A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans
On my weekly livestream, Casual Krakoa Live, I review the week’s X-Men comics, and answer big questions about what’s going on with Marvel’s merry mutants! You can listen or watch below:
Spoilers for discussed comics may follow!
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[Read more…] about Casual Krakoa Meets Kirby: Eternals #7 (& MCU), Hellions #17, Excalibur #25!Above everything surrounding Eternals – the reports of global bans for Marvel Studio’s (woefully belated) attempts at queer representation, the most rotten critical reception any MCU movie has seen, the debates about MCU fandom’s respect for Eternals creator and Marvel Comics King, Jack Kirby – there’s one element I was most excited to figure out: What’s the strategic thinking behind Eternals at this particular moment of MCU Phase 4? Why Eternals, and why now?
* Spoilers For Eternals Will Follow*
The Principles:
Protect Celestials
Protect The Machine
Correct Excess Deviation
It would be an exaggeration to call the great Jack Kirby’s The Eternals an inarguable classic. To most, it’s a curiosity: an abandoned story that introduces some genuinely brilliant concepts into the Marvel Universe (not the least of which is the Celestials). But ultimately the series pales in comparison to its sister story, the DC-published Fourth World saga.
The Eternals have returned numerous times, perhaps most notably in 2006, when Neil Gaiman and John Romita, Jr. relaunched The Eternals with a miniseries which, while much praised, did little to position the Eternals as consistent members of the Marvel Universe. Even as recently as 2018, Jason Aaron, Paco Medina and Ed McGuinness‘ Avengers #4 made the Eternals the ultimate footnote to their more successful Celestial counterparts, when a change in the status quo of the Celestials caused the Eternals to commit mass suicide, taking them entirely off the board for Aaron’s Celestial-centric story. [Read more…] about Eternals & Asimov: A Robot, An Eternal, and a Philosopher Walk Into a Trolley
Of the big three “non-human races” of the Marvel Universe, the Eternals have long been playing catch-up. The X-Men are, well, the X-Men. While the Inhumans have a rich and varied history interwoven into the fabric of the larger Marvel Universe dating back to the Silver Age (to say nothing of a failed TV series and that time when Fox still owned the X-Men movie rights so Marvel tried to position them as their new, more cinema-friendly, version of mutants).
The Eternals, while of a similar pedigree (all three share an artistic creator in Jack Kirby), have long existed on the fringes of the Marvel Universe: various artists and writers, often top-notch ones, step-up and present their take on the long-lived demi-gods secretly protecting humanity from the monstrous Deviants in the name of the cosmic Celestials, and when they’re done, the Eternals quietly fade once more into the background of the Marvel Universe.
Eternals: Only Death is Eternal
Gillen and Ribic don’t just put a new spin on things; they do so in a way that contextualizes and synthesizes all of the previous versions, creating a kind of grand unified theory of the Eternals that honors what’s come before in the Eternals history while breaking new ground. Along the way, they also tell a densely-plotted, gorgeously-illustrated, rip-roaring tale filled with moments of fist-pumping excitement and tragic heartbreak alike. The end result is the best possible entry point into the Eternals for a new reader.
[Read more…] about Best New Graphic Novel: Eternals Vol. 1 by Kieron Gillen & Esad Ribic!
Genderfluidity in Marvel Comics is a complicated subject. Historically, it constitutes most of, if not all, non-binary representation in Marvel’s comics. Yet all of Marvel’s genderfluid characters seem to have similar characteristics that have become clichés on the way genderfluidity is portrayed in superhero fiction. These characteristics are :
Some characters like Mystique or Jacob Gavin have also been described as genderfluid by fans, and while I do not want to invalidate the way these characters have been interpreted by fans, their actual portrayal in-universe doesn’t match the definition of genderfluidity. Despite the changes their bodies go through, they seem to identify to one specific gender (Mystique only taking on other gender identities as a disguise, and Jacob Gavin actively seeking to go back to their initial body and the gender they were assigned at birth).
Check out Part 1 of Trans Representation in Marvel here: https://www.comicbookherald.com/a-guide-to-trans-representation-in-marvel-comics/
[Read more…] about Genderfluid Characters in Marvel Comics: Xavin, Loki, Sprite & the Eternals