No Good Deed
I just got my mitts on a comic I’ve been wanting to read for a while now- Neil Gaiman’s revival of Jack Kirby’s The Eternals. I’m a big fan of Kirby, especially his “cosmic” characters. I’m also a big fan of Gaiman, and there’s no writer alive today who can do “cosmic” better than him. Unfortunately I’m going to have to give this volume a mixed review. That is to say, it’s way better than most of the Kirby revivals I’ve seen, but the holy Reeses peanut butter cup of mythic goodness that I was hoping for failed to materialize.
What went wrong? Lots of little things. The central MacGuffin of the plot was overly complex and I’m still not sure what several of the characters were hoping to accomplish. The history of the Eternals was extensively retconned. I’m not against retcons in general (belonging to the Keith Giffen/Ambush Bug school of continuity), but some of these cuts went pretty deep into the mythos. Certain parts of the book didn’t really feel like The Eternals at all.
One part that really bugged me was the scene on the train in the final issue. It seemed gratuitous. When the exact same thing happened in MiracleMan, it was heart-wrenching. When it happened here, I wondered if Gaiman was making a homage to MiracleMan. What was the purpose of that scene? If Zuras just waited a few decades the problem would have solved itself. I think I can see what Gaiman was trying to convey here, but it still feels out of place to me.
With all that said, I still finished the book in one sitting. It’s a good read. Neil Gaiman is a fantastic writer. He could write a three hundred page graphic novel about a person sitting on the toilet reading a newspaper, and I guarantee that there wouldn’t be a dull moment in there. He captured the personalities of the characters perfectly. It was great fun to watch them just going around, doing things.
Part of the problem may be that I came into this book hoping for Kirby but finding Gaiman. The two men have very different writing styles. The ending of this book, in particular, felt like pure Gaiman with no Kirby added. I wonder if the lack of a strong conclusion was meant to evoke the ending of the original series, with Arishem’s final judgement of the human race left unresolved.
August 25th, 2009 at 12:53 am
I don’t know Kirby well. He was a (the?) major inspiration for Eastman and Laird, but pretty much all the Kirby I’m familiar with is Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. Which I haven’t read any of since I was in grade school.
I consider this a sign that my knowledge and appreciation of comics and graphic novels is, however eclectic and heartfelt, nevertheless lacking.