Eternals Forever #1 is a Marvel Comics one-shot by writer Ralph Macchio with art by Ramón F. Bachs, colors by Rachel Rosenberg, and letters by VC’s Joe Caramagna. The cast-away Eternal Ikarus is captured by his archrivals, the Deviants, and set up to unknowingly reveal the location of their hidden city Olympia.
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There are a number of Eternals comics coming from Marvel of late—surely timed around the impending release of the Marvel Studios film Eternals. You can probably completely skip this one and never notice. Regardless of whether it is a setup for Eternals stories to come or not, it’s a lifeless plod through page after page of uninteresting and sometimes painfully scripted exposition. Nearly every sentence uttered exists only for the sake of explaining something else: who the Eternals are, where they came from, their gripe with the Deviants, Ikarus’s backstory, the background of other Eternals, and so on for 22 pages. If you want to know the history of the Eternals before the film comes out, don’t read this comic. Just read a wiki article or watch a YouTube video.
The Silver Age of Marvel Comics was blistering with overly eloquent and flowery language. Sometimes this was on purpose, like in the case of Thor, to emphasize his godliness. Perhaps that was the intention in Eternals Forever #1 too, but it falls flat. Ikarus and the other Eternals don’t feel like they earn that level of pompous speech in their short time on the page. It also is confounding because the Deviants speak the same way, making it feel less like an intentional choice to make the Eternals sound regal and more of a stylistic decision to harken back to older comics prose that just doesn’t appeal to me in this book.
The art is unfortunately mediocre as well. The characters have neither personality nor distinctiveness in their looks or feelings. The Deviant boss Ghaur doesn’t look at all menacing and any character without a name feels like a blob of a character again, aking to what you may have seen in a Marvel comic in the 60s, perhaps a bit on purpose stylistically, but to no great effect. The singular action sequence at the end does well to illustrate the scope of the attack as well as the Eternals’ power with how many enemies are in each panel at a time.
Colors are what keep this comic afloat, sometimes. The underwater scenes feel like the purple skin of the Deviants melds too much with the green and blue hues. The flashback scenes harken wonderfully back to the Kirby era though, and the colors in the fight sequence are striking. It’s an odd battle to follow narratively, but you can at least pour over the colors and get the gist of it nicely.
The lettering is fine: a bit hard to read in some of the blue boxes on top of blue backgrounds, and it’s not the letterer’s fault that there are just too many words on a page.
I don’t know why this comic is called Eternals Forever other than to sell itself as a starting place for new readers to the Eternals lore. Don’t fall into the trap though, it’s not worth it. Eternals Forever #1 is a boring comic to read and to look at and while it likely sets up some future plot its role as a refresher on the lore of the Eternals is just far too long and interestingly presented.
Eternals Forever #1 is available October 13th wherever comics are sold.
Eternals Forever #1
TL;DR
I don’t know why this comic is called Eternals Forever other than to sell itself as a starting place for new readers to the Eternals lore. Don’t fall into the trap though, it’s not worth it. Eternals Forever #1 is a boring comic to read and to look at and while it likely sets up some future plot its role as a refresher on the lore of the Eternals is just far too long and interestingly presented.
