Eternals #6 (December, 1976)

It’s been a while since we last discussed artist/writer/editor Jack Kirby’s Eternals in this space — so, as will come as no surprise to regular readers of the blog, prior to jumping in to the issue referred to both by this post’s title and by its featured cover image (the work of Kirby and Frank Giacoia, by the way), we’re going to spend some time catching up with the episodes of the ongoing saga which had appeared in the intervening months between the release of issues #2 and #6, way back in 1976… beginning, naturally enough, with issue #3, whose cover (also by Kirby and Giacoia) is shown at left.

Eternals #3’s “The Devil in New York!” (featuring the inks of John Verpoorten, who’d also done those honors for the title’s first two issues) picks up right where the previous installment had left off — which, in case you need a reminder, was with the full-page reveal of the awesome Arishem, leader of the Fourth Host of the space gods known as the Celestials.  The present chapter opens as “Ike Harris” — originally introduced in issue #1 as a mere guide to archaeologist Daniel Damian and his daughter Margo, but who’d quickly outed himself as Ikaris, a member of an immortal, super-powered sibling race to Homo sapiens who call themselves Eternals — poses the question to his fellow Eternal, Ajak: “Does this Arishem herald the coming of disastrous times, such as befell man in the distant past?”  Read More

Eternals #1 (July, 1976)

By April, 1976, the return of artist/writer Jack Kirby to Marvel Comics could no longer be considered news.  His first new cover for the publisher (an Avengers illustration fronting Marvel Treasury Edition #7) had appeared the previous July, and his first new full comic book, Captain America #193, three months after that.  Still, we hadn’t seen any brand-new series concepts from Kirby yet — and, given that he had been the House of Ideas’ preeminent idea man for roughly the first decade of “the Marvel Age of Comics” (i.e., 1961-70), longtime Marvelites were eager to see what would next emerge from the protean imagination of “King” Kirby — as, of course, were virtually all the creator’s many fans, regardless of their preference for one comics publisher or another.  Read More