This week Marvel Studios is releasing their next blockbuster, The Eternals. A lot of you are probably wondering who the Eternals are. I’m a comic book geek so I know who they are, but I am not surprised that a lot of others don’t. The Eternals are not the most well-known group of characters in comics.

Before you judge, the popularity of the Eternals please remember that Iron Man was not quite a number one top-tier character before the Robert Downey Jr movies. He was known through cartoons but still not as popular.

Well fear not, young squires, my mission today is to give you a rundown about the Eternals before you go sit down to see the movie.

The Eternals first appearance was in The Eternals #1, July 1976, and created by Jack Kirby. Yes, that Jack Kirby, the infamous creator of DC’s The New Gods. Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics in 1970 to work at DC Comics. It was then that he created The New Gods and the soon-to-be number one villain of DC, Darkseid. The New Gods were created from a mythical and scientific background and the storyline had a definitive ending that was never finished with DC due to the cancellation of the book. When Jack Kirby came back to Marvel, he started a similar concept, but this time named it The Eternals.

The story of The Eternals starts with godlike creatures called the Celestials. The story goes that one million years ago the Celestials came to Earth and created two different races by doing genetic experiments on proto humanity. The two races were the Eternals and the Deviants.

The Eternals look human but have extraordinary attributes such as being long-lived, do not fatigue, immune to disease and poison, and not being affected by environmental cold and heat. The Eternals have cosmic energy running through their bodies that give them an unbreakable mental hold over their physiological processes.

One of the main tasks of the Eternals is to protect the world from the Deviants. As stated above the Deviants were created at the same time as the Eternals by the Celestials. While the Eternals are usually physically beautiful in appearance, the Deviants are known to be more hideous. Each Deviant was made possessing some random physical or cosmic mutation that Celestials never repeated making each Deviant unique. The Deviants have a lot of the same attributes as the Eternals however they are not always as powerful as their counterparts. The Deviants are also under the impression that they were to rule over the Earth but were betrayed by that promise by the Celestials.

As a universe created by the great Jack Kirby, there was obviously a lot of potential to expand on that universe. I would even say that the work Kirby did for DC Comics was not expanded as much as Marvel expanded the idea of the Eternals. The story of the creation of the Eternals and Deviants by the Celestials was also used as a backstory in the history of the Inhumans, the Kree, the Skrulls, and the Titans, which is the race of the infamous Thanos. So even some of those already existing cosmic characters in the Marvel Universe were able to be explained by Jack Kirby’s contribution.

There are so many ways the Eternals connect to the Marvel Universe. Throughout the years a few Eternals have been Avengers at some point. The Celestials became a cosmic entity that knows and interacts with all throughout the universe.

Eternals opens in the box offices this week and before any of you run out to the theatre, we thought we would give you a heads up on what to expect. A background. After you see the movie, please come back to ObsidianNomad and let us know what you thought of the movie. Give us your review.

Kenny Walker Jr


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