The AXE Begins to Fall in Eternals #11

The Avengers catch the Eternals digging in their Celestial cookie jar as Thanos creates a cataclysmic distraction far away in Eternals #11, written by Kieron Gillen, drawn by Guiu Vilanova, colored by Matthew Wilson, and lettering/design by Clayton Cowles.

Mark Turetsky: They say there are three basic stories: Hero vs. Hero, Days of Future Past and Getting The Gang Together For A Heist. This comic has a bit of the first and last of the three basic stories.

Karen Charm: Oh, hello Mark! Lovely of you to join in for this issue. Zoe had to stop a plasma vent somewhere. I don’t know, it sounded very complicated. I suppose it’s fitting, since this is the first, full fill-in issue of the run, with art duties courtesy of Guiu Vilanova. It appears that this is the penultimate issue of the current run before Gillen and co. launch into the final kind of story – JUDG(E)MENT.*

*extra E for Eternals

The Great Eternal Caper

Karen: The bulk of this issue takes place inside Avengers Mountain where the Eternals’ have exhausted the element of surprise. The alarms are going off, the Avengers are on their way, and Ajak is no closer to communing with the dead Celestial. Everything is going wrong, as the World/Machine puts it. At least things are going pretty ok for Sprite and Sersi, who we see are still enjoying the company of Starbrand and Namor, respectively. Zoe and I speculated a lot last time about what was going to happen between Sersi and the king of Abslantis, and as we see from their nude bathing, I think it’s pretty safe to assume we were right – they totally banged.

Mark: Sersi took him down, as The Machine puts it. It… doesn’t speak well for The Eternals that the wiliest members of their team were only able to distract one Avenger each. Maybe it speaks well for the Avengers as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes that only the literal child and the man who can most easily be led around by the barnacle could be sufficiently distracted by the infiltration crew.

Karen: If I speak about the Avengers I will be banned, but I guess any team Black Panther is on would be pretty hard to get past. We have seen the Eternals do some pretty impressive things in this series, so manybe there’s something in the Avengers’ contract that says they can’t be shown losing on page. (I said I wouldn’t start…)

Visually, there’s a lot to pay attention to. Vilanova’s art here is so much darker, heavier than series’ regular Ribić, and I think the issue benefits from them not sharing the stage. I wouldn’t be surprised if the scheduling worked out more in Vilanova’s favor as well, as the draftsmanship throughout is much more solid than the last time we saw him in these pages. I particularly love how he draws Ajak throughout.

Mark: Yes, I love the panel of Ikaris flying at full speed to retrieve the pocket dimension gauntlet. Such mission. Very strain. Not a thought in his head to distract from his aim. And Vilanova’s going to be drawing A.X.E.: Death to the Mutants, which seems to be continuing the Eternals story during the event. As to what will happen to this series, who can say?

Karen: If it’s mostly about Druig and Uranos doing shady stuff, that could be a lot of fun. We shall see!

Let’s talk about Kingo’s disguise. Issue #10 left off with him going to intercept the Avengers. Here, we find him popping out adorned in bone spikes, a skull face mask, and glowing swords calling himself Skullathar the Destructorite. 

…

So many questions here. Question the first, where did this costume come from? Is it an illusion, did he just make it really quickly, or is this something he does from time to time? I could go on, but whatever the answers are I expect to find them in a special one-shot issue, Eternals: Into the Mort-o-verse. 

Mark: I know there’s likely no direct edict from on high at Marvel for them to make the comics more like the movies; more likely any similarity is there to entice new readers who are familiar with the movies. All that is to say that this version of Kingo is much more of a Kumail Nanjiani character than a Toshiro Mifune (the actor Jack Kirby based Kingo on) character. Mifune could do comedy, but he wasn’t really known for being goofy. Also, with Kingo becoming something of a meme on Twitter, it’s become harder to take the character seriously of late. So it seems like we’re leaning into Kingo as a comedic character, and here it works for me.

Karen: I didn’t get the memes before I saw the movie, and I don’t get them still now that I have seen it. Ah well.

Force Majeure

Karen: Some of my favorite panels are in this section, which opens with a great birds-eye-view of Thena, just in front of a glowing hexagonal portal, looking down on Little Hollow. It’s a great image enhanced by Wilson’s washed out colors, highlighting the red of Thena’s cape and the black and blue of Cowles’ narration boxes. While everything looks majestic in the air, on the ground things are much worse. Ikaris is trying to manually relocate the town house by house, but he’s only managing to break everything (hmm, foreshadowing?)

Thankfully, our friend Gilgamesh pops up to help.

Mark: This triad plays on a pretty well-established archetype. They look like nothing other than a rebranded Justice League, don’t they? The warrior woman in the golden armor, the dark and conflicted man in black, and, well, the himbo Superman. And it’s appropriate here: they’re doing traditional superhero stuff! They’re saving a town! 

Karen: Ikaris grabbing Ajak’s pocket dimension bracelet in the blink of an eye was very cool. They then use it to bubble the whole town and move it over a couple hundred miles or so before the bubble busts. 

The Eternals can just not make anything right with humans. This feels like an echo of the Robeson situation of the first arc where Ikaris tries so hard only to have humans scream at him for ruining everything. 

Mark: And, really, aren’t Eternals to blame here? Sure, it’s not these Eternals who are behind the plasma vent, but they’re also keeping schtum about the situation with Thanos. We’re seeing the bad side of being a secretive, separatist super-civilization here. 

Karen: Which definitely sounds like it will be a major plot engine of Judgment Day. This sequence where the Avengers show up feels very Civil War (the movie) because, surprise! Everyone fights. The narration is wonderful here, summarizing the split-second psychic debate among the otherwise silent Eternals. Their plan is pretty impressive as well – take out Carol first and then trap Echo in a pocket dimension to even the odds a bit. Then it’s just Thor and Iron Man to worry about, both able to open the skies and rain hell down. Like when everyone took on Thanos earlier, these moments are great PR for the Eternals, establishing them as credible and worthy additions to the Marvel Universe in ways that feel true. I suppose mileage will vary for other fans who may be more skeptical of the Good Word, but I buy it.

Mark: Gillen being a player, creator and critic of games really shines in that moment. There are tactics, and there is the thought behind the tactics at play. It’s similar to the description of Kingo’s abilities vis à vis Cap and Black Panther, or the moment of the Eternals lifting the sphere of town out of the ground. It sidles up to power charts without directly touching them. Superheroes are strong enough to do what the story says they do. But what’s most important is their state of mind, the why of what they do.

Journey to the Center of A’Lars

Karen: Thanos and Druig are such bad dudes! Walking around, thinking about how they can be badder dudes. Vilanova draws a great sniveling Druig, I gotta say. Thanos, though, has an extra swagger to his step because we now know (from Eternals: The Heretic, as the data page is so kind to plug) that he has access to Uranos’ armory – aka, he can destroy the planet with the press of a button. This is a man who loves modern convenience, the beauty of efficiency.

Mark: Doesn’t it make a problem for Thanos though? He’s looking to get integrated into The Machine, which will grant him untold power and everlasting life. So, if he destroys it, doesn’t that mess with his plans even more? It’s like The Tick said, when asked if he had the power to destroy the Earth, “That’s where I keep all my stuff!” Still, it is a good bargaining chip. There’s also the metatextual commentary on these two characters: Kirby, for all his supreme greatness, did not give Druig the true depth of depravity that Starlin gave Thanos, and not a lot of other writers since then have given him. Druig’s spent millions of years as the one nefarious trickster, and maybe he wasn’t given much of an opportunity to grow in those skills. He was outthought by Thanos, who’s the cleverest of them all at the best (worst) of times.

Karen: It’s not often we see the color red in these data pages. Cowles looks like he’s having a lot of fun with this one, essentially a flowchart for breaking into the mind of an Eternal as formidable as A’Lars. We’ve got an icon of a brain, wavy lines, pointy lines, a maze, and a little vault graphic. This is actually another area where Gillen’s ongoing world-building begins to reveal a shape. We’ve learned a little bit about the layers of an Eternal’s consciousness in earlier installments, and here it becomes directly story relevant. I also appreciate the symmetry of Thanos seeking answers from A’lars and Ajak seeking answers from the Celestial ghost. Both are looking to solve the same problem but for different reasons, and having an equally difficult time of it. I wonder then, if Thanos does manage to burrow his way into his father’s mind-vault, will he be as disappointed as Ajak seems to be? We have one more issue to find out!

Mark: Cowles is really good at this design business, isn’t he? I’m wondering if he’ll be sharing design duties with Muller in A.X.E. comics. 

There’s something to be said for the juxtaposition of one Eternal beating up their dad and another beating up their God, each looking for answers to their ultimate existence. I haven’t read The New Testament, but that feels like something that probably happens in there, right? Maybe toward the back?

Karen: You might be thinking of X-Factor comics, I’m not sure (Apocalypse joke). I’m not sure how much I liked Ajak physically beating the hell of the ghost Celestial, as amazing as it looked (honestly, that final panel of the issue is one of my favorites here). I can recognize the catharsis there but it just felt… pedestrian, for lack of a better word. I think it will depend on what we find out next issue, what it said and why it wasn’t responding to Ajak’s cool dance, whether it is narratively satisfying to me or not. I also am not always in love with the Celestial speak being portrayed as binary code but what can you do.

Mark: I’m also not in love with it, in that’s it’s decidedly fake binary. Literally alternating ones and zeroes without any meaning. Contrast to Gillen and Cowles’ DIE, where the binary code spouted out by beings actually formed ASCII characters. It could have been “stop!” or “please!” (as suggested by the art) and it wouldn’t have spoiled anything about what the Celestial had to say.

One more issue, then an event miniseries, some tie-ins, and if we’re good, a relaunch with a new number 1 with a title like Eternals: Reborn. What could go wrong?

Marvelous Musings

• Ajak’s dancing reminds me of the all-time great, classic Kirby panel of Makkari saying “at this moment, it would be ridiculous not to!”
• I’ve decided to get over Echo being the Phoenix host over the course of writing this. 
• I really like A’lars’ Zordon screen being blasted through, like Thanos and Druig are going into the movie, man! (What movie does that happen in, Last Action Hero or something?)
• There’s Purple Rose of Cairo, where a character steps out of the screen because he sees the same woman watching him every day, but this is characters blasting past a screen, so it’s different. There’s also the burning screen and theater in Inglourious Basterds, I guess. Two fine films from uncontroversial directors! -MT
• Thank you Mark!!

Karen Charm

Karen Charm is a cartoonist and mutant separatist, though they’ve been known to appreciate an Eternal or two.

Mark Turetsky

Mark Turetsky is an audiobook narrator and voice actor who sometimes writes about comic books. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he now lives in Northern Louisiana.