As a comics fan, I am fond of great stories, more than anything else, and of the creative teams that are responsible for them. I'm not really into "event" books, like Infinite Crisis and its ilk, and truth be told I'm still banging my head on the wall that I paid for two issues of House of M.
The favorite comics in my collection involve writers and artists who I feel are at the top of their game. I treasure my issues of Amazing Spider-Man by J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr, my issues of X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday, and my issues of Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. I feel these books are more important than megahyped event books because of the way they alter status quos without trying too hard to do it.
It's nice to know, however, that even though the big comics companies are caught up in "universe altering event" mania, that they can still come up with books that stick to the basics, i.e., put a dynamite creative team together and just let them do their work, free of any "change the world" directives.
One such book I'm really looking forward to is "The Eternals," coming this June from renowned writer Neil Gaiman and my all-time favorite comic book artist, John Romita, Jr.
Though just about everyone credits Frank Miller and Alan Moore with revolutionizing the superhero genre, to my mind Neil Gaiman has done more still to win respectability for comic books in general as a legitimate form of literature. I'm fairly certain that it was his work for DC Vertigo that has bridged the gap between "funny books" and literature, especially since he is well known for having achieved a great deal of success writing both. In college, one thing that really struck me about the man was that (as consummately shallow as this may sound) girls read his books. Enjoying his "Sandman" was not just "a guy thing."
John Romita, Jr. on the other hand, is about as traditional a comic-book professional as one can get. He's something of a latter-day Jack Kirby (a comparison which I was not the first to draw) with the exception that he has shown a LOT more versatility than the late "King" of comics. Not only that, but he's proven to be something of an "eternal" himself, considering that his career began all the way back in the seventies, and he's still going strong, still selling books while erstwhile comic greats like Chris Claremont and John Byrne have fallen by the wayside. One of the reasons he's been so enduring is that while he still maintains a distinctive style, there is no denying how remarkably he has been able to reinvent himself over and over with each passing decade. Also, he is according to both fans and his peers, able to tell a story better than anyone else in the industry.
I avoided Marvel 1602 because I had the rather unpleasant impression that the folks at Marvel were trying too hard to pander to Gaiman's penchant for writing strange, off-kilter stuff. Setting the entire Marvel universe in the 17th century was admittedly a novel idea, but it didn't really give us an idea of how Neil Gaiman would write a legitimate, mainstream Marvel book. This new project, however, is completely in continuity and involves an actual (albeit almost unused) character from Marvel's pantheon.
Bearing this in mind, "Eternals" promises to be a true marriage between exemplary traditional comic book storytelling and the virtually haute couture sensibility for which much of Gaiman's work is known.
Of course, not a single page of this series has even been penciled yet, so I don't really want to draw any conclusions until I've finished reading at least one issue, but having enjoyed Gaiman's Death and Stardust and Romita's Daredevil, Amazing Spider-Man and even Wolverine, I'm hard-pressed to imagine how this team will let me down.
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