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27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gaiman at his best with lovely pictures from Romita Jr., May 26, 2007
Jack Kirby created them and now Neil Gaiman has put his unique and always achingly beautiful spin on the Eternals. I loved this soaring, yet sensitive space opera years ago and what a pleasure it is to be reacquainted with Zuras, Thena and company. Gaiman makes it all fresh again without sacrificing the least of Kirby's baroque characters and concepts. John Romita Jr. provides gorgeous art that respects without preening. Once again this superb graphic novel reveals the heights and depths the comic book form is capable of achieving. Gaiman fans will love it and it would also be a great introduction to his work, in both the fiction and graphic novel genres. No previous knowledge of the Eternals is necessary, but knowing what has gone before certainly adds to the pleasure of the current work. They even managed to slip in some references to Marvel's Civil War big company-spanning and forever-changing multi-series, running concurrently.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well-executed, but not Gaiman's best work., February 22, 2008
This reads like the first three or four chapters of a really good Neil Gaiman series. The problem is, that's all. He does a magnificent job of setting up the characters, starting their stories, and precipitating them into conflict, but then the energy trails off, and the resolution is stamped far more with "ok, time to close this off and work on other projects" than it is "I have thought of a masterful reworking of this concept."
All in all, it's not bad, but it's more a revitalization of Kirby's characters than a reworking of them -- the transformative brilliance Gaiman has displayed in works like the Sandman series or _1602_ isn't present here. There's no flash of genius, just a technically well-executed story. There are strong, believable characters, a decent plot, compelling villains, and so forth. That's still better than a lot of things out there, and overall this is probably worth reading, but it isn't in the first rank of Gaiman's works.
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31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gaiman enlivens Kirby's notion, June 13, 2007
Neil Gaiman, who took a mothballed and gimmicky character from the DC Comics warehouse and created the Endless phenomenon, does similar service for Marvel Comics here by revisiting the late Jack Kirby's extraterrestial immortals. Kirby, who co-created Captain America for Marvel and devised the New Gods for DC, crafted the Eternals (nee Celestials) as a graphic response to "Chariots of the Gods?" and other ancient ET theories.
The fruit died on the vine back in the 1970s, but Gaiman has given new life to the concept.
Let me be frank: I've never been a fan of Kirby's inventions that, for all their purported godly origins, were just your average, oddly costumed superheroes. But, while DC inserts the New Gods into countless storylines, making them hard to ignore, the Eternals had fallen entirely off my radar over at Marvel. Until now; Gaiman's involvement was enough for me to give them a chance.
And he does it. He successfully remakes the Eternals in a way that honors Kirby's source material while shoehorning them into the Marvel Universe in a way that makes sense -- something Kirby himself was unable to do. And, while he hasn't created a sensation like the Endless, Gaiman has put some interesting concepts on the table; it remains to see what Marvel does with them next.
by Tom Knapp, Rambles.(n e t) editor
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