Eternals Archives

I’m happy to announce that my Guide to The Eternals is now available to all CK readers as part of the Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Marvel Comics! This guide covers ever Eternals series and every major Eternals character!

This Eternals guide was originally launched in 2021 thanks to the ongoing support of the eternally awesome Patrons of CK. I’m launching it today to coincide with Marvel’s big summer event – Avengers / X-Men / Eternals: Judgment Day!

Guide to The Eternals

Part of what is so interesting about The Eternals at Marvel is that their separation from human society in continuity is mirrored by their isolation in publishing.

The Eternals have rarely made guest appearances aside from some arcs of Thor while they had no title of their own, plus Sersi’s time on Avengers). They’ve never had a series run more than 20 issues, and they’ve often gone for a half a decade or more with no series or significant appearances.

(That last bit was truly surprising to me. Even the previously obscure Inhumans and Guardians of the Galaxy had a way of turning up every few years before their fame. Not so for the Eternals – they really keep to themselves!)

That means, of all of Jack Kirby’s concepts that launched at Marvel, The Eternals in their way remain one of the purest. Aside from Neil Gaiman briefly breathing new life into the group in the mid-00s, it doesn’t feel like anyone has strayed especially far from his blueprint.

In the run-up to The Eternals film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel began paying more attention to their progenitors – The Celestials. They centered them in Jason Aaron’s 2018 Avengers run (which, by the way, kicked off with his wholesale genocide of all of the Eternals), and then relaunched the group into their own headlining title from Kieron Gillen, Esad Ribic, and Matthew Wilson in January of 2021.

Gillen & Co’s Eternals is a thrilling comic because it hews closely to Kirby’s legacy for the characters while also showing the connections between their history and Jonathan Hickman’s recent “Dawn of X” relaunch of the X-Men line.

The book is deliberate, intricate, but often laugh out loud funny as it follows the rebirth of The Eternals and their discovery that there is a serious flaw in their regenerative code… in the form of one of Marvel’s most-recognizable villains!

Gillen’s Eternals feels almost like a compressed version of the first two years of the entire X-Men line… which turned out to be a very intentional similarity as the Eternals come to blows with The Avengers and The X-Men in Marvel’s 2022 summer event – Avengers / X-Men / Eternals: Judgment Day!

Now you can read EVERY appearance that leads to that series by following my Eternals Guide! Nothing can stop you, since they’ve now all been reprinted in color and they’re all on Marvel Unlimited!

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Marvel’s The Eternals – including members like Ikaris, Giglamesh, Makkari, Sersi, Sprite, & Thena – in comic books and omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated July 2022 with titles scheduled for release through February 2023.

The Eternals are one of the defining creations of Jack Kirby’s mid-1970s return to Marvel Comics, though relatively few modern readers have had the chance to appreciate them prior to their film debut in 2021 compared to his other cosmic creations like The Inhumans and DC’s The New Gods.

The core cast of roughly a dozen named Eternals (though there are as many as 100) have tended to stay confined to their own handful of series during over 45 years of their publishing history, with just a handful of guest appearances or exceptions.

The main exception is Sersi, who join the cast of the Avengers in the 1990s for over fifty issues, and is well-known to heroes like Captain America and Iron Man.

(A secondary exception is Gilgamesh, who was an Avenger for just a handful of issues before Sersi replaced him. A more remote connection are descendants of Titan, among them Thanos and Starfox, who are Eternals by relation but are not part of the primary cast of The Eternals comic.)

In Marvel continuity, the Eternals are a long-lived splinter-race of humanity created by visiting Celestials during Earth’s pre-history – alongside their sibling race, The Deviants. The Eternals function as both heralds-of and caretakers-for the Celestials on Earth. They often interact with or inspire humanity’s mythology – the Eternal Ikaris, in some tellings, is the father of the mythological Icarus. They also police themselves, abiding by the rule of the group and sharing knowledge by forming a collective “Uni-Mind.”

Jack Kirby had a massive, cosmic story to tell with his cast of Eternals starting in 1976, though many of the plots of his series were left dangling after its cancellation in 1978, to be resumed in 1979 in Thor’s “Celestial Saga.” Shortly afterward, Mark Gruenwald and Peter Gillis significantly expanded their origins via a series of in-continuity back-ups in What If – explaining their earliest Celestial origins and forging a connection between the Eternals and fellow Kirby creations The Inhumans.

Past that, the Eternals have appeared largely only when their series is revived, or when a character is explaining Celestial history. They return in 1985 for a 12-issue revival by Gillis and Walt Simonson, in 1991 for an OGN, in 2000 for a one-shot trying to give them some X-Men shine by connecting them to Apocalypse, and again in a heavyweight 2006 revival by Neil Gaiman (and continued in a 2008 series). Even Sersi returned to relative obscurity after her run on Avengers.

In 2018, Jason Aaron’s opening arc of Avengers (2018) saw the team facing off against a fleet of invading Celestials, and the entire earth- bound Eternal race was collateral damage – he killed them all, mostly off-panel! However, this would prove to be a set-up for Kieron Gillen to relaunch the title with a clean slate at the start of 2021 as part of the run-up to the Eternals film. [Read more…] about The Eternals – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order