Sometimes, you have some one-shots that weren’t collected in the main series, and shouldn’t really be read together. Sometimes there aren’t enough of them to fill their own trade, so you have to fill it with some classic What If…? stories that are tangentially related. It’s also released after the finale of the run, while also sort of serving as a prelude to the event whose collection dropped last week. This is one of those times.
Marvel Comics
My week (read: nine days) of covering Gillen-written Eternals comics has come to an end. It was mostly good – lotta good comics there. This is another one, but it’s also a weird, disjointed experience that’s clearly not designed to be read this way.
All three of the one-shots collected are great comics with incredible art teams. Dustin Weaver, Kei Zama, John Livesay, Ryan Bodenheim (RIP), Edgar Salazar, Matthew Wilson, and Chris O’Halleran all delivered gorgeous issues, all living up to Esad Ribić’s standard.
The first of the three, Thanos Rises, focuses on the ancient, unchanging nature of the Eternals. It sells the idea that they had already lived millennia too long many millennia ago, and that they’ll keep going for longer. Weaver sells the beauty and horror of such a long life, and flips from the latter to the former in a stunning section at the end of the issue.
The second issue, Celestia, focuses on the religious duo from the main series, and I think leaves the most to be desired. This issue is tied up in what Judgement Day did with these characters, and it feels less good and more necessary because of it. The idea of these undying priests of a religion whose practitioners have to practice is juicy in its own way, and the characters have their own great features, but this just doesn’t click in a real way for me, for whatever reason. Maybe a full reread is what’s needed for it to land well. Either way, goddamn, Zama drew some incredible rectangles, and other shapes.
Marvel Comics
The last issue, The Heretic, focused on Uranos, and served the dual purpose of introducing him to be used in Judgment Day, while also showing just how monstrous the Eternals have treated the Deviants. Those themes are when Eternals is at its strongest, and it works wonderfully here. The issue does a great job of framing Uranos as the monster that he is, while still presenting his arguments plainly, which really only lends to their horror.
Along with the three, there are bits of five What If…? comics, which are all pretty easy to ignore, in my opinion. They’re fine, but they have little bearing on anything here, and are only really in the collection to pad it out. They’re fine.
Marvel Comics
Reading this collection this way is just plain odd. I just read the finale of the whole thing in the A.X.E. Companion, so going backwards so soon is weird, especially when it seems there’s so little that really connects here, aside from Celestia discussing godhood and belief. Even then, that arc (like much of A.X.E. in general) was just as setup within itself as it was in these pages and Eternals proper, which just makes this feel extraneous. However I look at it, this book feels oddly timed, at least from a narrative standpoint. These only really make sense if you read them separately, ideally in published order with the rest of Eternals.
As odd as it is that this is the end of the series, it’s also pretty funny. Oddly fitting that a series about an undying superhero family ends in one of the weirder situations the direct market could have caused.
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