I'm not particularly sorry I didn't get to meet Neil Gaiman when he was here in the Philippines. It's not that I have anything against him, but as soon as I heard how many people went to have their stuff signed by him I realized that I would have spent an entire working day (or more) to have about eight comic books signed, and not even my particularly prized stuff.
Previous to yesterday, the only Gaiman stuff I had was his second Death miniseries (The Time of Your Life) and his four-issue Stardust illustrated, serialized novel (I can't bring myself to call it a comic book or a graphic novel, because it really isn't one). I rather enjoyed the latter and am happy to report that it's being made into a feature film.
Still, there was something about the way he wrote that made it feel somehow distant from everything else I was reading at the time. Granted, it was better written (because folks like Mark Millar, Brian Bendis and J. Michael Straczynski hadn't started writing mainstream just yet) than the other stuff, but it feel real-world, like a lot of the dialogue in the Death books. It somehow felt surreal, otherworldly.
Eternals changes that somewhat. In a nutshell, it's about a race of immortals who have, for the most part, forgotten who they are, that walk among men, specifically the men of the regular Marvel Universe. We see most of the story through the eyes of Mark Curry, a young New York intern whose life takes a strange turn when blond-haired, golden eyed Ike Harris shows up in the hospital restroom one day to tell him that he is a being of fantastical power. Other characters who show up are Sersi, a flightly New York party planner whose dialogue reads just a touch like some of the lines of Death in The High Cost of Living, the mysterious Druig, weapons R&D expert Thena, and tweeny TV star Sprite. Still, this particular issue is all about Mark and Ike, who share most of the issue's conversations.
And it is here that Gaiman plants his foot firmly in the real-world nature of the Marvel Universe. I never bought Marvel: 1602 because the neither the premise nor the art grabbed me enough to entice me to spent a small fortune on all eight issues. It was too out there, and like I said once before felt like it was designed to pander to Gaiman's penchant for the strange.
Eternals is still a fantastical project, by that logic, but at the very least it still has the "real," modern world as its starting point. And Gaiman's dialogue straddles the line between fantasy and reality. He gives the everyman a point of view in Mark Curry instead of populating his world with a whole bunch of strange characters.
As for the art, my reverence of John Romita Jr. has sometimes bordered on the idolatrous. I guess that statement pretty much says it all.
In the course of his thirty or so year career he has actually gotten very little of the respect that is due him. He did remarkable runs on X-Men, Spider-Man and Iron Man in the 80s, but he didn't enjoy the superstar status that was lavished on the likes of Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane and (gasp!) Rob Liefeld. In the last twenty years he has worked with as many cookie-cutter hacks as he has really good writers.
The only other time a book of his was treated as an event was in 1993 when he and Frank Miller came up with Daredevil: The Man Without Fear. His work on that book was really something special, which was why it boggled my mind that for years after that he was paired up with some at best mediocre writers like Scott Lobdell, Howard Mackie and Dan Jurgens. Arguably one of Marvel's top talents, he was really getting the short shrift: his books were getting printed on toilet paper and colored by people who were either autistic or blind or both. John's stuff looked like shit, in short, even though his talent still shone through occasionally.
It was a good thing that Joe Quesada, a fellow illustrator, finally became Marvel's editor-in-chief because as one of JR Jr.'s biggest fans, he finally started giving him the "props" (as the rather irritating slang goes) he deserves. He paired him with the vastly talented J. Michael Straczynski, gave him a phenomenal coloring team in Dan Kemp and Avalon Studios. He was also generous with his praise for the man in all of his interviews where JR's name came up. Anyone who's seen the extras on the Spider-Man DVD will know what I'm talking about.
Still, before this project, Johnny never seemed to recover the vibe that had made Man Without Fear so special. He'd come close a few times, but never quite hit it out of the park the way he had before.
That's all changed with issue #1 of Eternals. The illustration, the storytelling, the rendering (which is not something John is famous for) are out of this work. Credit goes of course to the stellar inking team of Danny Miki and Tim Townsend, as well as the brilliant palette of colorist Matt Hollingsworth, but their efforts wouldn't mean anything if they weren't inking or coloring such ebullient, outstanding pencils.
In short, this is a great start to what promises to be a very entertaining series. The only thing I didn't like was how they shoehorned the current Marvel line-wide event Civil War, into the story. Although I am a self-professed fan of that particular series, I felt that the little nod to Marvel's ongoing continuity took me out of the story somewhat.
Flaws notwithstanding, though, I'm certainly on board for all six issues.
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