The ETERNALS (2021) Take
When I try to make sense of the intense discourse surrounding ETERNALS, I think about the film Marvel Studios promised. Where previous films seemed all too enamored with the here and now, and its quirky outsiders rebuilding a military-industrial complex in their image, full of diversity, quip-happy charm and good intentions, Eternals was to be a grand historical epic, a tale of almost but not quite human immortal warriors tasked with a mission of a scale so great as to be imperceptible by an all-too small world. Where the Russos made us bask in the unreality of digital sets and Saturday morning action, Eternals was to be about the majesty of the real world, and the great human drama of people whose every action is world-changing. Where every other Marvel movie might as well not have been directed by anyone, this project had gotten future Oscar winner Chloe Zhao involved, and ready to bring some artistic cred to a movie serial that had been desperate for it.
You need only look at the footage Marvel Studios has freely released through clips and trailers to know that ETERNALS is not that film. That many things happened on the way from then to now, each bringing compromises of varying sizes, leading to one of the most costly acts of misunderstanding in the contemporary history of the comic book adaptation. In tracing back the cracks through the edifice, you arrive at a foundational mistake: the Eternals was not a Chloe Zhao movie from the very start.
This is the domain of Jack Kirby, and every good reinterpretation of the concept, whether done by John Romita Jr. or Esad Ribic, maintains at least some of the epic bombast. That, in itself, is the perfect diametrical opposite of Zhao's cinema, focused as it is on the quiet intimacy of individuals as part of the world they live in. The sprawling vistas of Nomadland exist, in part, to put Frances McDormand's Fern in relation with the vastness of the world, putting the film's feeling into picture. It's a great framework, but it doesn't work for the Eternals, who are designed to struggle against their own lack of an inner life. The Eternals were made by the Celestials with a clear purpose, like tools, and their selves were programmed for specific uses. Their interpersonal dramas, their ideological conflicts, are just what happens when those traits are left to clash with one another on their own. That's the hook, that's the truth at the heart of the best Eternals comics. Ikaris isn't really human, and then again, are we really all that human either?
Anyway, none of those big questions make it into the movie, which instead follows the bog standard formula of "getting the band back together because the CGI monstrosities have awakened once more". It's an action comedy on a slightly larger scale, with a larger number of self-serious action heroes, matched with a larger number of comedic foils. Let us do what many on Twitter have done before us and consider Kingo, as perfect a case study of ETERNALS' faults as there is. Changing Kingo's character, from dour guy with a sword to funny guy who does finger blasts, is a choice as defensible as any other, and Kumail Nanjiani plays the part as well as he can. But on a fundamental level, you can see the shtick beneath: this is a relatable everyman actor turned into something he is exactly not through a ludicrously intense training and dieting regimen that has left his body looking like it was left to dry age for several years.
This, and so many other choices, leave one to ask themselves many questions. Here's one: when exactly did you realize that I have not actually gone and seen ETERNALS? This whole thing, all 600-odd words of it, was made up basically on the spot Tuesday night, just based on general gut feeling and extremely cursory research. If it reads like I wrote it in my sleep it's because I have! There's no point to reviewing any of these fucking films! I punked you but good! You'll die as you were born: eating my dust! HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: WELCOME TO HELL, IDIOTS
Let's open what must surely be my final review of a Tom King-written book for this newsletter for the year with a confession: I was this close to writing off The Human Target #1, being as it is a noir-inspired mystery thriller taking clear inspiration from a previously existing work and featuring a man trying to make sense of a conspiracy to murder a powerful and powerfully evil man. I thought that, at last, I had grown tired of the tricks everyone else pretended to have grown tired of when Heroes in Crisis hurt their feelings. As with most Tom King things, however, there is a twist: you have seen all the tricks used in this comic before, but you have not seen them done all at once, and that is the point of this book.
This is where we bring in Greg Smallwood, one of the most purposeful stylists working in comics these days. If you've paid any attention to his work, for instance his run on Moon Knight, you know that the man knows his way around laying out a page, and he gets to do it every which way in this greatest hits collection. Some pages are on King's beloved 9-panel grid. Some are on the brand-new 12-panel grid as seen in Batman/Catwoman. Some pages flow backwards, like in the oft-forgotten Future's End issue of Grayson. There's a whole new take on the panels putting the emphasis on a specific onomatopoeia you know and love from The Sheriff of Babylon, and yes, it ends on the Eisner-style "make the credits and the title look like they're part of the world" trick that Clay Mann deployed so expertly all over Heroes in Crisis.
The point, then, is to look backwards. This is a book set in an atemporal past, blending the 1960s masculinity as seen in Mad Men with 1940s noir, centering around the 1980s Justice League International, but covered in the patterned flair of the 1970s. It is about a man at the very end of his life trying to solve his own murder, and therefore it is about considering one's own mortality, the things done in life, and all those things one might think about when living life around an airborne killer virus. It's very thrilling, it's very stylish, and it's very good. What interests me more is the question that seems to be at the heart of it. It goes like this: "Your time on Earth is limited. Wanna make something of it?"
Superman and the Authority was one of the most forward-looking comics I've read this year or indeed ever. It was as effortlessly cool, imaginative and new as any Grant Morrison book had ever been, while also being their final statement on Superman, comics, and where it's all going. Really great! Really fun! Check it out! Batman/Superman - The Authority Special #1 is not that book, and it couldn't be. Its concerns are more immediate. They're about figuring out how this product of a very singular project from a very singular point of view can fit in Phillip Kennedy Johnson's big future attractions, namely that big Warworld saga we've heard so much about.
But in order to do that, some compromises have to be made. First and most obvious: this is not Hot Daddy Superman, which is an unfortunate side effect of having to involve people who are not Mikel Janin with the proceedings. Also: we're back in the Dark Multiverse because SOMEONE had an idea for an Evil Batman that they had to get out (it's a pretty good one to be honest). To me, the biggest problem is that Johnson doesn't quite know what to do with Morrison's group of anarchist misfits, so he sticks with Midnighter and Apollo, which are pretty hard to get wrong, and puts everyone else on the sidelines of the melee. By my count, O.M.A.C. has exactly two lines in this. Steel has six. And Enchantress, around which the whole plot pivots? Four lines. This is an oversized $5.99 comic! There was space!
That said: it's not a bad comic. How could it be, when the Ben Templesmith parts are this gorgeous? It doesn't do much with this new Authority, but what it does reads pretty well, it's a fun action comic with an edge, it brings something cool to the table, and it even has a little playfulness with the conceit of having two different artists. (Trevor Hairsine does a bang-up job at the bread-and-butter blockbuster comic with a tinge of Bryan Hitch, which is pretty cool.) It's good! It is a good comic. It's just not as good as the groundbreaking mind-expanding comic it's supposed to follow. What would have been? I'm just not sure.
You're not mad at me for owning you so hard earlier, right? You see why I had to do it to them, and by extension, to you? It's because I'm good at it, and I love it, and sometimes you just gotta do these things! Look: if you promise to tell people about this, if you promise to subscribe, maybe I won't be so hard next time. I'm tough but I'm fair. In the mean time, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!