Even when Thor was thrown in the mix, his monster-of-the-week stories were not unlike that of his fellow Avengers. Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four all lived in the same vicinity and dealt with villains on a similar scale. When Marvel’s flagship heroes began crossing paths in the 1960s, their creators had no trouble explaining why. At least, not in a traditional comic book sense. How would these two narratives, so vastly different in scope and scale, be made to co-exist? Well, they wouldn’t. were tasked with bringing the Eternals and their enormous space opera back into the Marvel fold, at a time when the company’s centerpiece was Captain America and Iron Man’s ideological squabble and the ensuing hero vs. Writer Neil Gaiman and artist John Romita Jr. While Marvel had a smattering of cosmic stories at that time, the publisher had only just finished up the line-wide crossover Civil War, which had dragged almost every corner of continuity into a political saga of superhero registration (à la Watchmen). The Eternals are set to make their big-screen debut this November, are a pantheon of immortal deities introduced during comics’ Bronze Age, though they wouldn’t become a Marvel mainstay until their relaunch three decades later, in 2006. But no characters have ever taken that juxtaposition to the extremes of the Eternals. Few Marvel properties feel both like an integrated part of its sprawling saga and like a mythology on a different wavelength.

Neil gaiman eternals review