Celestials left. The most I would have looked for, had the series continued, was a first step, something to show that the three races at last recognised the problem and what had to be done to save themselves - not necessarily a final, once and for all resolution.
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Post by berkley on May 24, 2021 12:54:05 GMT -5
One non-Kirby Eternals storyline that I really enjoyed was how their origin was tied to that of the Titanians (the Jim Starlin ones) and the Uranians (of Marvel Boy fame). I think it was published in a few issues of What if..?Independently of whether it was a good idea to bring the Eternals to the Marvel universe proper, it added to their mythology, even indirectly, and helped explain how super-powered humanoids could live on two decidedly uninhabitable celestial bodies. I personally disliked that move. From my perspective, we'd had decades post-Lee&Kirby of development and modernisation of the Norse gods, while the Greek gods had been stagnant. This, finally, gave us something new about the MU Greek gods and gave Thanos a tie to them as well as to an alien (albeit not extra-solar) race.
Instead, now, he's just some sort of mutant Eternal, purebred (albeit from two distinct strains), which makes him far less interesting.
I agree that with the already existing Inhumans, adding the Eternals to the mix feels redundant.
Yeah - when Thanos makes an appearance in the comics does anyone immediately think, "That damn Eternal is back again." ? I don't think so. The idea that he's an Eternalt never has become an important part of the Thanos story. No doubt Marvel is hoping the movie will change that and make the Eternals as popular as the Guardians now are, and maybe it will but I doubt it'll be an imporvement from an artistic standpoint.
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Post by commond on May 25, 2021 6:42:40 GMT -5
Does it matter that there's no payoff to the 50 year judgement? Not necessarily. If you think the heart and soul of the book is something else then who cares if we never have any resolution to the central mystery of the Space Gods. The 50 year judgement is something Kirby borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke and isn't the type of thing you should think about too hard otherwise you'll get a headache trying to figure out whether the scientist will stay the same age trapped in the Inca ruins while his daughter ages in the outside world (I'm sure the Eternals would have found some way to keep her forever young, and that professor that Sersi was besotted with.) The thing is, Kirby spends so much of the series banging the same drum -- The Space Gods have returned! The Space Gods have returned! -- and everyone from the Deviants, to S.H.I.E.L.D agents, to the Russians, and Ikaris' cousin, try to destroy the damn things -- that you expect that through line to come to a head. If the series had lasted, there would have been time for other side plots -- character relationships, more lore from the past, the representatives of the three strands of mankind striving to bring able an end to war and the other ills that plague mankind. However, I don't think you can compare the ongoing premise of the X-Men to the Eternals' hook. It doesn't matter what the time frame is -- it could be a day, a month, a year -- if you begin a story by saying that everything will end in X amount of time unless the heroes do XYZ that becomes the pulse of the story. If the premise had simply been that there were two races of beings that humans never knew existed -- the Eternals and the Deviants - but suddenly they're made aware of them, then sure, you could maintain an ongoing premise like the X-Men. But as soon as you introduce an endgame, who's going to ignore that? I thought the Eternals, humans and Deviants were supposed to unite together and bring peace to the world to show the Celestials that their experiment wasn't a failure. What I want to know is whether Jack Kirby thinks that mankind can do it. But Kirby himself was still lost in the premise that aliens had visited the Earth and were responsible for all of mankind's mythology and achievements. I don't see why Kirby couldn't have wrapped up the Fourth Host storyline in the first dozen issues then moved onto the next arch, so to speak.
Perhaps this is a matter of personal taste, but for me, it was far too big a story to wrap up even in a 20 or 30 issue epic. It's really dealing with one of the most important, most basic of all questions: can we survive? In the real world, we don't know the answer to this, so it feels right to me that the question is left open in the Eternals. And as I say, the idea that humans, Eternals, and Deviants have to learn to coexist is something that I think would have unfolded very slowly over a long time - and then their efforts to do so, their successes and failures, would have been an important part of the series, but not necessarily presented explicitly in those terms - it might well have bee kept as something beneath the surface narrative. thena, the Reject, and Karkas would have been at the forefront of this but to the characters in the book bringing these Deviants to Eternal Olympia might have continued to appear a bizarre whim of Thena's, not the vitally important decision it was, the success or failure of which could determine the fate of the earth.
Also, learning to co-exist is by its nature an ongoing proposition: you couldn't have them just sign a peace treaty and say, "OK Celestials, we're going to get along so you can leave now! Bye-bye!" I think if there were to be a resolution it would always have to be a provisional, contingent one because of the nature of the problem. I think it would have taken a long time to get there, assuming they did, and then it would have been an ongoing problem even after the Celestials left. The most I would have looked for, had the series continued, was a first step, something to show that the three races at last recognised the problem and what had to be done to save themselves - not necessarily a final, once and for all resolution.
I can see your ideas working. They definitely have a lot of merit. I think they might be better suited to a self-published, creator owned title where the author has the freedom to tell their story the way that they want to as opposed to the demands of a mainstream comic. If the Celestials stood in silence for 50 years, pottering about as though they were doing the gardening, where would the source of conflict come from? I don't think you can keep telling the same story where the Deviants attack, or one of the factions tries to destroy a Celestial. I suppose Kirby could have continued to dig up Deviant threats from the past, but I wonder what the central conflict would have been. Would there have been internal conflict between the core group of humans, Eternals and Deviants trying to unite mankind? Would there have been resistance from certain groups? Betrayal? A power struggle within the factions? A group trying to use the Celestials' technology for their own personal gain? More heel Eternal characters like Druig? I am curious about Kirby's plans for The Reject and Karkas, and the Forgotten One was another character with tremendous potential. Perhaps the Celestials would have made a move at some point that would have sent ripples through the series.
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Post by berkley on May 25, 2021 15:57:45 GMT -5
I think the Reject and Karkas, along with their guardian Thena, would have been some of the most important characters of the series going forward: more specifically, the struggle for these two Deviants to be accepted by the Eternals, overcoming suspicions, etc. Their eventual acceptance - by the Eternals, most obviously, but also by the Deviants: remember they were "rejected" by their own people; and by the humans who fear them - this eventual acceptance might have been the symbol of a broader reconciliation between Deviants and Eternals and Humans: we see in the Annual the turn their adventures might have taken: saving Humans, fighting evil, being mentored by Thena, etc, but feared by the Humans they fight to save and mistrusted by Eternals.
BTW, I don't think it's a coincidence that the Deviant threats come from the past: had the series continued, we might have seen that this was an indication that the Deviants were evolving, becoming less aggressive, less threatening. The two modern Deviants fighting Deviant threats from the past might be a symbol of the Deviants overcoming their worst impulses.
So to answer your question of where the conflict comes from, it would operate on two levels: the conflicts of the surface narrative but also the internal, symbolic conflicts at the heart of the concept: the struggle is an internal one, internals to the collective psyche of Mankind in its three branches of Human, Eternal, and Deviant. In the plot there would be the struggles of Eternal vs Deviant, the struggle of the Deviants to overcome their lower impulses of aggression and domination, and I believe also the struggle of Deviant society to become more humane to its own members, and probably to throw off its corrupt ruling caste. For the Eternals, there would be the struggle to overcome their prejudices against the Deviants, which could play out in several different ways.
So there is no absence of conflict to the Eternals set-up - just an absence of the straightforward good guys vs bad guys sort of conflict expected by too many readers - as well as comics professionals who should know better.
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