It's been almost three years since Neil Gaiman's 1602, and he now returns with his second project for Marvel.  This time it's a relaunch of the Eternals, the 1970s Jack Kirby project that never quite worked out.

The Eternals are a problematic concept.  Kirby obviously saw them as a big mythological idea, including strange concepts about the origins of life.  Marvel saw them as something to be added to the Marvel Universe, which was terribly misconceived since they didn't belong there at all.  To modern eyes it's tempting to read the Eternals as just a rather late example of 1960s craziness.  Actually, as Gaiman obliquely acknowledges, it's really a Kirbified take on Chariots of the Gods, and therefore very much of its time.  Nobody takes Erich von Daniken's "aliens created life on earth" book seriously any more, but those are the ideas at the heart of Eternals.  Which is... unfortunate.

What Gaiman brings us is a revamp where the Eternals have all mysteriously lost their memory and are living as normal people.  Ikaris has more or less worked out who he is, and he's trying to spark the memory of Makkari.  But Makkari thinks he's a doctor called Mark Curry, and doesn't want to know about the raving lunatic with the silly ideas about origins of life.  Meanwhile, Sprite - the Eternal who looked like a child - has got his own show on Nickelodeon, which adult characters insist on watching for plot reasons.

It's unquestionably set in the Marvel Universe, far more explicitly than 1602 ever was.  While that series just wheeled out the archetypal lead characters, here we have Sprite appearing in public service announcements about the Superhero Registration Act, and the Wasp hosting a reality TV show, in frankly bizarre segments that read like the result of J Michael Straczynski trying to write from a Peter Milligan plot outline.

It's not a blowaway first issue, but I'm definitely intrigued to see where Gaiman is heading with this.  The mythical Eternals certainly play to his strengths more than 1602 did, and the very title "Intelligent Design" suggests a willingness to get into the current bizarre debate in the USA.  On the other hand, the premise of the series kind of requires the Celestials story to be true.  Since Gaiman is neither American nor ultra-religious, it's a fair bet that we're not heading for an endorsement of intelligent design theory.  But given that he's stuck with the Celestials, I'm not sure how you get around that.

Gaiman's real interest, though, seems to be his old favourite of pseduo-mythical figures in mundane settings.  The Eternals fit neatly into that mould, and John Romita Jr is an ideal choice of artist, capable of shifting from relatively subdued normality to utterly insane Kirbyvision as required.  It's not Sandman by any stretch of the imagination - this is Gaiman aiming at a broader audience and toying with somebody else's idea to see what he can make it do.  But there's certainly a lot more to this project than the last one he did for Marvel.

Rating: B+

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