View Full Version : The Eternals: an attempt at an interpretation.
Jack Kirby’s Eternals series, created at Marvel in the mid 70’s, is often seen as one of his lesser efforts, at least in comparison with the multi-title Fourth World epic so unfairly aborted at DC. It has even been referred to as a sort of “Fourth-World-lite”, a relatively uninspired rehash of ideas which he had given a more profound treatment in that earlier set of books. The Fourth World, like it or hate it, at least has some pretty clearly defined themes: good vs evil, freedom vs oppression, nature vs nurture, just to cite some of the more obvious. The Eternals, though, doesn't appear be “about” anything any deeper than the story itself, a typical Kirby-style adventure yarn riffing on the then trendy 'Chariots of the Gods' books of Erich von Daniken.
I'm going to take a contrary view: Kirby's Eternals has a lot going on beneath the surface narrative and can be opened up to an incredibly rich and intricate symbolical interpretation. Far from being an inferior variation on the New Gods, it is a unique concept, built on an entirely different set of thematic and narrative premises from the earlier work, and is by no means the lesser creation in terms of originality and thematic resonance.
So what do I mean exactly by all these vague and pretentious phrases? (“ 'thematic resonance',” indeed; this is comics! And Jack Kirby comics at that!”). What, in other words, are the major themes of the Eternals, how do they differ from those of the Fourth World and what makes them so “resonant”? To answer that is going to take some doing, especially since my impression is that the average reader is quite resistant to the idea that Kirby was capable of writing anything with any degree of depth or subtlety; I think most people are going to need some convincing, so bear with me if I seem to be taking a long time to get to the point. I'll have to break this up into a series of fairly long posts, most of which I've written over the last couple weeks.
So, with all that in mind, let's begin with a few fairly obvious observations that i think will be acceptable to most people:
What are the distinguishing characteristics of the Eternals and the Deviants, respectively? The Eternals live high above the dwellings of humans, on inaccessible mountaintops. They are practically immortal and indestructible, and have developed fantastic powers and abilities, both physical and mental, through centuries or even millenia of self-discipline and training. They have regular, even features, are for the most part youthful or in the prime of life and physically handsome and/or beautiful (apart from father-figures such as Zuras and Valkin). Their attitude towards humanity is benign, although somewhat paternalistic or even, at times, authoritarian, and in the distant past they acted as humanity's teachers and protectors. They usually look at the Deviants with disgust and contempt at best, and as dangerous enemies at worst. They regard the Celestials with awe and wonder, and aspire in some far distant future to reach some level of understanding of the nature of those enigmatic beings, an achievement far beyond even their amazing abilities at present.
The Deviants, on the other hand, are almost uniformly ugly and misshapen (in fact, it is noteworthy that the epithet “ugly” is often used, almost as an accusation, by various Eternals on more than one occasion when referring to the Deviants; something I'll get back to later). They are habitually suspicious and envious of the Eternals, aggressive and exploitative towards humans when they can get away with it (enslaving them in pre-historical times), and are possessed by an almost irrational terror and hatred of the Celestials. Within their own society they are cruel and brutal to their social inferiors, but sycophantic towards superiors. They are genetically unstable and prone to produce bizarre and unpredictable mutations, most of which they ruthlessly exterminate. They live underground, beneath the very ocean, in fact, in a hidden city very rarely visited by any non-Deviant.
I think it's apparent from this description that, at a symbolic level, the mountain-top-dwelling Eternals connote the higher consciousness that humanity has always striven to reach, whether through religion, philosophy, science (knowledge), or some other means. Their mountaintop habitat, their advanced mental evolution (“They probed the universe with their minds” Kirby says), their physical beauty, all mark them as higher beings, a status they have achieved both through their own innate genetic potential and through intense self-discipline. Their past role as teachers and benefactors of humanity is also significant.
The Deviants, on the other hand, obviously have strong associations with the dark side of human nature, the chaotic mass of cruel and violent impulses suppressed in the human subconscious, forces, not coincidentally, associated with the chthonic (“of the underworld”) in ancient Greek myth. The underworld and the oceans are both strongly associated in various mythologies with chaos and savagery, and we have seen that the Deviants' dwelling place is connected with each. The Deviants themselves behave with fear and hatred of anything they perceive as stronger than themselves, and with ruthless brutality to anyone weaker. They are creatures of impulse, attacking what they do not understand or what they think they can overwhelm and exploit. Kirby describes them s “volatile and energetic”. A Freudian might say they represent the id as opposed to the Eternals' superego, with humans as the ordinary ego situated “between” these lower and upper levels of the psyche. I don't disagree entirely with this interpretation, but would caution against simple equation in which X always stands for Y as is the case in a strictly allegorical narrative. I think we're dealing with symbols, not allegories (more on the difference later).
But “so what?” you might say. You could, for example, look at any monster story and start talking about how the monster represents the dark side of human nature, etc, but does this have any real meaning when we look at the story itself? Or is it just a bunch of impressive sounding mumbo-jumbo that makes no sense when we try to apply it to the narrative? I think that the symbolism tentatively outlined above does indeed bring us to a deeper understanding of what the Eternals series is all about, and the rest of this exercise will be an attempt to demonstrate how. So let's start looking at what actually happens in the story.
The series opens with Ikaris leading an expedition of human archaeologists (Dr. Damian and his daughter Margo) into the Andes where they discover the “chamber of the Gods” and Ikaris proceeds to inform them of the existence of the Space-gods, Eternals, and Deviants. In an apparently (but only apparently, as I'll get to in a moment) trivial scene, an ordinary human-flown airplane disappears when it inadvertently runs into a mysterious energy barrier which turns out to have been created by the Deviants, whom we then see sending Kro up from their undersea city in order to prevent the Eternals from activating a device that will call the Space-gods back to earth. He and his Deviant lackeys attack Ikaris and the Damians, trying to kill the humans, who are protected by the Eternal. The conflict is interrupted by the landing of the Gods' spaceship. End of issue #1.
So what's going on here? My reading goes like this: we are dealing with a metaphorical effort at consciousness raising. Ikaris leads the Damians (the ego, or ordinary human consciousness) to the mountaintop (enlightenment), where he does indeed enlighten them regarding some crucial aspects of human reality, aspects of which everyday consciousness is unaware: the existence of unguessed-at dark, primal forces (Deviants), and highly evolved mental faculties (Eternals) each of which is intimately associated to ordinary human conscious (as the Eternals and Deviants are genetically related to ordinary humankind) . That is, he attempts to make the mundane consciousness aware of facets or potentials of the mind normally unperceived by it. He also tells them of the existence of the Celestials who are described as an unbelievably awesome race of space-faring, god-like beings who are responsible for genetically engineering all three races. I'll get to what this signifies at the symbolic level a little later.
So far, so good, but things aren't quite that simple – luckily for the reader, or we wouldn't have much of a story. For one thing, I think we have some ambiguity in the symbolism of the physical setting of this attempt at consciousness expansion. The secrets of the gods, as we'd expect, are situated high up in the Andes, but at the same time the actual “Chamber of the Gods” is located beneath the ground, always a clue that we may be dealing with the dark psychic forces represented by the Deviants; and, sure enough, the Deviants break into the scene, literally from beneath, and disrupt the entire exercise, attacking Ikaris and even attempting to kill Margo and her father. At a symbolic level, then, it appears that the attempted consciousness raising is for some reason prevented from succeeding by the primitive instincts represented by the Deviants.
Moreover, Ikaris himself is an interestingly ambivalent choice as guide, since his mythological namesake, Icarus, is best known, not for his ability of flight, but for his foolhardy attempt to fly too high and its disastrous results, a theme repeated elsewhere in Greek mythology (e.g. Bellerophon, who attempted to fly to Mount Olympus on the winged Pegasus, and was hurled to earth for his presumption). Lest we think this a mere coincidence, allow me to point out in advance that the very first time we see Ikaris in flight (in issue #3) he is attacked by Deviants, endangering his human companion, Margo, and that later on (#4), when we see him foolishly attempt to take on the entire Deviant invasion of New York by himself, he is downed in flight, again by the Deviants, and immobilised.
Finally, I return to the seemingly unnecessary scene in #1 in which the human-flown airplane disappears. More particularly, what happens is this: The airplane is flying over the ocean when the pilot begins complaining that he's lost (“My compass has gone wild! I don't know where I am!”); then, “he is suddenly confronted by a wall of seething energy”. This description alone (mental confusion, panic, ocean, “seething energy”) would be enough to connect the incident symbolically with the inchoate psychic drives and forces represented by the Deviants, but Kirby leaves no room for doubt by actually making the disruptive energy wall a Deviant construct.
So, just as the mythological Icarus flew too high and fell to earth, so does the Eternal Ikaris, when he attempts to bring his human companions to the secrets of the gods, end up endangering them. How? By exposing them to Deviant attack. And just as the Damians are in danger from Deviant attack due to high-flying Ikaris, so the “human flight” of the airplane comes to a bad end through an encounter with the Deviants' “wall of seething energy”.
In other words, a premature attempt to expand (or raise - recall the flight motif and the mountaintops) an unprepared consciousness leads to the threat of extinction of that ordinary but at least rational consciousness by “the return of the repressed” - the Deviants. Or, again in other words, an attempt at psychic development which disregards the existence of those repressed forces runs the risk of disaster.
But maybe this is all just coincidence. Sure, it's easy to come up with a few facile statements about symbolism for a single issue, but does it make sense for the series as a whole? I think it does, and I hope to show how by a fairly detailed description and analysis of the rest of the series.
T GUy
03-12-2005, 03:49 AM
Fascinating reading of The Eternals, berk. keep 'em coming.
I assume that you're not familiar with Fabio Barbieri's essay on The Eternals in The Jack Kirby Quarterly back in the 1990s?
Kirby himself said something like 'The New Gods was the question; The Eternals is one of the possible answers.' (Mind you, he also said that the questions are always more interesting than the answers.)
Thanks, T Guy.
No, I have a few issues of the Kirby Quarterly, but nothing about the Eternals. Was it along the same lines as what I'm doing?
I started thinking about the Eternals 2 or 3 years ago, in response to a thread on the Eternals message board at comicboards.com, asking what everyone's favourite issue was and why. I chose #10, which was the last of a 3-issue story that began in #8, so in order to explain why I liked it I had to go back and describe the whole story, which led me to look at it closely and try think about exactly what it was saying. Previously, I had just enjoyed the series at the story/character level, without really analysing it too deeply.
I'll make another post in a couple days. There's a lot of material here, so I don't want to swamp everyone with too much information at once.
The Kirby comment you quoted is new to me, and certainly is intriguing.
T GUy
03-12-2005, 11:26 AM
I have a few issues of the Kirby Quarterly, but nothing about the Eternals. Was it along the same lines as what I'm doing? Not in the sense that you are interpreting it from a Freudian - or at least psychological - view. My - rather vague - memory is that it was interesting and quite good except for all the Hindu mythology which either I failed to follow or Fabio dragged in unnecessarilly.
A point I forgot to mention: it's significant - from the point of view of your analysis - that Ikaris is with scientists/explorers in No. 1 when he's seeking to contact the Celestials. They (both the Damiens and the Eternals) represent the part of humanity that seeks truth and beauty. Sudden thought: do the Celestials represent that truth and beauty?
Conversely, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Vira (the titular she-demon in No.2) creates architecture and religion from the simple necessity of survival.
T Guy said:
A point I forgot to mention: it's significant - from the point of view of your analysis - that Ikaris is with scientists/explorers in No. 1 when he's seeking to contact the Celestials. They (both the Damiens and the Eternals) represent the part of humanity that seeks truth and beauty. Sudden thought: do the Celestials represent that truth and beauty? I agree that it's very significant that the Damians and Ikaris are all seeking some from of truth, some new level of knoweldge that is in some way associated with the Celestials. As for what the Celestials represent, I don't use the terms you suggested (truth and beauty) but I don't think they're incompatible with what I end up saying. Symbols (as opposed to allegories) are difficult to pin down to one easily defined meaning, as I'll get into a little later.
Ah well, I was going to wait a while before posting anything further, but I can't wait. Here's the next bit (see following post):
The most significant events of the next few issues (#2, 3, & 4) are:
the arrival of the Celestials and the characteristic reactions to it from Eternal, Human and Deviant; the resurrection of Ajak; the escape of Ikaris and Margo from the Andes retreat before it's sealed off for 50 years; the Deviant attack on New York City; the introduction of Sersi; and the downfall of Ikaris by Deviant hands. There's lots to say about each of these incidents, but I'll try to limit myself to those which I think have the most direct bearing on the major themes of the series (which, I realise, I still haven't spelled out completely, but bear with me: I'm gettng there, bit by bit).
Just as earlier we scrutinised the Eternals and the Deviants in an attempt to guess what those beings might signify at the symbolic level, let's have a look at the Celestials. Their most important charcteristics appear to be: their vast size; their immense, nearly incomprehensible power; their role as engineers of all higher life-forms on earth, (Eternal, Human & Deviant); their association with space (the most common designations for them are “Celestial” and “Space-Gods”); their silence; and their sheer unfathomability and awesomeness. They are described as “huge” and “vast” and Kirby gets this across visually more effectively than any other artist I've ever seen. Even though later artists drew them at the same scale, their Celestials never gave such an impression of sheer awe-inspiring enormity as did Kirby's. Double-page spreads of their spaceship (#2), and of Arishem's head and hand (#3) help get the point across.
Of Arishem himself, the leader of the Fourth Host, the caption of the final panel of #4 says “His face is hidden, but his eyes can see everything that lives in this world ...”; elsewhere, at various points, Damian comments on the “facelessness” of the Celestials, how “huge and enigmatic” they are. Even the Eternal Ikaris, in #2, says that it is “beyond me” to “read the thoughts of the gods”. There are numerous comments on and demonstrations of the unfathomable power of these beings throughout the series.
So the Celestials are associated with a complex of ideas and feelings concerning with the origins of the human race, space, vastness, power, awesomeness, and incomprehensibility.
There's a famous quote from 17th-Century French mathematician Blaise Pascal describing his feelings upon gazing at the night sky:
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with terror.”
This line, in my opinion, expresses much of what Kirby was trying to suggest with the Celestials.
In the first panel of the 2nd last page of #4, Kirby writes of the appearance of one of the Celestials above Ajak and Dr Damian: “... The sky is blotted out by a great shadow. It moves ... draws close ... and resolves itself into a reality of staggering import!” Ajak gestures at the gigantic figure and says, “Behold! One of the Celestial Host ... To merely see him is to marvel at the wonders that lie among the stars.” My feeling is that with the Celestials, Kirby was trying to represent in symbolic form the awesome incomprehensibility of the universe in which we (humanity, earth) occupy so miniscule a place. And by implication, not only the universe, but reality itself, i.e. the reality that underlies the visible phenomena we are familiar with. Their vast scale (it makes no sense that anything that size could actually function in an anthropomorphic form) evokes the unbelievable vastness of the universe. Their unbelievable power evokes the relative powerlessness of beings such as ourselves before the forces that govern this universe. Their unfathomability, their complete and utter silence, and the huge, unreadable masks they wear in lieu of faces evoke "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces."
At some level, then, the Celestials signify the fundamentally unknowable mystery of that in which we as beings find ourselves existing.
But what of the following: The final panel of issue #2 reads: "Arishem, Leader of the Fourth Host, lands firmly upon the pylon. He will stand upon it for fifty earth years, towering like the surrounding mountains above all life below. And on the last day of the fiftieth year - he will step from the pylon - and on that day, earth will live - - or DIE!"
This is indeed a very important element, at both the narrative and symbolic levels, and I'll come back to it when I get to some of the middle issues, particularly #6 and #7.
But for now let's turn to the Damians, so far our most important human characters. When the Celestials arrive, Kirby gives us a full page panel of Kro, the Damians and Ikaris, in that order, left to right, background to foreground. Carrying on with the symbolic scheme I've been trying to outline, the humans are placed between the Deviant and the Eternal because those two strange races represent, among other things, aspects of the human psyche of which ordinary consciousness, as represented by the Damians, is not usually aware.
This mundane consciousness is represented by a father and a daughter for very good symbolic reasons: we soon see that Margo, who is to become in some ways the main human character in the book (insofar as there is one at all), is forcibly taken from her father by Ikaris when Dr. Damian decides to remain with Ajak to study the Celestials. In psychological interpretations of fairy tales, scenarios of this sort are often taken to indicate an effort on the part of the psyche (Margo) to develop, to outgrow the dependencies of childhood and become a developed individual. If this were a fairy tale, Margo would probably be the protagonist, and the Eternals and Deviants her supporting characters, allies and adversaries in her subsequent adventures. And to some extent, this is indeed true of the Eternals series.
Except that Margo is a supporting player instead of leading heroine. Kirby, typically, is working at the same time on several different scales: Margo represents, not only an indivdual consciousness, but ordinary consciousness in general – the entire human race, in one sense, just as, in another sense, the human race (in relation to Eternals and Deviants) represents ordinary consciousness.
I think that this, paradoxically perhaps, is why the human presence in Kirby's Eternals is largely a passive one: in a way, ordinary consciousness, the ego, is more of a spectator than a participant in this story, because the story is largely about the discovery of these hitherto hidden aspects of the psyche, the process of learning about their nature, the interactions amongst them, the change in their inter- relations brought about by this new knowledge, and so on. Ordinary human beings like Margo observe and wonder at these newly discovered entities and their strange abilities and actions. All this may sound a little abstract, but for now I want to leave it at that. The best way to make these ideas clearer will be to continue looking at how they're manifested in the story.
But before leaving the subject, I can't resist pointing out that the name “Damian” itself was a very interesting choice on Kirby's part for his main human characters. To me it looks like a variation on the ancient Greek “daimon” which had several realated meanings:
“demon” (the word is actually derived from daimon)
“spirit”
“divine being” (recall Socrates's daimon, a personal divine spirit which he believed instructed him what to do in a manner not dissimilar to what we today would call conscience).
In my opinion, this ties in too nicely with the symbolic scheme I've been outlining to be a mere coincidence. Let
“demon”= Deviant = id/unconscious,
“divine being“ = Eternal = superego/conscience;
the obvious conclusion might be that:
“spirit” = human = ego,
but also perhaps more importantly:
“spirit” (in the sense of soul/mind) = psyche = human.
(don't allow these “equations” to mislead you; this isn't allegory; I simply use the '=' sign as a shorthand, not to to suggest that I have formulated anything definitive about these symbols.)
Anyway, in other words, while, on the one hand Eternals, Deviants and Humans each represent certain aspects, hidden or otherwise, of the psyche, Humankind, as psyche, also contains all three. i.e. In one sense, the human mind is the setting for the entire story (another reason perhaps why human characters aren't the main protagonsts of the narrative). In another sense, that of humans-as-ego or what I've been calling “ordinary” or “everyday” consciousness, a recurring pattern in the book is human failure to cope intellectually or emotionally, when faced with the existence of the Celestials (examples include the American SHIELD agents in #7,, the Russian military in # 11) or even that of the Eternals and Deviants (e.g. the students who unleash the cosmic-powered Hulk in #).
Rod G
03-12-2005, 11:35 PM
I for one wouldn't mind an Essential Eternals.
I think an Essential Eternals would be agreat idea, although the series really needs to be seen in colour. It is a very "colourful" story, literally and figuratively, and Kirby's inked artwork doesn't really have the inpact it should in B & W (his uninked pencils are another matter, and look pretty good in b&w).
Getting back to the story, we left Ikaris, the Damians and Kro witnessing the arrival of the Celestial Host. Kro reacts in typical Deviant fashion, hurling threats at the Space-Gods and various dire predictions and ill-wishes at Ikaris, and finally running away in terror of the power of the Celestials, whose arrival is threatening to collapse the ancient stones of the god- chamber, and finally fleeing back down to the Deviant lair underneath the ocean. At first glance it might seem that, symbolically, we could say that the primitive destructive instincts represented by the Deviants have been successfully repressed so that the exercise in consciousness expansion interrupted earlier can continue. I think we need to take a closer look, though.
First of all, Kro flees voluntarily, not because he is driven off by Ikaris, so we should interpret this retreat in terms of an interaction between Deviant and Celestial. The unconscious, or the primal instincts represented by the Deviants, have come face to face with the Celestials, i.e. The terrifyingly vast power and unfathomable mystery of the universe, of existence. They react with threats, terror, and flight. At one level, this is simply the reaction of an infantile psyche when faced with the shocking experience of an external reality that does not comply with, in fact shatters, the psyche's illusions of omnipotence and self-sufficiency. At another (but not unrelated) level, we have the terror of Western Man in the face of an indifferent universe, a universe ruled by cold, inhuman forces to which our thoughts, passions, and desires are irrelvant (hence, IMO, Western man's yearning for a universe created and ruled by a personalised, caring, paternal god).
We could see the god-chamber, which, although situated high in the Andes, is at the same time buried beneath the earth, and is connected to the Deviants lair by a long, water-filled, underground channel, as a womb from which the psyche is attempting to be reborn in a new, enlightened form. However, the infantile psyche is unprepared for the final step, and when faced with the terror and insecurity of external reality – i.e. Of the world outsed the familiar security of the womb – it retreats, and the attempted re-birth is spontaneously aborted (represented symbolically by the collapse of the god-chamber, etc). [EDIT: the imagery and symbolism of the god-chamber episode are complex, ambiguous, and in some ways conflicting; and perhaps for those reasons, I'm not entirely satisfied with the explanation I've outlined in this paragraph. I'll probably come back to it later, but for now, I want to keep ploughing forward.]
Secondly, Ikaris himself decides that Margo must leave the area and forcibly removes her from her father, who, as we saw above, decides to remain. In other words, higher consciousness realises that more work has to be done, more progress made, before ordinary consciousness is ready to face the Celestials. At the same time, the removal of Margo from her father underscores the fact that the effort to develop, while postponed for now, is to continue.
Finally, if this suppression is a success, it is a very temporary one. The Deviants have not gone to sleep, and soon return to threaten the human and Eternal once more.. They make a brief, unsuccessful attack on Ikaris and Margo as they fly to New York City, but, more ominously, are shown making plans to turn their defeat into victory. Their plan is very simple and very significant: Kro intends to masqerade as the Devil and hoodwink the Humans into thinking that the he is part of the Celestial Host, provoking them to attack the Space-Gods out of the instinctive terror and hatred he believes this devil-image will arouse in them. They are actually on their way to New York in order to carry out this scheme when they make they make their attack against Ikaris and Margo. Ikaris takes Margo to meet another Eternal Sersi and leaves her under her care while he goes off to fight the Deviant invasion single-handedly. However, he is very quickly brought down by the Deviants, who hit him with a "brain-mine", rendering him unconscious. They encase him in a coffin-like capsule and bury him beneath the sea.
All this has several interesting implications on the symbolic level, most of which should be obvious by now:
The race between Ikaris and the Deviants to get to New York, and the physical conflict between them, signify the battle for control of the psyche between the primitive drives represented by the latter, usually suppressed in the unconscious, and the higher ideals represented by the former. New York City, as a human city and the scene of the battle, is the psyche itself, the setting for this conflict (see the previous post's comments on the Damians).
Once again we have what Freud called “the return of the repressed”. No matter how many times they're defeated or driven away, the Deviants always come back, eventually. They have to, because the primitive drives they represent are an inescapable part of human nature. (With the Eternals, the same fact is symbolised more directly by their immortality and their very name).
Their decision to impersonate the Devil is wholly appropriate because the Devil himself is and has been for most of 'his' existence a symbol for, among other things, the very same primitve instincts I keep bringing up (telling phrase) every time I mention the Deviants (as was one of his several ancestors, the Greek God Pan).
Their choice of tactics – to make the humans attack the Celestials out of fear, hatred, and anger – is an explicit statement of some of the most powerful of those same primitive instincts I keep mentioning. Kirby couldn't make it much more clear: this is what the Deviants do – they drive humans to act on the basis of their most basic and primitive emotions. The prehistorical (=preconscious?) enslavement of the human race by the Deviants is a symbolic way of saying that humans were once ruled by those primitive instincts.
The ease with which the Deviants nullify Ikaris's counterattack and bring him down in mid-flight signifies how very powerful these drives can be, no matter in how much contempt they may be held by higher levels of consciousness. “That fool Ikaris,” his friend Ajak comments, “He would try to take on an entire force of Deviants. That's what happens to heroes.” (As a minor aside, I believe is that there is also a hint here that the Eternals series isn't about heroes in the ordinary comic-book sense of the word; i.e. That the series is concerned with another kind of heroism, not of the usual Superman/Captain America variety). Ikaris's failure indicates the error in thinking that these drives can be dealt with simply (i.e. merely, only) by attacking and repressing them by force. (And in fact, Ikaris's attempt and defeat are parallelled by the aggressive reactions of the humans at this stage of the Deviant attack.)
So, things aren't looking too good at the moment. Kro's plan to frighten the humans seems to be working, Ikaris's attemptted counterattack has failed, and he, Sersi, and Margo are prisoners of the Deviants. That is, the psyche has been taken over by its most primal, instinctive drives and is reacting with fear and anger.
Issue #4 ends with Ajak pointing to the gigantic form of Arishem and saying to Damian, "I know what you are thinking, Doctor. What will the humans do when they see him?!" We than get a full page panel of Arishem with the caption: “His face is hidden, but his eyes can see everything that lives in this world ... They are the eyes of a judge ... even as his hands are those of a destroyer ... When Mankind discovers Arishem, it will find itself against overwhelming, TOTAL POWER!!”.
In other words, how will a psyche ruled by its most primitive passions react when faced with the terrifying awesomeness of a reality before which it must dwindle into insignificance? And what recourse is there when, so far (in the story), all attempts at repressing those primal instincts have failed?
The answer to this question will bring us one step closer to the key to the meaning of the entire series (which I'm sure is beginning to take shape for those who have stuck with me this far).
Cei-U!
03-14-2005, 09:15 AM
I've always found Kirby's Eternals superior in both conception and execution to the New Gods tetralogy. Perhaps it was the symbolic depths to the series you're sounding so adroitly that I respond to. This is *great* stuff, berk. Keep it coming.
Cei-U!
I summon the "More!"
Thanks Cei-U. I do believe that readers respond to the symbolic depths, as you put it, of stories, even if they don't consciously analyse them the way I'm trying to do here. I was an Eternals fan for years without ever really thinking too much about what the series might mean at the symbolic level, but still feeling that it had some sort of resonance for me. It "hit a nerve" as the saying goes. But as soon as I did begin to think about it (in regards to my favourtite story of the series in #'s 8 - 10) the symbolism opened up like a flower to me.
Anyway, I will keep them coming. I've sketched out analyses of each issue up to and including #10 so far (and have a few ideas about some of the later stories although I haven't thought about them in depth yet). Since I've only covered up to the end of issue #4 so far in the posts, there's lots to go yet. I'll probably post another one or two tonight.
Shellhead
03-14-2005, 06:32 PM
I think that Kirby was stuck in a rut with certain archetypes. Before the Eternals and Deviants, Jack was working with the New Gods and Darkseid. Before that, it was the Inhumans and their Alpha Primitives.
Well, I think the New Gods was dealing with a different set of themes than was the Eternals. I certainly agree that the whole idea of an more advanced alien race experimenting genetically with earth life was part of the original Inhumans concept, but we'll never know what Kirby intended at the time he created the Inhumans, because he wasn't given a free reign back then. As far as we can tell from this perspective, the treament of that idea in the Eternals is a very different kettle of fish from that given with the Inhumans. For example, the Kree are very different from the Celestials, and could not be construed to operate at the symbolic level in anything like the way I think the Celestials do; and so on.
In any case, I wouldn't call it a rut. Artists often keep coming back to a few central ideas that interest them. Philip K. Dick is an obvious example, but you could include people like Beckett, Kafka, ... even Charles Dickens.
InfoBroker
03-14-2005, 08:26 PM
request to Sir Tim: While it's a natural outcome of a discussion/analysis of Eternals to compare it to New Gods, and I think a lot of interesting discussion can come from comparing the labels of ruts to artist's themes, and also pointing out all the stuff that Kirby created between the "rut" of New Gods and the "rut" Eternals, and while I will also add that there is a lot more to Kirby's New Gods than just the surface theme of "New Gods and Darksied" and while I find it interesting to explore the aspects of the roots of these later series in his earlier works like Inhumans, and their link to the Kree, and even earlier stuff in Thor and also Jack's golden age material like Mercury...
I would appreciate all that stuff being segmented to another thread and keep this one focused on the analysis of the Eternals.
Note to Berk from another big time Kirby fan: I am enjoying your analysis and as time permits I will be adding my two cents worth.
- jb the ib :cool:
Getting back to our story ...
When we left, at the end of issue #4, the Deviant invasion of New York was moving along just as they had planned, with the humans reacting with fear and aggression, Ikaris out of action and Sersi and Margo prisoners. Makarri, an Eternal in Olympia who earlier witnessed (via video-screen) the Deviants' capture of Sersi and Margo, rushes off to inform Zuras, the Prime Eternal, that “the Deviants have come out of their hole” (again, note the phrasing; OK I'll stop pointing the obvious now). He manages to get admitted to the presence of Zuras, whom we find playing a game involving remote-controlled robot-boxers with his daughter Thena (Thena wins, KOing Zuras's fighter). Upon being informed of the situation, Zuras explodes in rage, bolts of energy crackling around him in his anger.:
Zuras: Must we ever remained chained to savage cousins with whom we share this world?
(Note the ambiguity: he could well be referring to Deviants and humans, not just the Deviants). Then we have an interesting exchange among the three (Makari, Zuras, and Thena):
Thena (responding to Zuras's enraged energy display): Father! You'll ruin the furniture!
Zuras: Don't divert me with trivia, Thena! Your true thoughts cannot be hidden from mighty Zuras!
Thena: Then mighty Zuras knows that the Deviants must be taught to respect Eternals! You know that I intend to do the teaching!
Makarri: Well said,Thena!
Zuras: Go then – both of you! Vent your aggressions upon the Deviants. There's more to do here than join in small encounters!
Thena (pulling Makkari off his feet as she strides from the chamber): You heard him! We leave at once!
Makarri: Y-Your wish i-is my command Thena!
The siginificance of Zuras's first quoted comment should be pretty straightforward by now: "Must we (higher consciousness) ever remained chained (inextricably connected) to savage cousins (Deviants/primitive, irrational instincts) with whom we share this world (the psyche)? " It's a cry of frustration from the higher, more rational levels of the mind at its inability to shake off those primitive drives which insist on breaking through at the least opportunity.
However, there are some elements in the scene described above that may appear at odds with some of the things I've been saying throughout this analysis: I've been saying that the Eternals as a group represent a complex of more or less related ideas, including :
the concept of enlightenment;
higher consciousness
something akin to the Freudian idea of the superego, including what we call conscience
the love of wisdom and the quest for knowledge
the pursuit of the ideal of truth and beauty [thanks to T Guy for this observation]
an ideal or model of higher evolution to be emulated or striven for (it's very important, for instance that their amazing abilities are often described, not as simple genetic gifts or "super-powers", but as having been achieved through hundreds of years of discipline and training; there are many exmples of this throughout the series)
But here we have Zuras exploding in anger, Thena and Makarri expressing aggressive intentions towards the unruly Deviants, and so on. Are these the actions of a higher consciousness?
The simple answer, of course, is that even a highly evolved being sometimes needs to defend itself and those under its protection, but this evades the question: if the Eternals stand for something presumably above these sorts of hostile feelings (which, after all, I've been asserting are actually represented by the Deviants) shouldn't the Eternal characters be a little more serene and sort “above-it-all” in their attitude towards things?
A better answer, I think, is that while the Eternals as a group "stand for" the concepts I've outlined, and even individual Eternals, as Eternals, can at times represent those same ideas (as I've claimed Ikaris does in the first issue), they are symbols, not simple allegorical figures. Perhaps this is a good point at which to talk a little about something I mentioned earlier: the difference between symbolism and allegory. I think there are two main points of distinction:
Individuals such as Ikaris, Sersi, and Thena are fully rounded characters, so that, for example, each character, as a character, would each have a fully rounded psyche, including his/her own superego, ego, and id (to stick with the Freudian terminology, for the moment). This is in contrast to allegorical figures which tend to be flat, card-board cutouts – simple placeholders for that which they represent.
Carl Jung, in his essay Psychology and Literature, defines a symbol as “not … an allegory that points to something all too familiar, but an expression that stands for something not clearly known and yet profoundly alive.” That which is represented symbolically isn't a clearly delineated, easily defined concept, but rather a complex of ideas and feelings which would be very difficult to define or discuss in simple terms; which is exactly why literature resorts to symbolism in order to deal with them.
This isn't to say that a symbolic work can't be interpreted allegorically at some (usually fairly superficial) level. The Greek myths have often been analysed this way, for instance; ot that allegpries cannot be a powerful and evocative technique for the treament of certain themes (My favourite example of allegory is Pilgrim's Progress, a great read which I recommend to everyone).
Keeping these two points of difference in mind then, I'd point out that it's very appropriate that when the Eternals do behave aggressively, it is almost always due to Deviant provocation, which of course is exactly what we'd expect given the symbolic plan I've outlined. The Deviants represent, among other things, primitive aggressive instincts, so it is fitting that they'd provoke individual characters to express those instincts in their actions. (One implication of this interpretation is that even when the Deviants lose at the narrative level, they can still “win” at the symbolic level, since by provoking an antagonist into an aggressive reaction, they've caused that antagonist to allow his/her actions to be ruled by those very same primitive passions the Deviants represent. This idea will become very significant in a later story I intend to get into).
There's more to say about how this introduction to Thena and Zuras, and how it reflects on them as characters, but for now, let's get back to the story.
Thena and Makarri then travel to New York City in one of Makarri's faster vehicles, and begin a counterattack against the Deviant army. This battle takes up most of the remainder of issue #5 and continues into the beginning of #6. The final page of #5 switches scenes to the Pentagon, where we see the US military command reacting to, not the Deviant invasion, but to their first intelligence concerning the landing of the Celestial Host in South America. And they don't react well (“What can it all mean, sir?” “It may add up to the damnedest war we've ever fought!”).
Back with Thena and Makarri, it is quickly apparent that their battle against the Deviants is a much more serious affair than Ikaris's ill-considered solo attack. With Makarri piloting and Thena using a high-tech crossbow that shoots “cold energy” bolts, they take out large numbers of Devaiant Mutates before one of them manages to disable the weapon with his staff. He soon finds himself in trouble, though, when Thena grabs his staff and smashes him into the side of a building. The two Eternals are then attacked by a horde of flying Mutates; with Makarri steering, Thena holds them off for the time being with her fists, but they are in danger of being swamped by sheer numbers until Makarri sends the ship into a deep freeze, causing “the ice-encrusted Mutates to tumble from the sky”. Thena comments that “It took intense concentration to endure that bit of whimsy” and Makarri replies that at least “I did get us free of those ugly boors.”
The splash page of issue #6 has Makarri and Thena still flying in the aircraft, Thena poised to throw a sort of high-tech “energy spear”. Then we get a double page spread of Kro and a squad of Deviants at bay within a ring of energy caused by the spear, which Thena's cast has embedded into the pavement in their midst. Suddenly, any Deviants near the spear begin to fly helplessly off the ground; it's an anti-gravity spear, and they begin to “speed like bullets across the city until their mad flights are broken by obstacles in their path.” We see various Deviants helplessly pinned against walls, begging Kro to save them. The battle is won, and Kro has no choice but to surrender.
From this synopsis, it might appear at first glance that Thena has committed the same error I've accused Ikaris of making – attempting to suppress the Deviant menace by force. However, let's take a closer look at exactly how Thena and Makarri defeated the Deviants:
Thena does all the actual fighting, first with her "cold-energy" crossbow, then with her fists, until, when they are at the point of being swamped by numbers, Makarri sends the ship into deep-freeze, effectively immobilising their assailants.
On the symbolic level (are you tired of hearing this phrase yet?), the Deviants (primitive aggressive instincts) have provoked Thena and Makarri into reacting aggressively against them. But this aggressive reaction, after some initial success, has brought them into danger of being overwhelmed by the very forces they are trying to suppress. The situation is temporarily saved by literally cooling everything down (i.e. calming the emotions), first with Thena's "cold-energy" bolts, then by throwing thier entire vehicle and their own bodies into "deep-freeze." It takes “intense concentration,” as Thena says, for her and Makarri to endure this; the deviants can't, and are rendered helpless. i.e. the highly self-disciplined, self-controlled consciousness of the Eternals are able to calm themselves, to "cool their passison", thus neutralising the Deviants, that is the primal instincts, assailing them. Somehow, Thena and Makarri, while still fighting to suppress the Deviants, show signs of possessing a deeper understanding of their nature than did Ikaris's simple method of attacking "like with like".
However, this is only a temporary solution – Thena's and Makarri's immediate assailants have been stymied, but the main Deviant army is still menacing New York. What happens next? Thena neutralises them with her “energy-spear” which soon turns out to be an “anti-gravity spear”. Remember, the Deviants are intimately associated with the lower levels, literally and symbolically: they live beneath the ocean, they represent primitive subconscious forces, and so on. So when Thena makes them fly helplessly through the air with her anti-gravity spear, we see that they are disconnected from their milieu, their power-base. We might say that these instinctive drives and instincts have been brought up, by higher consciousness (Thena), from the subconscious to a psychic space (consciousness) where they can be dealt with by that higher consciousness (as opposed to unexpectedly erupting up from the unconscious through their own energy and wreaking havok). We can see that the primitive aggressive instincts are somehow being dissipated rather than suppressed. Next, we see this symbolic event being confirmed by at the narrative level, as Thena quickly reaches a truce with the Deviant leader:
Even though Kro's soldiers have all been neutralised and he has been left isolated, he himself seems to be quite satisfied with what he has accomplished: “My work here is done! “ says Kro, ”I'm certain the humans have taken the bait! ... The Space-Gods have returned! The humans will now associate them with 'devils' and wage a cosmic war, while we Deviants watch them destroy each other.”
Thena replies that humans have “outgrown this 'devil' fear” and when Kro, ostensibly to prove his confidence in his declaration, offers a truce on any terms, Thena accepts, ordering him to release all captives.
So, in contrast to earlier confrontations, we have the Deviant soldiers being harmlessly neutralised instead of being driven back beneath the earth, and we have a relatively voluntary truce between the Eternals and the Deviants. In other words, some sort of provisional accomodation appears to have been reached. Instead of the higher consciousness (the Eternals, Thena) simply repressing the primitive instincts (Deviants) by sheer force and thinking they will remain quiescent, it (Thena/higher consciousness) has demontrated some understanding of their (Deviants'/primal instincts') nature and acknowledged their existence (and thus, by implication, their right to exist). Once Kro surrenders, Thena immediately ceases all aggressive action. She has used force when it was necessary, but quickly moved to diplomacy and negotiation as soon as it was feasible; just as it is often necessary to repress primitive emotional reactions in the short term, if we are to avoid exploding in anger and hostility at every moment, but in the long term we have to come to some sort of understanding of our anger (to stick with that single example) if we are not to be plagued by it breaking through at the least provocation; in other words, if we are to become mature, psychologically balanced individuals.
Back to the narrative: We then switch scenes to Margo and Sersi. The latter, becoming bored with captivity, is in the process of humiliating various Deviant guards by transforming their weapons when they threaten her or Margo. (This scene has some interesting implications for the nature of Sersi's character, but I'll stick to the main thrematic thread for now). She and Margo are then informed that they are no longer prisoners anyway because of the new truce, and they are taken to see Ikaris freed from his submerged cylinder. Ikaris doesn't take kindly to his experience and begins to rough up the Deviant officer until Thena appears on a wall-screen ordering him to stop. I want to quote the following exchange in full:
Thena (on view-screen): Cease this hostility! Old feuds have no place in universal issues.
Thena: Our task is to unite all our species in an effort to deal peacefully with the Space- Gods. Cynical Kro feels this will fail! He feels that the humans will panic and resist the Gods.
Margo: I've seen the Space-Gods. I was among the Inca ruins when I saw their ship land. War with such powerful beings could be catastrophic for humanity.
Sersi: Only the Deviants would gain from such a war.
Ikaris That's why evil Kro attacked. To set this war in motion.
Sersi: The humans will now strike at the Gods on sight.
Ikaris: Can we stop this, Thena?
Thena: There is hope. The truce is on my terms. It means that Kro will help, too.
Margo: I'll help! If I can!
Thena: The humans must learn the entire story about their relationship with the Space-Gods and our two species. But it must be revealed first to academic sources – who can analyze and verify the facts.
They then arrange for a friend and colleague of Margo's father, Sam Holden, a professor of anthropology, to meet representatives of the Eternals and Deviants and present them, along with all this earth-shattering information, to the public. We see a news conference doing just that in the last pages of the issue.
I think we can see that this exchange confirms the interpretation we tentatively put forward for the preceding events. Ikaris, who is still following the his unsuccessful pattern of reflexively attacking the Deviants whenever he feels menaced by them, is commanded by Thena to stop his aggressive actions. She then explains that:
“Our task is to unite all our species in an effort to deal peacefully with the Space-Gods. “
Think about how deeply this statement contrasts witht everything that's gone before: from the very beginning of the series, the Deviants have been treated as violent, brutal, treacherous enemies. Yet here is Thena saying they have to be included - more that all three of our species must be united. It;s quite a turn-about from what we've become used to. In fact, I've highlighted the sentence quoted above because I think it gives away the key to the meaning of the Eternals concept.
On the symbolic level, I believe there are several implications: first of all, we have something related to Jung's idea of individuation. And what is that, exactly? Here are a few definitions I found on the web:
“In Jungian psychology, the gradual integration and unification of the self through the resolution of successive layers of psychological conflict.”
“An individuated [person] is one in whom the unconsious and conscious are harmonized ... This is achieved by getting in touch with the unconscious, without allowing the ego to be overwhelmed by it. ... “
“Blocked or distorted development of the personality is characteristic of neurosis, and in psychosis consciousness is overwhelmed by the unconscious. The aim of psychotherapy in Jung's view is to develop a situation where consciousness is not swamped by the unconscious, but neither is it shut off from it. The encounter between consciousness and the symbols arising from the unconscious enriches life and promotes psychological development, individuation.”
The correspondence should be clear: when Thena talks about uniting Eternals, Humans and Deviants, at the psychological level she is talking about uniting the elements of the self – in Jungian terms, the ego (Eternals/Humans) and the unconscious (Deviants). (For now, I won't get into the finer details of the Jungian system – the shadow, anima/animus, and so on). At the narrative level, there are obvious benefits for all three species if they can learn to accept one another and coexist peacefully. At the symbolic level, to combine two of the definitions above, “integration and unification of the self” “enriches life and promotes psychological development, individuation .“
But there is more: Thena says the the unification of the three species is not only an end in itself, but is necessary in order “to deal with the Space-Gods.” Symbolically, then, we cannot confront that which the Space-Gods represent without first undergoing this process of psychological development (individuation), achieving an improved awareness and acceptance of all aspects of the psyche, leading to a more unified self. But what do the Space-Gods represent? Remember that famous line of Pascal’s: “The eternal silence of these infinite abysses fills me with terror.” At the most abstract level, the Celestials are a symbol of the infinite, of the eternally silent abyss that lies behind reality, and before Eternal, Human and Deviant can face that terror, it must face itself. Thena is telling us that, before it is capable of confronting the universe in all its vastness and incomprehensibility, the psyche must become harmonised by confronting the darkest and most hidden aspects of its own nature.
Getting back to the story, the remainder of issue #6 is taken up by the press conference mentioned earlier, presenting the startling fact of the Eternal and Deviant existence to the “human) public. If there was still any doubt regarding what all this means at the symbolic level, Kirby continues to give the reader all kinds of hints through various pieces of dialogue:
Sam Holden: You see before you three divergent species of Man.
Ikaris: In the dim past, a common ancestor produced us all.
Kro: Since that day, we've all shared the planet together. But you've known this only through your myths and legends.
Sam Holden: Our three species have made contact in the past, but we humans recorded them as fantasy.
Ikaris: You see, it was the only way in which the humans could live with the facts and still keep their egos.
At this point, there probably insn't any need for me to explain, but anyway, Eternal, Human, and Deviant are related because, symbolically, they each represent various aspects of the psyche. These aspects do make contact with one another, but the Humans (i.e. the ego, as Ikaris's last line makes explicit) can only see Eternals and Deviants (the hidden aspects of the psyche) as creatures of fantasy. As Kro states, it is only through the symbolism of myths and legends (he might have added dreams) that the conscious ego is able to deal with these unconscious or supra-conscious elements can be dealt with, which is of course exactly what this story, the one in which these Eternals and Deviants are speaking and acting right now, is trying to do.
In the final panel of the press conference, another statement of Thena's sums up and reiterates what we've been talking about for the last several paragraphs, the concept I believe is at the very core of the Eternals. Thena says:
Once our three species can face each other – we can then confront the Space-Gods!
Once we can face the inner reality of our own nature, including all the hidden, unpleasant aspects the conscious ego usually wants to forget, then and only then can we face the enigma of outer reality and try to deal with its terrors and mysteries.
That's it, that is what I believe the Eternals is “about” if it is about anything. But we're not done yet. The last page of issue #6 shows an encounter between a team of Shield agents and the Celestial Gamenon. And once again, the humans do not react well: to quote directly from the scene:
The Giant shadow is upon the agents with a sudden, startling swiftness .Gamenon, of the Fourth Host, is an awesome sight to behold. To attempt to describe him is fruitless. To face him is frightening. To escape him is impossible.
Agent 1: Hold your fire. H-He may just be curious!
Agent 2: I'm not waiting until he grabs us like mice!
Agent 2: He-he's going for us! I-I've got to shoot!
[Fires his rifle at the Celestial]
Agent 3: Group to Base! We've made contact! The alien – he's big! BIG!!
There are final words which end in a scream. In the silence that follows, only the winds are left to speak for missing men ...
Radio: Shield to Group One! Come in Group One! Report! Report!!
The language Kirby uses when speaking of Gamenon (“frightening”, “awesome”, inescapable, and vast) once again emphasises the qualities that correspond to that which the Celestials represent: the awesome vastness of the universe, the frightening, inescapable mystery of reality itself. The agents attempt to remain calm, but react almost as badly as would a Deviant, and in the end cannot keep from panicking and striking out in fear. The ego, the unindividuated self (the human Shield agents) cannot face the frightening awesomeness of reality (Gamenon). The consequences of failure? We get a glimpse in issue #7, “The Fourth Host”.
Thanks Infobroker, and I look forward to reading your thoughts. I'll post something on issue #7 tomorrow. Then there might be a small delay while I gather the material for the big three-part story of #8 - 10, which I find so rich in layers that it could take some time to arrange my comments.
Back to the story ...
There's a line from Nietzsche, familiar to most comics fans from Alan Moore's Watchmen series:
“When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back.”
At the end of issue #6, we saw what can happen to an unprepared psyche when it dares or is forced to “look into the abyss,” to confront the Celestials: panic, terror, and then - oblivion. Now, at the beginning of #7, when Dr. Damian expresses his satisfaction at having the opportunity to study the Celestials, Ajak responds: “Remember, ... the Celestials are studying us as well.”
One of the Celestials offers a small container to Ajak and Damian. The capsule turns out to contain the stored atoms of the three Shield agents we saw at the end of the previous issue. Ajak reconstitutes them, but, after a few introductions, they attempt to force Damian and Ajak at gunpoint to give them information and help them leave. Ajak disarms them with a wave of his hand, and, impressed, they listen quietly, for the moment, as he tries to tell them about the Eternals (“While the humans fought each other on the earth's surface, We spent the centuries developing the ability to do things like that [levitate the agents' weapons out of their hands].” ) and the Celestials.
What he has to say isn't exactly reassuring to them. He describes how “The Celestials visit a planet in four hosts,” the first created Eternals, Humans, and Deviants from a common ape-like ancestor; the second came in “wrath and discipline” causing many civilisations to vanish and “forcing Man to climb again in new directions.”; the third concerned itself with “inspection and cultivation”; and the fourth? We don't get to hear yet, because the Shield agents interrupt him: Their thinking still mired in narrow conceptual boundaries (“As an American, Damian, you've got to help us!” “As a human being I've got to warn you that this is not the place or time for fool heroics.”), their irrational, aggressive impulses come to the fore again, and they attack Ajak and Damian with violence. Declaring that “Shield wants solid fact, not old wives tales” their leader produces a small device in his hand. “Gods, devils, or space giants – this tactical nuclear device will decide what they are!” and throws it at one of the Celestials, Tefral. The giant closes his enormous hand on the nuclear bomb and allows it to explode, causing no damage whatsoever. The caption reads, “The thought of those who would detonate plutonium with such rash abandon is a saddening one, indeed.” Then we have series of panels showing the Celestials and their ships, with some narration I'll quote:
Thus it begins! Wherever the Fourth Host must do its task the survival creatures, having reached their technical maturity, react with a fear beyond their past behaviour ... isn't it strange how they seem to sense that this is the TIME!
...They reach for the stars but they are forever cut down by the Fourth Host. This has proceeded since before Genesis was written ... and will continue until THE DAY OF ALPHA!
Above the earth, in fixed orbit, their cyclopean space home hovers in sombre majesty. Inside it is the One Above All. His word will set the task in motion. It will be his word that will end it ...
He sends down a message on a laser beam ten billion years evolved. Seen once before by the ancient earth, it was called the Ladder of Fire! ... flaming, snapping, ever-changing forms of light which make the horizon ring with sound – and men feel the presence of their own souls ...
Shield Agent: W-what is it? I-I've never seen or heard anything like it!
Ajak: Fear-stricken humans.! It's nothing more than a coded voice – decoding itself.
The “ladder of fire” then engulfs the Celestials, and they vanish: “They have entered and are part of the 'Wheel within a wheel' ”. A great rush of wind picks up the agents and tosses them against the pyramid wall. Shaken, they still intend to try to break out so they can bring this information back to Shield.
Stevenson (leader of the agents): Nothing's going to stop us! Nothing!!
Ajak (pointing to Arishem): He will! It seems you overlooked his presence during these proceedings.
Stevenson: Good Lord! He's the largest of them all! How could I have missed spotting him?!
Ajak: He's aware of you, Stevenson. Anything that moves on this planet is subject to his scrutiny. And I tell you, mister Shield agent, that neither you nor I will leave this place for the next fifty years.
But the agents make the attempt anyway, only to have their atoms scrambled and stored once again in the capsule. The final, full-page panel is a close-up of Arishem, with his arm outstretched, plam down, thumb horizontal, in the pose of a Roman emperor about to pass judgement on whether a gladiator will live or die. The caption reads:
Arishem, the mightiest of the Fourth Host, having enforced his will, raises his mammoth arm toward the sky. It signals the beginning of the Fifty Year Judgement – the final stage of an experiment carried out by the Celestials, among the countless stars, on countless worlds, in the fond hope of geberating what the Celestials term as ALPHA DAY.
But endless time has produced endless failure. Thus, Arishem stands ready to do what he has always done.
He is a planet-killer!
Engraved on his thumb is the formula for world destruction.
If earth fails --
EARTH DIES!
Obviously, there is a lot going on in this issue. Kirby uses Biblical allusions (“ladder of fire”, “wheel within a wheel”) effectively to create an atmosphere of almost religious awe around the Celestials. When Gamenon holds out the capsule to Dr. Damian and Ajak, and Dr. Damian hesitates: “I-I wonder -”, Ajak says “”Never question or refuse a Celestial ... Accept them as you would the whimsies of Fate.” Questioning or refusing to accept reality is the sign of an immature, perhaps even damaged or non-functional, psyche.
The Celestials are described as “giants [who] come and go in ways undefineable to their observers”. Ajak tells the Shield agents, “Their kind is as old as the stars. Their home is the vast universe.” A caption tells us that inside Arishem's “impregnable armour is a mind incomprehensible to Man. It broods in a manner which encompasses space and time and the invisible trails that cross in dimensions not of this universe ...”. When the One Above All sends down his “Ladder of Fire” “ever-changing forms of light which make the horizon ring with sound – and men feel the presence of their own souls “. Statements like these, in my opinion, reflect on the Celestials as symbols for the enigma of ultimate reality, and the impossibility, at least at our present stage of development, of coping with it, intellectually or emotionally. In a nice reversal of what I've been saying is one of the main themes of the series - that we cannot hope to face the enigma of external reality without first facing our inner reality - the last line quoted tells us that a confrontation with the ultimate nature of that "external" reality (the universe or however we want to name it) forces us into an awareness of our internal reality ("and men feel the presence of their own souls").
[EDIT: I have more to say about this 'external/internal' language I've been using, but want to leave it for later. I'm sure if Paul McEnery, for example, is reading this, he'll have some thoughts on the dangers of allowing this sort of dichotomy to frame our thinking about the problems being treated here. Bear with me, I'll try to return to this when I comment on a later incident in the series.]
But what about the the Fifty Year Judgement? I think the key to understanding this concept is in the lines that talk about how Man has reached a certain level of technological sophistication, and in the behaviour of the Shield agents, which illustrates how Man tends to use that technology. The point is that, while our technology has become highly developed, our minds have not. It's an observation that's been made by many thinkers over the years. Einstein once put it this way:
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift towards unparallelled catastrophe.”
The Shield agents, in spite of their efforts to remain calm and to rationally assess the mind-boggling situation in which they find themselves, still end up reacting with fear and aggression, and use the most destructive technology they possess to attempt an attack on the Celestials themselves. The Fifty Year Judgement is a metaphor for the crisis in which Humankind finds itself due to the disparity between its technological and spiritual/psychological levels of maturity. Simply put, with the destructive potential of our technology, as exemplified in the story by the nuclear bomb, if we continue to behave with the same mind-set we have possessed throughout our history, we will destroy ourselves. In the story that destruction will be visited from an external source - Arishem; but this is simply a metaphor for a destruction we will have visited on ourselves.
[EDIT: in the story this is illustrated through the image of nuclear weapons, but in reality, of course, there many other ways we might destroy ourselves - environmental degradation, resourse exhaustion, etc. Also, I don't necessarily mean that, if the series had been brought to an end by Kirby, we would have seen the Celestials destroying one or more of the human, Eternal, or Deviant races, even if the verdict of the Fifty Year Judgement were negative. Once I say most I want to say about the Kirby issues we're left with, I intend to speculate a little about where the series might have gone had it been allowed to continue without editorial interference. More on this later.]
OK, I've been pretty slack in carrying on with this, but enough procrastinating. If you're reading this thread for the first time, I hope you'll take the time to go back to the beginning, because I'm trying to build a case and nothing I say here will make much sense if you don't know what's been discussed so far.
The first 7 issues, as described above, gave us the basic set-up for the Eternals concept, on both the narrative and symbolic levels. The next story in the series takes many of the ideas we've been talking about so far and shows where the series was going with them. It is also one in which Thena takes a central part. There are some very suggestive parallels between Kirby's Thena and her namesake, the goddess Pallas Athena of ancient Greek myth; so suggestive, in fact, that I think that this mythological model was chosen and handled by Kirby with great care, and it might be helpful to give a little background information before I start talking about issues 8, 9, & 10. I'm going to use a lot of quotations from various sources, because I don't want anyone to think I'm making all this up just to fit my thesis.
If you look up the proper name “Athene” in the Oxford English Dictionary, you'll see two points emphasized: that she is the “personification of wisdom” and that “she sprang fully-armed and uttering her war-cry, from the head of Zeus.” This warrior goddess of wisdom is described by Robert Graves in his exhaustive compilation of Greek myth as follows: “Although a goddess of war,she gets no pleasure from battle, as Ares and Eris [Strife] do, but rather from settling disputes and upholding the law by pacific means. She bears no arms in time of peace and, if ever she needs any, will borrow a set from Zeus. Her mercy is great …Yet, once engaged in battle she never loses the day … Many gods, Titans, and giants would gladly have married [her], but she has repulsed all advances.” [The Greek Myths 25.1] Athena was born from the head of Zeus, fully-grownand clad in armour. And at the moment of her birth from Zeus's head, all heaven and earth trembled and the sun itself stopped in its path:
With Pallas Athena, that glorious goddess, my song begins,
Who is bright-eyed, rich in craft, who has an implacable heart,
The virgin in revered, protectress of cities, possessor of strength,
Tritogenes. It was Craft-filled Zeus himself who gave birth
From his sacred head to her already in armour of war,
Golden, all-gleaming; every immortal was gripped with awe
At the sight. But quickly she leaped from his deathless head to stand
Before Zeus who bears the aigis, and brandished her keen-tipped spear.
At the might of the bright-eyed goddess great Olympos reeled
In a fearsome tremor, the earth all round with a dreadful scream
Rang out, and the deep was stirred in a mass of seething waves.
But the salt sea suddenly checked, and Hyperion's splendid son
Foe a long-drawn moment kept still the swift hoofs of his chariot's team,
Until from her deathless shoulders Pallas Athena took off
That armour fit for a god, and Craft-filled Zeus rejoiced.
[Homeric Hymn to Athena. tr. Michael Crudden]
She is the only god, besides Zeus himself, who is either capable of wielding or permitted to wield Zeus’s Cyclops-forged thunderbolts [Eumenides. Aeschylus]. She is the most courageous and fearless of all gods, and was the only god to stand her ground before the first onslaught of the monstrous Typhon; all the rest fled to Egypt in animal form (incidentally enabling this myth to provide an explanation for the theriomorphic appearance of the Egyptian gods). She is described by the notoriously misogynistic Hesiod, who is with Homer one of the prime sources, both for the ancient Greeks and for ourselves, of information about the gods, as “equal to her father [Zeus] in strength and in wise understanding”[Theogony 895], and she is the only god of whom it is said that she has never been defeated in any battle. In fact the goddess Nike [Victory] is closely associated with her, and may be seen as a personification of one of her aspects.
She is the goddess of wisdom, but also of war and battle, and is usually pictured with spearand wearing armour. In striking contrast to, not only her own implacability in battle, but to practically every other divinity, Athena is also distinguished by her gentleness and mercy. In, for example, Aeschylus's Oresteia, particaularly the last of the trilogy, The Eumenides, her respectful and conciliatory attitude towards the Furies, after she has thwarted their desire to destroy Orestes, is both remarkable and moving. The role of the goddess which is perhaps best known to readers today is that of protectress of mortal heroes such as Heracles, Achilles, Odysseus, and Diomedes. Several of the Twelve Labours of Heracles are accomplished only with her crucial aid, and we see her performing a similar function in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Argonautika, as well as in the exploits of many other famous heroes such as Cadmus, Bellerophon, Tydeus, and Perseus. She is often described as Zeus's favourite child and enjoys a specially favourable relationship with him.
Finally, Athena is unique in that, while she is the Olympian goddess par excellence, she has strong chthonic associations, as evidenced by the serpents that often appear in her representations, and fringing her shield (the famous and impregnable aegis) as well as the story of Erichthonios, outlined below. She is in many ways a unique individual among the twelve Olympians of ancient Greek myth. Karl Kerenyi describes her as second only to Zeus in the ancient religion of which the surviving Greek myths are our main source of information [The Gods of the Greeks 7.2]. She often appears with Zeus and a (variant) third god or goddess as part of a trinity of specially honoured gods at many locations in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Ernest Dodds, in describing the stark nature of the ancient Greek religion, says “and in fact, of the major Olympians, perhaps only Athena inspired an emotion that could reasonably be described as love.” [The Greeks and the Irrational. p.34]. To sum up, Athena is a figure of unsettling contrasts: goddess of battle and war vs goddess of wisdom; fierceness in battle vs gentleness and mercifulness especially to defeated enemies; virgin goddess vs maternal relationship towards heroes she protects and to Erichthonios; Olympian goddess (“Golden Athena”) vs chthonic aspects.
Before leaving the subject of Athena, I want to mention one more thing: one of the strangest myths involving the goddess, the story of Erichthonios: Hephaistos attempted sexual intercourse with the virgin warrior goddess, who repulsed him without difficulty, but did not otherwise punish him; his semen fell down to the earth, fertilizing it, so that Gaia gave birth to a creature human in appearance from the waist upwards, but with the body of a serpent from the waist down. When Gaia, and all the other divinities, refused to have anything to do with the monstrosity, Athena, ignoring their ridicule, took him under her protection and raised him to adulthood, naming him Erichthonios. Note the word element “chthon” in the name, and his half serpent nature; Erichthonios is another sign of how chthonic elements keep manifesting themselves in the mythology surrounding Athena. Recall that the cthonic signifies the earth, the underworld, and thus the same unconscious forces associated with the Deviants.
Sean Dulaney
04-12-2005, 06:34 AM
One of the things that the Eternals benefited from compared to the Fourth World (especially for the time) was it was confined to the one book. While the Fourth World books had their own internal continuity, having three to four titles with the common theme and villian, Kirby could and would continually toss the new concepts into the books to a point where it could overwhelm the reader and if your local spinner rack only got Forever People and something new is mentioned like it was old hat, you wondered if it was a concept from New Gods or Mister Miracle only to find out later that month was a "detour issue" for those titles and the concept was never seen in those titles.
Eternals had way out concepts, but it was more of a laser focus than the shotgun blast of ideas you had in the Fourth World. (Oddly enough, I felt the shotgun theory would apply to 2001. Perhaps Cap/Falcon as well.)
Interesting point, Sean. I like the Fourth World experiment with multiple titles (which is now being emulated by Grant Morrison with Seven Soldiers, as Mar Andrew pointed out on the DCU board). But perhaps Kirby decided not to go that route with the Eternals after the abortion of the New Gods titles at DC; or perhaps he just thought the Eternals concept wasn't suited to that format. I do think the Eternals was a rich enough concept to support multiple titlaes, but concentrating it in a single series made it one of the few truly ensemble series I've ever encountered, with different characters taking the spotlight in each story, and I agree that this did give the book a unique impact. I wonder whether or not, if it had caught on with the public the way Kirby must have hoped, he would have branched off some titles somewhere down the road.
EDIT: By the way, everyone, sorry about the long post above re Pallas Athena. It really isn't as off-topic as it might seem right now, but I probably should have edited that one down a little, just for readability. I'll post the follow-up in a few hours once I get through a few errands.
Cei-U!
04-12-2005, 09:25 AM
I wanted to mention that thanks to this thread I've begun recollecting the series. #1-3 should arrive today or tomorrow. Thank you, berk, for lighting the fire under me.
Cei-U!
I summon the renewed interest!
That's awesome, Cei-U. That makes every minute I've spent on this thread worth it. I hope you enjoy the series as much as I have. I particularly like Kirby's arwork in the first few issues, before ike Royer came on board. Not that I don't like Royer's work as well, but John Verpoorten (I think it was) added a more organic feel to the artwork that was different from Royer's very faithful inks.
OK, we've had a look at Pallas Athene. What exactly does she have to do with the Eternals?
Well, some of the parallels between Kirby's Thena and the description of that Greek goddess given a couple posts above are readily apparent. In her first appearance (issues 5 & 6) Thena is presented as a calmly forceful personality who, as soon as she is informed of the Deviant invasion, takes charge of a quite serious situation: New York is under siege, and the human forces cannot cope with Deviant military technology. Ikaris, who has chracteristically bitten off a little more than he can chew, has been captured and immobilised by the Deviants, and Sersi, hampered by Margo’s presence, has also been captured. Thena at once turns this debacle completely around, attacking and defeating, with Makarri’s aid, a large squadron of Mutates, then taking out Kro's personal guard, and finally arranging a truce in which the Deviants agree to cease all hostilities and return all prisoners (Ikaris, Sersi, & Margo).
No one questions her right to act and speak for the Eternals as a whole, and she herself does not defend it or even assert it verbally. She simply takes command, with no fanfare, no pompous speeches, and everyone accepts her as the voice of authority in the absence of Zuras. Even Sersi, who behaves to pretty well everyone, Eternal, Deviant, and human alike, in her customary teasing and irreverent manner, is relatively serious when she addresses Thena. In fact, Thena and Zuras are the only two characters with whom she usually drops her otherwise playful and/or flippant tone. All this indicates, in an unobtrusive way, that Thena is an object of unusal respect among the Eternals.
Note also the manner in which Thena uses force when necessary (the Deviants have already attacked and must be repulsed), but immediately turns to negotiation as soon as it is feasible. Thena is also the only Eternal ever shown sharing counsel with Zuras in his Chamber of Command, as she is doing in her very first appearance when Makarri brings the news of the Deviants’ attack and the capture of Sersi. An although we haven't seen it thus far (up to #7), Thena is also, in striking parallel with her namesake, the only Eternal throughout the series able to wield the bolts of Zuras, other than Zuras himself, of course.
So, keeping all this in mind, lets get back to the Eternals. We left off at the end of issue 7. Thena has succeeded in neutralizing the Deviant invading force and in arranging a truce between Eternal, Human and Deviant in order that they may try to reach some kind of peaceful co-existence and thus be able to deal with the reality of the Celestials' return to earth. I won't repeat what all this signifies at the symbolic level: it emerged from the series as it progressed through the first 7 issues, as described in the earlier posts and if I start going over it again, I'll probably end up re-writing the whole thing. Instead, let's get back to the story.
I'm going to try to describe a lot of what happens in the next three issues in some detail, with a lot of direct quotes from Kirby's captions and dialogue, all of which I hope will aid those of you who haven't had the opportunity to read the issues to see where my comments are coming from.
Issue #8, “The City of Toads”, opens with a scene in Lemuria, where Great Tode, the Deviant leader, is observing a combat between a masked Deviant “Reject” on one side and several opponents. A caption says: “What is a reject? Is it not that which is despised or cast out by its brothers? Or can it be a fear – a vision of doom – a finger pointing at the flaws of the perfect society ...” The Reject defeats his adversaries, killing most of them, and is then forced with the electric whip to kneel before Great Tode, who orders his mask removed. “He is truly ugly,sire,” says a Deviant soldier, “The mere sight of him may upset you. But he is unequaled in combat. A born killer, if I may say so.” The mask is removed, revealing a dark, handsome young man. The unstable Deviant genes have produced an anomaly: a Deviant who looks like an Eternal. The final caption goes: “In the City of Toads, no name but Reject can be found for him. His face is his crime -- and to disguise this crime, he excels in what is most admired by his fellow Deviants: a superior cunning and the ability to destroy his enemies.”
The scene then switches to NYC and a conversation between Thena and Kro. Kro is trying to convince Thena to accompany him on his return to Lemuria. It emerges that they have known each other in the distant past, and had even begun a romantic relationship, which seems to have failed. Kro wishes to renew this romance, but Thena, while not unsympathetic, feels “the gulf between us is too wide.” Kro pleads that “The passing centuries have narrowed the gap! Let me prove it, Thena!” But she is hesitant – one of the only occasions in the series when she is anything but decisive and commanding. However, after a brief scene with Sersi and Sam Holden, we see that Thena has indeed decided to accept Kro's invitation, and their “undersea warcraft slips unnoticed into the deeps”. They soon find themselves travelling through the ruins of Lemuria, destroyed when the Deviants attacked the Second Host of the Space-Gods millenia before. Kro boasts that “They'll find us ready this time. Our new weapons-systems are invincible. ... You shall see our new city.” Thena replies that “It is doomed to suffer the fate of this one if you dream of resisting the Space Gods.”
Given the symbolism we've outlined earlier, it should be obvious that the invitation extended to Thena by Kro is in fact a plea for recognition from the unconscious to the higher levels of consciousness. Thena's acceptance shows her interest in exploring the “lower” levels of the psyche – the unconscious. The fact that she appears to have a past history with Kro shows that this interest in the unconscious is not something new, it has always been a part of her psychic nature, making her a unique figure among the Eternals. Her hesitation is a milder form of the distaste Eternals as a group have for the Deviants, i.e. The mistrust of the higher levels of consciousness for the primal instincts. To sum up, when Thena and Kro descend beneath the ocean to the Deviants' city, we are actually embarking on a journey into the depths of the unconscious. From this perspective, then, Thena’s descent to the symbolic home and seat of the unconscious becomes a quest to explore its nature, and to eventually reintegrate it with the higher consciousness, to become complete and whole. In other words, individuation and integration.
Back to the story:
As they disembark in the City of Toads, they are greeted by a large ceremonial guard. The Deviants appear to be pulling out all stops in an effort to impress their Eternal visitor. But as they proceed “ toward the city's centre” something goes wrong I'll quote much of what follows in full:
A clammy, misshapen arm thrusts itself at Thena and grasps her with uncanny strength ...
Thena: By the fire bolts of Zuras, wha --!!?
1st Deviant Guard: Fool! Did you let that reject get out of hand?
2nd Deviant Guard: I-I couldn't help it! He tore free!
Kro: Away with you both! Hurry! Lest this creature's sight offend our royal visitor!
[We see a monstrous, deformed, but somehow pitiful creature being cruelly whipped by the two handlers.]
Thena: Poor thing! He offends me not! If anything, the plight of malformed birth makes him the victim, and fate the villain.
1st Deviant Guard: He'll soon be rid of his misery! Strange how his kind seems to sense the coming of Purity Time.
Kro: Purity Time! I'd forgotten that it was due! Let's not tarry here, Thena. We must pay our respects to Great Tode.
Thena: Not yet, Kro. If there is truth here, I must know it all!
Thena: What is the truth, Kro? What is Purity Time?
Kro: I-I cannot tell you now. I-it would destroy your faith in my dream ... the dream of removing the Deviant curse of structural instability ... the hope of erasing the ugliness from our image!
Thena: Very well ... I shall keep my thoughts elsewhere for the present.
[Kro commandeers a vehicle to take them to Great Tode's palace]
Deviant Bystander: Here they come! Here come the Death Wagons!
Deviant Bystander: They've collected every misbegotten monster among us!
Deviant Bystander: Don't push! I want to see them!
Kro: Blast! I'm undone!
The Death Wagons roll in slow procession through the square. Their cargoes of horror are to be seen in full view of the curious onlookers.
Deviant Bystander: Ugh! Look at them! See the cursed things!
Deviant Bystander: Cleanse us of them! Leave us pure and clean!
[We see the pitifully mal-formed Rejects being carted off in an enclosed, transparent container.]
Thena: What will be done with them Kro? Where are they taking them?
Kro: To the place ... from which they will never return to haunt us. It is there, Thena.
[We see a great, smoking inferno rising from some large building or machine in the distance .]
Thena: Horrible! Horrible! There are monsters here indeed! But they are not in the Death Wagons!
Kro: Make no judgements, Eternal, until your species begins to carry within itself the uncontrollable seed!
Kro: Come Thena. Come and see the one Reject who offers a hope of stability!
Thena: I've already seen too much, Kro. Whatever was between us has died with those helpless creatures.
In exploring the unconscious, there is always the danger that consciousness will be overwhelmed by the powerful instinctive drives it has hitherto suppressed, giving them free rein. This danger, or temptation, is represented by Kro, who is a member of the Deviants’ ruling clan, and is anxious to pursue a romantic relationship with Thena – a marriage in effect, in which by definition the two partners would be more or less equals. It is by Kro’s invitation that Thena actually makes the descent, showing that her immediate motivation is perhaps curiosity about the nature of the unconscious forces that he, as a member of the Deviant elite, represents. In Lemuria she first encounters ugliness in the form of a misshapen reject Deviant who reaches out to her as he is driven away by his jailers; but instead of recoiling in disgust, as Kro expects, and as would be typical of Eternals (and humans), she reacts with instinctive compassion, showing that not all unconscious drives are of a negative nature. [EDIT: this probably isn't necessary, but I feel I should spell out at least this one example: the mistreated Reject, as a Reject and a Deviant, represents an unconscious drive; but Thena (higher consciousness) doesn't reject him. This Reject is, at the narrative level, the object of Thena's compassion. But at the symbolic level, in this scene, he is the representative (i.e. symbol) of her compassion, that is of compassion as an instinct.]
This scene is also significant in the way Kro tries to guide and limit Thena’s exploration of his realm. Thena’s words, “If there is truth here, I must know it all!”, take on a double meaning in the light of the quest motif. She wants to explore this unknown territory on her own terms. But the unconscious has its own motivations and seeks to take over the exploration process, forcing consciousness to follow its lead. For the moment Kro has some success, and is able to persuade her to accompany him to see the Great Tode, leader of all the Deviants. “Very well,” Thena says,”I shall keep my thoughts elsewhere for the present.” In other words, she is allowing her thoughts, her exploration of the unconscious, to be guided away from something it does not want seen.
But Thena does find out the truth about Purity Time, in spite of Kro’s efforts to keep her in ignorance, and with this understanding, which from the viewpoint I’m taking here also stands for a deeper understanding of the psychological forces represented by the Deviants. Thena loses her fascination with Kro. (“Whatever was between us has died with those poor creatures.”), which, at that moment, also signifies a desire to abandon her quest (“I’ve already seen too much.”). The unconscious is home to many dark and disturbing forces, and facing them can be a shocking experience. Purity Time represents this aspect of the unconscious, and Kro's efforts to hide it fromThena show that even though he may be doing what he thinks is best for her, he is not to be trusted as a guide. He wants to control her knowledge and exploration, which means he wants to control her, at some level. Having for the moment avoided the danger of succumbing to the unconscious drives she is exploring, she is now at risk of retreating back to the un-integrated state of mind/psyche which is the norm for Eternals (not to mention Humans and Deviants), rendering her quest to become whole abortive. We'll see one of the effects of this retreat a little later on.
Back to the story (we're still in the middle of issue #8):
The scene switches to the “Combat Room of the palace grounds”, where the handsome Reject is having his armour put on by his handlers. One of them says that he knows who the Reject's next opponent is and that “the Reject will die in this battle.” But, a caption tells us, “The mere mention of defeat drives the Reject into a frenzy”, he snatches a weapon, the guards panic and run for their lives. The Reject stalks through the corridors while the guards cower in fear behind corners, consoling themselves that he'll soon be destroyed by “that horror they whisper about ... that thing they call Karkas.”
Next we see Kro and Thena enter the presence of great Tode. Kro prostrates himself before the Deviant King, but Thena refuses, much to the displeasure of the Deviants courtiers. However, she does speak respectfully, and addresses him as “your excellency” and “Sire”. Great Tode is in a good mood because of the exciting entertainment he's arranged for their guest: a spectacular battle between two Rejects. Thena is not enthusiastic, but doesn't make a scene, although she does exchange a few barbs with Kro. “Simmer down, female!” Kro says, “I know you love a good fight!” I warrant you'll find this exciting.”
Thena's attitude towards Great Tode is typical of the general moderation of her character. Another Eternal, Ikaris for example, probably would have been disdainful or even insulting; Kro, at the opposite extreme, obsequiously prostrates himself and grovels at the feet of his master. Thena is neither subservient, nor insulting. Although the Deviants think she is being “haughty”, she is actually quite respectful to the Deviant ruler and tries to keep her negative judgements of the proceedings under control. Although she has retreated from her initial desire to explore this strange realm, she is still herself, balanced and moderate.
But now, the first combatant , the handsome, human/Eternal appearing Reject, enters the arena. He and Thena are each amazed by the other's appearance:
Reject [thinking]: S-she looks as I do – yet she sits with royalty!
Thena: H-he's handsome by any standard! Are you sure he's a Deviant?
But then a huge, monstrous Deviant smashes into the arena, tossing guards away, and roaring fearsomely. The issue ends:
Although all the royal spectators are protected by a hidden electric barrier, they are highly uncomfortable in the presence of the massive mutate! Only Thena rises in concern for the Reject's fate ...
Thena: Stop the combat! The boy will be slaughtered by that thing!
Deviant: HAHAHA!! Ignore her! Begin the battle!
Thena: Fools! Fools! You'll destroy the one object of value in this ugly domain!
It is noteworthy that the epithet “ugly” is often used, almost as an accusation, by various Eternals (Ikaris, Makarri, Sersi, and Thena herself) on more than one occaision when referring to the Deviants, and that the other Eternals are disapproving of Thena’s relationship with Kro and her descent to the Deviants’ realm. I think this signifies a disconnection between the upper and lower levels of consciousness, or, to put it a different way, a denial of powerful subconscious drives by the higher consciousness. Thena's partial retreat back to this un-integrated state is signified by her attitude towards the two Rejects who are to fight in her honour: she automatically assumes, in typical Eternal manner, that the handsome Reject is “the one object of value in this ugly domain”, and that Karkas is just a “mutated monster”. Thus, issue #8 ends with a very much unresolved situation: Thena's quest to explore her psyche has come to a stand-still. She has “seen too much” and seems to have lost her desire to continue. But she is still in Lemuria, so the quest has not been explicity abandoned, it has been blocked. Its fate will unfold in the following two issues.
Issue #9, “The Killing Machine”, begins with Ikaris flying through some mountains, Makarri and Margo following behind in one of Makarri's vehicles. Suddenly, just over Olympia, they are attacked by a grotesque, dragon-like monster. Ikaris strikes it with his eye-beams, but it simply changes into another , even more monnstrous form. Makarri flies his ship away from Ikaris and the monster, and soon finds a small Eternal with a glowing head, hovering in the air. He unceremoniously shoots the brat in the arse with some kind of ray-gun, whereupon the monster vanishes. Ikaris is pissed and chases after the prankster, who has the appearance of a boy and is named Sprite.
Then we get a series of scenes in which Celestials are encountered by humans in different locations around the planet – Russian military leaders study a photograph of Nezzarr taken in Siberia; Australians in the Outback get a close-up look at Oneg; Hargen the Analyzer is seen by mountaineers in the Swiss Alps, and Eson wades waist deep in the ocean off Miami beach in the US. The human reaction ranges from disbelief (“That thing isn't real! I hear there's a movie outfit on location ...”) to narrow-minded opportunism (“This camera will get a close-up shot worth millions!”) to apprehension and fear (“It frightens me Harry! Please head back for shore!”). Eson then plunges into the ocean depths.
These two scenes illustrate points we've seen earlier in the series: Ikaris's sometimes impulsive (strange for an Eternal) behaviour and tendancey to run into trouble while in flight, parallelling his mythic namesake. And an overview of the range of human reactions to the Celestials (mundane consciousness reacting to Reality): from denial to the urge for selfish exploitation to terror and panic.
The story then returns to the combat arena where the Reject is facing the huge and monstrous Karkas:
Great Tode: This event is dedicated to you, my dear Thena! To lure an Eternal from her mountain-tops to these regions is an occasion indeed!
Thena: I am not pleased, Great Tode! This is anything but a fair match.
Kro: er – forgive her, Great Tode! She cannot judge these affairs by our standards. Enough, Thena, enough!
Thena: I shall speak my thoughts, Kro! This ugly society has, for the first time, produced a Deviant of handsome visage – yet, out of envy, it stamps him as a Reject – and now sacrifices him to that mutated monster!
Kro: Don't underrate the Reject. He is a veteran of these games. His chances are good.
Thena: Against that thing you call Karkas? Never! It's destroyed its keepers like rag toys – and wrecked the arena!
Great Tode: Don't waste your sympathies on an outcast, sweet Eternal.
Thena: Fools! He's the only thing of beauty in this ugly domain.
Thena's words here reiterate what we saw last issue: her condemnation of the Deviants' domain as “ugly” and her automatic assumption that because the reject is handsome and looks like an Eternal he is the only thing of value in that “ugly domain” are typical Eternal (and human) reactions, highlighting the disconnection between the consciousn and unconscious levels of the psyche.
Note also, however, Great Tode's creepily familiar tone towards Thena: “My dear Thena,” and “sweet Eternal.” The primitive drives represented by this king of the Deviants are not without their threatening aspect. Great Tode's attitude here is one of desire to possess; he even expresses satisfaction at having “lured” Thena down “to these regions,” signifying the danger of higher consciousness being enveloped and overwhelmed by the unconscious forces it has encountered in its quest to explore the lower depths of the psyche.
But Greta Tode has another line of great significance: “This event is dedicated to you, my dear Thena!” This has profound implications at the symbolic level, as we'll see very soon.
Getting back to the narrative, the Reject, belying Thena's concern and the audience's anticipation of his imminent destruction, begins to fire his weapon, striking expertly at the vulnerable points of Karkas's anatomy, until the monster, to the amazement of the audience, cries out:
Karkas: You're like them –You hurt Karkas! Why?!
Audience member 1: Wonder of wonders! That monstrous mutate can think!
Audience member 2: A-and talk!
[It is not clear whether either of these speeches is made by Thena or Kro.]
Karkas finally does what the Reject has been waiting for. With a roar that shakes the arena, Karkas charges.
The Reject husbands his shots. He fires short but telling bursts at Karkas's face and legs.
Karkas is unable to see – unable to stand. When he falls, the arena rocks as if from an earth tremor.
At that moment, the Reject's eyes blaze and his jaws distend like a carnivore at the kill. A snarl escapes his lips. He rushes toward his stricken foe.
The Reject leaps upon his victim and releases the last, most powerful bolt left to him.
Karkas screams and grows silent.
But the killing frenzy is upon the Reject. Combat is the only life he knows. There is triumph only as long as it continues. It must go on – and on – and on ...
[We see the Reject smashing his weapon like a club into Karkas's fallen form over and over again. The Deviant guards try to stop him, but he turns on them, hurling the weapon like a spear into the face of one guard who is tryin to take aim at him. Then he goes on a rampage:]
The Reject is upon them – using every reflex, every trick that life in the arena has taught him.
The surprised guards are hurled in every direction. One fires his weapon as it is turned upon himself. [We see the Reject twisting a guard's arm so that his gun is pointing as his own face as he fires. More chaos as the Reject continues to take out soldiers with his bare hands.]
Guard: We can't stop him! We're no match for him!
Guard: Call for reinforcements -- quickly!!
The Reject is not alarmed. He is in his natural element. With a weapon ripped from a fallen guard, he meets the new dangers. ...
In his hands a weapon becomes an artful instrument that plays a deadly overture ...
With unerring flight, each shot finds its target. The new attackers are shortly added to the list of casualties.
More guards arrive. They flank the Reject and rush him from either side.
To hold the Reject is impossible. He is a killing machine that reacts to each new move with precise timing – with precise force. [We see the Reject elbow the guard holding him from behind, knocking him down.]
Pressing his remaing attacker against the wall, the Reject turns his trapper into the trapped. Then, a mighty arm swings backward to gain momentum.
The ensuing blow strikes like a hammer.
A grim hush falls upon the arena. The royal court surveys the carnage in dismay. They have witnessed a slaughter – but with totally unexpected results.
The Reject slowly advances toward then. His feet touch the floor like those of a stalking tiger.
He leaps at them – and strikes fire! A protective energy screen sears him to his marrow!
Kro: There's your poor little sacrificial lamb, Thena! What do you think of him now?
Thena: H-he's a destroyer!
Reject: I hate you! I hate you!
Reject: I'll kill you all!! You'll see! You'll see!!
Thena: Poor creature! The lot of an outcast has robbed him of any worthy emotions. I – I pity him.
[Great Tode orders that the reject be killed, but before Kro can carry out this out, an earthquake rocks the arena. We see the Deviant defence forces firing their guns at Eson, who is outside the sunken Deviant city].
The tremendous power unleashed against him does little to disturb him – Eson knows power well. He draws it to him and drains the weapons system.
Emptying the city of power is also a simple task ...
In the arena, the animal instincts of the Reject relay strange messages ... somehow, he senses that the energy barrier which separates him from his enemies is gone!
The Reject cautiously extends his hand. It pauses where the barrier should be. Then it moves ahead, piercing dead space and nothing more ...
He is now free to wipe out the objects of his burning hate. He moves menacingly forward!
[End of issue #9].
The bulk of this issue is spent in demonstrationg the true nature of the handsome, Eternal-appearing Reject: he, not Karkas, has turned out to be the frightening “Killing Machine” of the title, as Kirby demonstrates to chilling effect in this action-filled story (some of the best-written combat scenes in comics, IMO, although I think the truncated 17-page issue length of the time severely hampered the effectiveness of the artwork).
Up to this point in the series, Kirby has drawn Thena in the erect, commanding posture that is typical of her, but at the moment when the Celestial Eson causes a great tremor to reverberate through the Deviants’ undersea city he shows her, for the only panel in the entire series I think, in a vulnerable position, thrown off-balance, and being held by Kro. Of course by now you’ve all guessed that I think that this is not a coincidence. Psychologically, Thena is at her most vulnerable at this point. She has done what no other Eternal would even consider doing – descend into the depths of the realm of the Deviants, she has “seen too much “ of what the dark drives she is exploring are capable of (Purity Time), and now she has had some of her most deeply held “Eternal” assumptions about beauty and worth turned on their heads. This is the moment of her greatest danger to being overwhelmed by the dark forces in which she has immersed herself, and it is symbolized by the disappearance of the energy barrier that had protected her and the ruling Deviants from the combatants in the arena. Note that the disappearance if the barrier is indirectly caused by Celestial activity, i.e. Reality – the universe - has impinged on the inner reality which is the location of this adventure. Thena is going to have to confront these forces directly, with no protective force field to hold them at a distance.
Issue #10, “Mother”, opens with the gigantic hand of Eson crushing a battery of Deviant guns on the perimetre of the city. The Deviants retreat in panic.
Deviant 1: Thanks to a force field, the collapse of this station will not bring the ocean waters in upon us.
Deviant 2: It couldn't keep him out. The Space Gods move in a mysterious manner which defies all barriers to their progress.
Eson, ignoring further attacks from Deviant ships, reaches his arm through the tunnel leading to the city and stretches his hand up through the waters, surveying Lemuria through the “universla eye”, a Kirbyesque device, in his palm. The water displaced by his immense arm and hand causes floods and panic in the city. The Deviant authorities are interested only in protecting the elite, leaving the commoners to fend for themselves as best they can. Meanwhile Eson departs from the area, and we see him gliding past a group of sperm whales as if they were a school of trout.
Some people might be a little confused by the highly stratified Deviant hierarchy and its strict political organization, given my assertion that they symbolize the violent and chaotic drives and primitive instincts of the unconscious. But it is a common theme in literature that symbols of the unconscious and of chaos are often given to complicated political hierarchies and intricate rules of conduct. Compare, for example, the Goetia of Moore's Promethea and their rigid hierarchy and elaborate military titles and manner of speech; or the strict code of honour governing single combat and so on in Courts of Chaos in Zelazny's Amber books.
Also, there is the old concept of "as above, so below": the complicated Deviant hierarchy is a parody or base imitation of the very simple one of the Eternals ("Great Tode" vs "Great Zuras"); the Deviant attitude towards their Rejects echoes the Eternal attitude towards the Deviants; and the Deviant Purity Time is even a parody of the Celestial Fifty Year Judgement. In each of these cases, the readily apparent wrongness of the Deviant behaviour forces us to look at, either the Eternal or Celestial object of parody or our own human behaviour in a new light. It's no coincidence that the highly mentally developed Eternals have a very simple political system: apart from the patriarchal figure of Zuras, all Eternals appear to be more or less equal, although in an emergency they have no problem following a leader. And of course, this is what we'd hopefully expect from a people who are so advanced that individuals can be left to their own guidance. But the suspicious and mentally unstable Deviants have a complicated political system with power concentrated among an elite and the vast bulk of commoners oppressed by their rulers.
There's more to say on this subject, but I want to get on with the story, so ...
We next see a short series of panels to let us know that the Celestials are still causing consternation in Australia, Switzerland, and Russia. Nezarr, in Siberia, is observed by a squadron of MIGs. For now, the Soviets are showing restraint, and take no offensive action.
The scene switches to Olympia, where the Prime Eternal, Zuras, is attempting to make contact with the Celestial “One Above All” in the orbiting space craft, with the aid of a special “link-up” helmet.
Zuras: The Celestials represent power beyond measure. Their thoughts do not yield to communication easily.
Once stimulated by the “link-up”, the mind of the eldest Eternal dwarfs all others on earth.
It penetrates the hull of the gargantuan craft -- and makes sudden contact!
Zuras is seized by violent tremors. The “link-up” blazes with a dazzling brightness that results in a terrifying backlash of shocking strength. It rocks both Eternals to their very core!
Zuras: I-it is done, Domo. I've no further need for the “link-up.”
Domo: But, you must tell me, sire! Wha - ?
Zuras: What, indeed! What have the dark and vast stretches of the universe spawned and sheltered and nurtured and grown in that unthinkable time before our planet was formed --
Domo: Good gracious! It is impossible to conceive of a mind that could visibly shake the Prime Eternal! Yet, it is up there – in the craft of the Space Gods!
[Zuras then informs Domo of the Fifty Year Judgement, and orders him to “activate the Unifier.”]
[Caption:] Soon, at the most complex instrument ever produced on earth ...
[Caption:] The Unifier ... is a technological aid which does what was once an ability of Zuras alone ...
Domo (thinking): The call goes out across the planet. Eternals everywhere must respond to it. As in the ancient times, there will be a mass gathering.
Eternal 1: I-it is the Call! It sounds after centuries of silence!
Eternal 2: Days of fear lie before us! I can sense it!
[We see a panel of Eternals expressing surprise and concern at hearing the call for the first time after so many centuries. Then the scene switches to Makarri, Margo, and Ikaris. Ikaris has Sprite over his knee and is in the process of giving him a spanking when they are interrupted by the call:]
Makarri: To the alert, Ikaris! Open your mind to more important channels!
At the end of this scene is a bit of dialogue I think is significant to the larger themes we've been following:
Makarri: ... But that was during a time when Humans and Eternals were still separated by fantasy. Now we must share the same fate.
Margo: Does this mean the Call is meant for me as well?
Ikaris: It means you are welcome to join us and the others. Although its sound is denied to Humans, the Call will be heard by Eternals everywhere – by Eternals like Sersi, who live in Human cities --
Makarri: Let's not forget those like Thena – who take foolish trips! Somehow, the strange fascination that lures her to Kro, the Deviant General, has brought her misfortune in the past. She is with him now, among the Deviants! I wonder how she fares?
The main thrust of the Zuras scene is to demonstrate once again how incomprehensibly far beyond even the Prime Eternal are the minds and powers of the Celestials. There isn't going to be any "ultimate nullifier" there isn't going to be any Reed Richards to "figure out" some of their technology and save the human race (partly because Kirby has larger concerns than making readers feel good about themselves with yet another story about the "indomitable" human spirit overcoming an alien threat, etc, etc).
Then we have the introduction of the concept of the Uni-Mind, which seems to tie in with Thena's earlier statement (the one I'm claiming is the key to understanding the series) that Eternals, Humans, and Deviants must unite if they are to face the Celestials. And sure enough, Makkari and Ikaris indicate to Margo that she and Sam Holden are welcome to join the Eternals in the Uni-Mind ritual. But someone and something's missing: and in case we didn;t notice, Kirby points it out with Makarri's last line: " Let's not forget those like Thena – who take foolish trips! Somehow, the strange fascination that lures her to Kro, the Deviant General, has brought her misfortune in the past. She is with him now, among the Deviants! I wonder how she fares?" The Deviants have not figured into the Eternals' plans for the Uni-Mind ritual, and Thena, the only Eternal who's shown any signs of wanting to deal with them as anything more than a nuisance and a menace, is missing - because she's taken a "foolish trip" into the realm of the Deviants. All this shows the reader that the Eternals as a group are still hampered by their attitude, understandable as it may be, towards their Devinat cousins. Higher consciousness has still not accepted the need to accept the existance of the unconscious, or to explore it. Thus we should anticipate that the Uni-Mind ritual will be at best only a partial success.
Makarri's words about Thena serve, of course as a segue back to Lemuria where the barrier protecting the royal spectators from the arena combatants has disappeared, due indirectly to Eson's actions, and the Reject is about to attack them.
At that moment, in the city beneath the sea, Thena looks squarely into the face of danger ...
And it is a strange, deceptive face. Wreathed in shadows and set on a well-shaped, muscular body, the face of death draws nearer.
We see Thena aiming a calm and level gaze at the Reject as he approaches for the kill. Then an interesting panel in whichthe Deviants spectators surrounding her are all in a state of movement, most of them fleeing in panic, while Kro's body is off-balance as he leans on the rail in one direction, trying to get in front of Thena, and gestures energetically in the opposite direction. In striking contrast to the turmoil of their surrondings, two figures are balanced and still: the Reject, caught by the “camera” in mid-stride as he stalks purposefully towards Thena; and Thena herself, who stands calm and erect as she faces him.
Deviant: Save us from the Reject! He'll kill us all!
Kro: Send for more guards! He's destroyed the others! Hurry!
Thena: Your combat arena fails to be amusing when it begind to involve the spectators, Kro!
Thena: You Deviants have only yourselves to blame for this. The poor thing was trained to kill ... and now he can't stop.
Kro: Your words won't stop him, Thena. I'll try to hold him off.
Kro's brave gesture is never completed. The Reject is upon him with uncanny swiftness ...
[The reject grabs Kro by the face, twisting his head back.]
Suddenly, the arena is illuminated by a powerful blinding flash of energy which hurls the two apart!
The Reject lies shaken and puzzled by this unexpected resistance. His instincts tell him that the female is the cause of what happened. From his very first glimpse of her among the assemblage of Deviants, he has sensed a hidden strength behind her cool self-assurance.
Rage seizes him once more. He attempts to rise, but another burst of power cuts him short ...
The Reject grows livid with anger! A savage snarl escapes his lips! He leaps like a tiger at the female who defies the onslaught of this unbeaten veteran of the arena ...
Then he runs headlong into the strongest of the energy blasts!
Thena: That stunned him for certain. He has yet to learn respect for the daughter of great Zuras – and for all other life as well.
Kro: We Deviants have bred him since childhood for the arena. He cannot change.
Thena: And so you would destroy him. What a cruel fate for one of tender years and fair visage.
Kro: It's his one virtue. He is living proof the Deviant gene has finally stopped producing monstrosities.
Thena: The fault lies not with your monstrosities, Kro, but with yourselves. Were the Deviants to exercise their noble qualities, they would shed the “self-hatred” which plagues them. These noble qualities exist in you, Kro. They bid mightily for expression.
Kro: Perhaps so, Thena. Perhaps, when I reach for your – aproval – I-I find these things you speak of. Let the Space Gods empty this world - - and leave but you and I!
Thena: That's a possibility. The Celestials grow more active. Thus I must take my leave, Kro.
Kro: No, Thena - - stay! We need time! If we part this moment - - we may lose each other for ever.
Thena: Time has been taken from our hands. I have heard the Call, Kro!
Kro: Great Zuras sounds the mental klaxon once more, eh? Vcurse the meddling Celestials! They have caused this!
Thena: No Eternal can fail to answer the Call. I – I must return to Olympia ... If we face trial with the Space Gods, let us do so in ways they must honour!
Karkas: HAHAHAHAH - - ! No instrument was ever made that could find honour among the Deviants! HAHAHAh!!
Thena: Great Zuras!
Kro: Wha - - !? It's the monster called Karkas! I thought him to be slain in combat with the Reject!
Karkas: I suffer from deep wounds, Kro! But I live! I live to laugh at lofty words spun by those who judge others!
Thena steps close to Karkas without fear ...
Thena: You think! You feel! You speak with great sensitivity! I – I find this amazing in one so - - different!
Karkas: Thank you, my Lady - - for not calling me - - monster!
Karkas: Yet, the Devinats will have me slain because I was born of them! A “mutate embarrassment!” An outrage of their standards!
Thena: Is this an issue you plead? What is it that you want of me?
Kro: Careful, Thena!
Karkas: I seek sanctuary, My Lady! A place to spend my life in fruitful pursuits!
Kro: You;ll get what you're fit for, monster! Your place is in the arena - - to fight - - or die!
[But just as Kro speaks these cruel words, we see the Reject has risen and is approaching menacingly from behind. Then, with a single strike, he downs the Deviant general, who then lies senseless on the floor.]
Once more the Reject arises to vent his anger against the Deviant oppressors. Theya re simple to destroy. But this female is not like the others.
Thena: Have a care, foolish youth! Strike out - - to your sorrow!
Reject: You – you sat with them! You sat with those who would wacth me die in the arena!
The Reject boils with the killing frenzy. T=Yet, he is wary of Thena's power - - and what is most frustrating to him is the evident compassion reflected in her eyes. It is yet another power that stays his clenching fingers ...
Reject: W-what are you!? W-who are you!?
Indecision almost tears the Reject asunder. For the first time in his life, he cannot strike down his prey! Instead, he recoils, almost in fear, as Thena reaches out with a tender touch ...
[We see Thena's hand reach out to touch the side of the Reject's head, who recoils in distress.]
Reject: No! NO!
Karkas: Sanctuary, My Lady! Sanctuary for that poor creature too! Remember your own words! “The fault lies not with the monsters!” We are “made!” - - not “born” this way!
Thena: Then let us find out if this is so!
Karkas: HAHAHA! Eternals must take the same risks they offer to the Deviants! We are now your monsters, My Lady!
Thena: I accept you both! I give you the protection of Olympia and the daughter of great Zuras!
[Caption:] The Reject can hardly believe what is happening. He is offered life instead of death. He's given affection from authority - - when it has always shown contempt ...
Thena (reaching out her hand to the Reject): Come! I have given my word and shall keep it! Come and learn the ways of the Eternals.
Reject: I – I - - !
Kro (recovering): Thena! What are you doing!? This is madness!
Thena: Farewell, Kro! I leave for Olympia - - with my wards!
In the manner of Great Zuras himself, Thena and her charges vanish from the City of Toads in one mighty flash of energy ...
[We see Thena standing erect, one hand raised in salute, the Reject kneeling at her feet, Karkas prone beside them].
Kro: No - - ! Thena - - Come back!
Kro's shouts are booming echos in the empty arena. He is mindful of the flood waters seeping in from above ...
Kro: Thena! THENA!
The canal flood is inundating the palace of the ruling family, but Kro has lost more than the rest ...
Kro: THENA-A-A-!
Earlier in the story, in issue #8, Great Tode announced that this combat between the Reject and Karkas was in Thena’s honour. At the time, this might have seemed to be just a bit of diplomatic flattery, since the reader saw that Tode had already decided that the Reject was to be sacrificed in the arena to the monstrous Karkas. But at the symbolic level, it really is in Thena's honour, because it will give her the opportunity to complete her quest by overcoming her Eternal preconceptions and by directly confronting the hidden drives represented by these two Rejects; thus, as the combat unfolds, she very quickly sees that Karkas, despite his monstrous appearance, is actually a thinking, feeling being, and that the handsome Reject is a ruthless, hate-filled destroyer.
Moreover, the forces represented by these two Rejects are exactly those which define the basic nature of both Thena and her mythic namesake Pallas Athena, the warrior goddess of wisdom. The Reject is, as the title of issue#9 makes explicit, a “killing machine.” He is the ultimate warrior, as Kirby demonstrates so effectively throughout this three-part story. Karkas, beneath his monstrous appearance, is a philosopher, a creature of the mind, a lover of wisdom, knowledge, and contemplation. He is also a creature of compassion, movingly demonstrated by including the Reject, who has just come close to destroying him, in his plea for sanctuary. Karkas shows that not all primal drives are negative and violent. The instincts for compassion and for the love of truth and wisdom are basic to Thena's nature, as is her warrior aspect. But the Reject is the Kirby concept of the super-soldier taken to its logical extreme: someone so good at combat that he is basically a monster.
So, Thena quest to explore the depths of the psyche was not only an abstract one, learning about the nature of the unconscious in general, but also led her in the end to face those very forces that make up the basis of her own nature. From this point of view, the combat arena in which the Reject and Karkas fight before her represents Thena's psyche, within which, in the course of her exploration of the unconscious, she has come face to face with the deepest, most basic drives that determine who and what she is. And how does she react?
Let's return to page 22 panel 5 (issue#10), where every figure in the panel is agitated or in motion except for the menacing Reject and Thena, whose calm, commanding presence is all the more impressive in the midst of the chaos. The story is now approaching its climax. As the Reject stalks towards her Kro tries to stop him but is completely helpless before the fury of this “killing machine”. This is Thena's trial, the arena is the arena of her psyche, in which her two defining drives have done battle against one another. To reiterate, both the Reject and Karkas represent concepts that are closely associated with Thena’s mythical source, Pallas Athena, goddess both of wisdom (Karkas) and of battle (the Reject); thust at the symbolic level Thena’s exploration of the subconscious has confronted her with two of the most basic aspects of her being – the frightening strength and destructive power of the Reject and the compassion and desire for knowledge of Karkas. The violent, savage, most negative aspect of her warrior nature appears to have defeated her wise, rational, compassionate aspect, and is now about to attack her.
But the threat the Reject poses to Thena is not a physical one – she is far too powerful to be in any danger from him, for all his lethal strength and skill. The danger, once again, is psychic. The danger right now is that she will give in to the destructive potential inherent in her by obliterating the Reject with the bolts of Zuras. This would be one way of sealing the Reject's symbolic victory: by destroying him, she would have demonstrated that she was in fact now ruled by the violent and destructive drives he represents. Paradoxically, if she had done so, it would have been fitting that the Reject suffer physical destruction, because there would no longer be any need for an exterior representation of this facet of her being; it would have taken over her psyche; Thena would have been the Reject – the menacing, violent, implacable warrior without compassion.
But when she does use her power to protect herself, Kirby is careful to show how she gradually steps up the force until it is just enough to stop the Reject, but not kill him, thus showing that it is she who controls her power, not her power that controls her. She has passed the first test.
Her next test comes in the form of Karkas, whose nature challenges her to overcome her Eternal prejudices and accept him as an intelligent being worthy of her compassion and protection. She passes this test too, as I think no other Eternal, with the possible exception of Zuras, could have done, when she “steps close to Karkas without fear,“ and engages him respectfully in conversation.
But it is at that moment that the Reject rises again, felling Kro with chilling ease to confront Thena once more. And then we come to the climactic moment; but it's a climax completely atypical of mainstream comics, even to this day, 30 years later. She doesn’t fight the Reject, she doesn't crush him with her power, she doesn’t even strike him down in the controlled manner she has just shown herself to be capable of; instead she does nothing more than reach out compassionately to touch his head. The Reject is overcome by this gesture of kindness, recoils in confusion and fear, and, finally, kneels at her feet. The symbolism should be obvious by now. To reiterate, the Reject represents force, power, aggression, and the instinct for self-preservation at all costs; Karkas, the natural
instinct for compassion and the drive to acquire knowledge and wisdom. The fact that the Reject wins the combat is a reflection of how dominant are the drives associated with him in the kingdom of the Deviants, i.e. the subconscious as a general concept (as opposed to a particular individual’s sub-conscious), and Thena, since she has entered herself in that kingdom, is in danger of succumbing to those drives, of allowing those primal instincts to become dominant within her self. But she reverses the outcome of the combat of the Reject and Karkas by overcoming the Reject, not by force as she was easily able to do, and which would in fact have been another kind of victory, a symbolic one, for the Reject, but with a display of kindness, the very thing represented by the mentally and ethically advanced Karkas. (Note that it is directly after her conversation with Karkas that she confronts the Reject with compassion rather than force). She shows her awareness of and restores the balance between the instinctive drives associated with these two Rejects, the fierce warrior instincts represented by the Reject and the compassion and love of wisdom of Karkas.
Thena then announces that she “accepts them both”. Her quest to explore her dark side and become whole is successful. She has rejected a romantic relationship with Kro in favour of a parental relationship with the Reject and Karkas; in other words, at the symbolic level, she has rejected the seductive temptation of relinquishing control to the dark side of the psyche, and instead has accepted and integrated the forces and drives that are properly hers, showing that she controls them, rather than being controlled by them. (But note that “control” in regard to The Reject and Karkas as individuals has the sense of “guidance”, not of an arbitrary and oppressive power over another living being).
Remember the definitions of individuation from a few posts back in the thread?
“In Jungian psychology, the gradual integration and unification of the self through the resolution of successive layers of psychological conflict.”
“An individuated [person] is one in whom the unconsious and conscious are harmonized ... This is achieved by getting in touch with the unconscious, without allowing the ego to be overwhelmed by it. ... “
“Blocked or distorted development of the personality is characteristic of neurosis, and in psychosis consciousness is overwhelmed by the unconscious. The aim of psychotherapy in Jung's view is to develop a situation where consciousness is not swamped by the unconscious, but neither is it shut off from it. The encounter between consciousness and the symbols arising from the unconscious enriches life and promotes psychological development, individuation.”
"I accept you both," Thena says to the Reject and Karkas.
Now, I want to return to the myth of Erichthonios, the strange and monstrous half serpent/half human foster child of the goddess Pallas Athena. I believe that at some level, Kirby's story of Thena, Kro, Karkas and the Reject was inspired by this very mysterious myth. The physically humanoid Reject and monstrous Karkas as a pair correspond to the half human (or divine)/half monster Erichthonios. But the parallel is multi-layered because each of the two is himself an individual parallel to Athena’s ward. Karkas is physically monstrous but ethically and intellectually close to the Eternals, while the physically handsome Reject looks like an Eternal, but is a psychologically monstrous “killing machine” who cannot be handled safely even by his Deviant masters. Thus, each of the two Deviant rejects is a dichotomy on his own, just as is Erichthonios; at the same time, Karkas and the reject as a pair form another dichotomy, both physically (the monstrous Karkas vs the handsome Reject) and psychlogically (the bitter and suspicious Reject vs the philosophical Karkas) that parallels the physically half man/half monster Erichthonios.
On another level, the Reject and Karkas correspond to the many heroes of ancient Greek myth who were protected and aided by Pallas Athena , the patroness of such heroes as Perseus, Heracles, Achilles, Odysseus, Diomedes, and so on. And just as Athena rejects Hephaistos as a lover or husband, but accepts Erichthonios as her ward, so does Thena reject Kro but takes responsibility for the Reject and Karkas. (It is also interesting that Hepahistos’s famous fall from Olympos, from which he was once hurled by Zeus, has been linked to the fall of Lucifer from Heaven in Christian myth, while Kro of course has a somewhat Satanic appearance even when he is not actively impersonating the Devil.)
In issue #5, when Makkarri enters the Chamber of Command, he says, “Makarri greets mighty Zuras, and hails the PERFECTION of Thena …”. On one level, this is simple flattery, as Thena herself notes in her response. On the symbolic level,though, in keeping with the interpretation described above, ‘perfection’ has the no longer commonly used meaning of “complete”, foreshadowing the theme of Thena’s later journey to Lemuria which, as I’ve attempted to show, enables her to complete herself, in the sense of confronting, mastering, and assimilating the most hidden and basic elements of her inner nature. Perfection in this sense is an ongoing process, not a state of being. Although Thena's process of individuation and integration has been successful in once sense, in another, it is not yet at an end.
And in my opinion, (getting ahead of myself a little here) the continuation of this process at the symbolic level, would have been reflected in the further adventures of this trio had the series been allowed to continue. We get a glimpse of how this might have played out in the Eternals Annual #1, in which the trio is sent by Zuras on a mission to earth.
Moreover, although Thena has accepted her two wards, how will the rest of the Eternals react when she brings them up from the Deviant's realm beneath the ocean to the mountaintops of Olympia itself? This too is a crucial aspect of how the series would have continued to develop these themes, IMO, as we see in the few remaining issues. I think that the outcome of the Fifty Year Judgement may well have hinged upon how the rest of the Eternals, and, later, the Humans, reacted to these two Deviant Rejects. Thena is only one individual: the goal she has articulated is “to unite all our species.” She has taken the first step. Now she must try to win acceptance from the rest of the Eternals for her two Deviant wards, which would have been the next step in the quest for unity. As we'll see in a few issues, things don't start off too smoothly. And I think this difficult process would have been one of the most important plot-threads had the series continued.
[Sidenote: readers of Promethea might like to compare (and contrast) a scene in issue #18 where Promethea faces the threat of the Goetia's attack by ingesting the demons, accepting the drives they represent as part of her, as the dialogue states explicitly].
Rod G
04-12-2005, 08:53 PM
I understand that the Reject is eventually given the name "Ransak".The question is where and when?
I understand that the Reject is eventually given the name "Ransak".The question is where and when? I believe this was a name given the character by a later writer, after Kirby's series had been cancelled. I don't particularly like it, myself.
Way back near the beginning of this thread, T Guy said:
Kirby himself said something like 'The New Gods was the question; The Eternals is one of the possible answers.' (Mind you, he also said that the questions are always more interesting than the answers.) I immediately recalled these words of yours when I typed the following quote from Eternals #10 a few posts above:
Karkas: Sanctuary, My Lady! Sanctuary for that poor creature too! Remember your own words! “The fault lies not with the monsters!” We are “made!” - - not “born” this way!
Since most people see the nature vs nurture, and Good vs Evil, questions as two of several posed by Kirby's New Gods series, I wonder if this might be the answer Kirby was referring to?
T GUy
04-13-2005, 05:31 AM
Karkas: We are “made!” - - not “born” this way!
berk: ...nature vs nurture, and Good vs Evil, questions as two of several posed by Kirby's New Gods series, I wonder if this might be the answer Kirby was referring to?
Kirby as recalled by T Guy: one of the possible answers
We get a contradictory answer looking at Orion and Scott Free.
T Guy said:
We get a contradictory answer looking at Orion and Scott Free. Only partially so, IMO. While Scott Free's "nature" overcomes his Apokoliptan "nurture," Orion's New Genesis upbringing does succeed in keeping his Apokoliptan "nature" under control, as is symbolized by Mother Box's change in his appearance. So the New Gods leaves the question open, IMO. Orion's basic nature does surface in times of extreme stress - usually combat; but Scott Free's nurture also expresses itself in his abilities as an escape artist.
The Good vs Evil question may be even more interesting; perhaps here we might be better off saying that the New Gods provides an answer which the Eternals brings into question. It's possible to read the New Gods as a straightforward Good vs Evil conflict (although I have reservations on that score that I own't go into here); but the Eternals is emphatically not a Good vs Evil scenario. In fact, one of the implications of the thematic subtext of the series, IMO, is to bring into question the whole concept of the abstract categories "Good" and "Evil."
There is no Darkseid to represent "Evil" in the Eternals cosmos. The closest candidates are Kro and Great Tode, neither of whom fit the bill: Kro yearns for the higher qualities of nobility, courage, and compassion represented for him by Thena, even though he is a long way from understanding them, while Great Tode, though certainly a despot, is acting for what he sees as the benefit of his people and even the earth itself in his misguided hostility towards the Celestials. One of the lessons of the Eternals is that even the most primitive, violent, and aggressive instincts have to be acknowledged if they are to be brought under control. Simple (as in not doing anything else) denial and suppression only means that they will resurface at the first opportunity and that when they do so we may not be able to control them, they might control us.
By the way, I should make it clear that I don't regard the nature vs nurutre question as one that has an either-or-answer. It's one of those over-simplified dichotomies we have to watch out for in our thinking. It isn't a question of either nauture or nurture; it's a complex and often unpredicctable interaction between the two. Which, now I think of it, is pretty much what Kirby shows in bot the New Gods and the Eternals. Take Karkas himself, for instance. When he says "We are made, not born, this way," he's morst likely referring to the Reject's savage hostility and even his own behaviour in the arena. The treatment they've received has turned them into manosters, especially the Reject. But Karkas himself is a clear example of inner nature coming to the surface (in his compassion and intelligence) in spite of the harsh environment in which it's had to survive. ANd hopefully the Reject will be able to overcome some of the effects of his training as well. So both nature and nurture are important.
T GUy
04-15-2005, 03:40 PM
Quote:
T Guy said:
We get a contradictory answer looking at Orion and Scott Free. berk said:
Only partially so, IMO...
The Good vs Evil question may be even more interesting; perhaps here we might be better off saying that the New Gods provides an answer which the Eternals brings into question. It's possible to read the New Gods as a straightforward Good vs Evil conflict (although I have reservations on that score that I own't go into here)
Yes, thinking about it I'd agree with you on nature/nurture re Orion and Scott. And on good/evil in the Fourth world tetralogy, where close study starts to raise questions.
As I quoted Kirby, more or less: possible answers to interesting questions.
The basic framework of the interpretation of the Eternals I've tried to give in this thread occurred to me a few years ago when, on an Eternals message board, we were talking about our favourite Eternals stories. I picked the 3-part story I just finished describing in the posts from a few days ago, "The City of Toads", "The Killing Machine" and "Mother", issues #8, 9, & 10. The themes I see in those issues were the first that came to me, and I worked backwards from there, looking at the entire series with new eyes, until the themes I've tried to describe in the earlier part of the thread, vovering the first 7 issues of the series, opened up to me. I think the thematic framework I've outlined is remarkably consistent and well-expressed in the first 13 issues plus the Annual.
But with issues 14 to 19, I think it all breaks down a little. Although there are still several interesting moments, the stories aren't as well-structured or as thematically coherent as the earlier issues. Not coincidentally, issue #14 seems to mark a point in the series where Kirby began to feel pressure to make changes in order to boost sales or answer criticism that his Eternals were too isolated from the rest of the MU. In #14, Ikaris and Makarri fight "the Cosmic-Powered Hulk", not the Hulk at all, actually, but a robot facsimile that is accidentally imbued with a stray bit of cosmic energy left over from the Eternals' Uni-Mind ritual. Later, in issues 18 - 19, the story degenerates into a fairly ordinary Marvel-style tale with Ikaris re-cast into the traditional Marvel leading-man role (as opposed to the rest of the series in which I think Kirby was taking the piss out of the typical superhero male lead with Ikaris; remember the comments from Sersi and Ajak on "heroes," and how ineffectual Ikaris's own undoubtedly heroic actions really were).
This is completely speculation on my part, but I suspect Kirby began to lose conviction in his experiment when he saw the lack of interest from fans and perhaps the lack of understanding from his fellow professionals of how ground-breaking this Eternals experiment really was. It's tough to be innovative when you're not getting much positive feedback. Since he had already gone through something similar at DC with the New Gods, the lack of support might have driven him to make what I think were sweeping alterations to the series. At any rate, whatever the reasons were, I don't think issues 14-19 hold up nearly as well as the rest of the series.
I will try to go through issues 11 - 13 and the Annual, eventually, though I probably won't go into the same detail as I did with issues 1 -10. I'll probably even try to point out the few bits of #'s 14 to 19 that I find interesting.
But first I want to say a little more about the Thena/Athene problem (see next post).
Sir Tim Drake
04-15-2005, 09:59 PM
berk, have you thought about submitting this to the Jack Kirby Collector?
Shellhead
04-18-2005, 08:38 AM
Berk,
Have you taken a look at DC's Seven Soldiers maxi-series? Grant Morrison seems to be greatly inspired by Jack Kirby in this ambitious project. He's even taking fresh look at Kirby's excellent demented creation, Klarion the Witch-Boy.
Sir Tim Drake: A couple years ago I did send them a much shorter essay, mostly dealing with Issues 8 - 10. They never ended up publishing it, something I'm very grateful for now, because when I looked at it (in prepartaion for this thread) for the first time since then, I saw that it was very sketchy. As for th e material in the current thread, it would have to be worked over quite a bit, I think, before it was ready for submission, and I'm not sure I want to put in the extra time that would take.
Shellhead: Yes, I am reading Morrison's Seven Soldiers. I'm enjoying it so far. I'm looking forward to the introduction of the Kirby characters with some trepidation mingled with the anticipation. Should be interesting. This is only the second Morrsion series I've really followed. (read the Filth and liked it a lot; glanced at JLA and didn't like it at all).
I forgot to mention earlier, when I was talking about the story of Athena and the half-man/half-serpent Erichthonios, that serpents, as creatures that are literally close to the earth (as legless creatures that slither along on the ground and often live in burrows or caves or under rocks )are often associated with the chthonic; they are also symbols of intelligence (as, in a negative way, they are in the Bible); and they can act as protective guardians (as we see, again in a negative way, with the various guardian serpents or dragons in Greek and other Western mythologies). So the parallels between Athena/Erichthonios and Thean/Reject/Karkas carry a lot of resonance.
I had written the posts regarding Athena, Thena, and Eternals 8 - 10 when I decided to look up “Athene” in Chevalier & Gheerbrant's Dictionary of Symbols just to see if it could provide me with any ammunition for the ideas I've tried to express above. I want to emphasize the chronology because what I found was much more than I had expected. I'll highlight some of the words and phrases that are particularly coincident with the ideas we've talked about in post #'s 24 & 29 - 38.
... throughout Classical antiquity the image of Athene underwent a steady development towards an ever higher spirituality. Two of her attributes, the serpent and the bird symbolize the parameters of this development. ... goddess of wisdom, she was the virgin protectress of children, the warrior-goddess who inspired the arts and crafts of peace. As Marie Delcourt puts it, she was 'a highly enigmatic personality and undoubtedly the one in all Greek mythology whose inner being remains most closely hidden from us.'
Her birth came like a flash of light across the universe, the dawn of a new world, an apocalyptic vision . ... Pindar chants, 'Athene leapt forth ... and cried aloud with a mighty shout, while Heaven and Mother Earth trembled before her.' Her arrival marked a turning point in the history of the cosmos and of mankind.
In Greece, newborn babies were given a charm in the shape of a serpent, symbol of intuitive wisdom and protective vigilance, in memory of Erecthonius, who was to become founder of Athens and whom Athene had protected as a baby by hiding him in a chest with a serpent to watch over and guard him.. In a number of statues Athene is shown wearing belt, skirt and tunic fringed with hissing serpents, ... They symbolize the goddess's fighting spirit and keen intelligence. She is the virgin armed and defending the heights, in every sense of the word both material and spiritual, on which she stands.
... the goddess wins her victories by her wisdom, her quick-wittedness and by the truth. The spear she holds is a weapon of light which cleaves and pierces the clouds like lightning ...
The protection which Athene affords to such heroes as Herakles, Achilles, Odysseus and Menelaus 'symbolizes', Pierre Grimal writes, 'the assistance given by the Spirit to the brute strength and personal courage of these heroes.' (GRID 57)
Athene, worshipped as fertility-goddess and the goddess of victory, symbolizes, above all, 'psychic creativity ... meditative synthesis ...socialized intelligence.' (VIRI 104)
She is the protectress of high places ... and is the active working power of the intellect. She is the goddess of inner stability ...
... the goddess achiev[es] perfection only after a long period of development, which itself reflects the development of human consciousness. In the course of her mythological history Athene exhibits more than a touch or two of savagery and barbarism. ... the final image of herself [is] when all the elements of her rich persomality have been welded into one harmonious whole.
Athene should symbolize especially that 'spiritual aggressiveness' which should be ever on the alert; since perfection can only be attained by the individual who has become 'one for whom, in the end, eternity fashions the change within him- or herself.' (DIES 97-8)
[Dictionary of Symbols. Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant. John Buchanan-Brown, tr.]
(Note: acronyms such as DIES refer to other books quoted by the authors)
It was a spine-chilling moment for me when I saw how closely the above parallelled with what Kirby had done in the Eternals with Thena, the Reject and Karkas. I won't go over the whole thing again, but everything in posts 24 and 29 - 38 agrees with the quoted passages above so closely that I can't believe it was only coincidence. Whether Kirby tapped into the collective euncoscious or did it all deliberately ir irrelevant to me. The parallels are there, they imbue the story with tremendous thematic resonance, and help make the Eternals one of the most powerful comics series I've ever read.
From here on in, I won't try to cover ever issue exhaustively. I'll look at particular scenes I think are important, and talk generally about some of the developments in the series, and where I think it would have gone had it been permitted to continue.
Issue #11, “The Russians Are Coming,” shows the Eternals entering into the Uni-Mind ritual, joined for the first time in history by human participants (Dr. Holden and Margo). The bulk of the story is taken up with the the reaction of the Russians to the presence of a Celstial in Siberia. There is internal dissension within the Soviet military between hakws who want to attack the Celestial and more reasonable leaders who want to continue observation. The latter, led by Vulcanin, turn out to be Polar Eternals, relatives to those of Olympia. Once again, Kirby's dialogue is telling:
Un-named general: You're mad Volcanin,! Do you actually feel we can negotiate with such a thing?
Volcanin: Did not the little people deal with Gulliver?
Greshkov: There you have it, Comrade Secretary! Vulcanin would have us take a folk tale approach to deal with - - that!
'Folk tale approach,' indeed, because it is exactly in folk and fairy tales and myths that the questions raised in this series have always been treated in all human cultures. Treated symbolically, just as in the Eternals itself.
The Hawks win the argument, but their nuclear-missile attack against the Celestial is thwarted in what I think is a nicely creative plot twist from Kirby. This issue bascially reinforces the dangers of dealing rashly with the Celestials, of thinking they can be coped with aggressively or violently. Symbolically, of course, this signifies the dangers of allowing the lower primitive instincts of fear, hatred, and hostility to guide the psyche's interaction with reality.
Issue #12, “Uni-Mind” continues the sub-plot referred to in the title. The anxiety felt by the human participants Sam and Margo is noticeable, signifying, I think, the fear of the ego before the prospect of losing its individuality, of the dissolution of the boundaries separating it and defining it form thhat which is outside it. As such the Uni-Mind can partially be seen as an allegory for the mystical concept of union of the psyche with reality as a whole; but only a symbol, because the actual ritual involves union only with the other participants.
We also get to see the arrival of Thena, the Reject and Karkas in Olympia. This is one of my favourite scenes in the series, nicely highlighting the interaction amongst the three characters and their individual personalities. There's also some humour in the reaction of some playful female Eternals to the handsome Reject, mixed with serious undertones at what that reaction really involves.
Ah, what the heck, I'll transcribe the scene, since I think it's an important one in relation to the series's themes and its future development:
[In Olympia, we see a great flash of light, within which we can discern the forms of Thena, Karkas, and the reject].
Eternal : Our instincts do not lie!We are privy to guests of an unprecedented nature!
Eternal: Why mince words? Call them exactly what they are! Deviants! Deviants - -here – in a city of the Eternals!
Eternal: Who among us could have been so reckless as to traffic with their kind?
Eternal: Yes ... Who but the daughter of great Zuras himself!
[We see the three arrivals, the Reject crouched in a combat stance, Karkas looking around in wonder, and Thena standing calmly].
Eternal: You're right! I – It's Thena! She's back!
Karkas: Olympia! This is a welcome sight!
Thena: Olympia finds you most disturbing, Karkas.
Eternal: Thena! What have you done? What have you brought us?
Eternal: These are days of woe, indeed!
The confrontation endures for long moments. The Olympians are stunned ... The Deviants are awed ...
Eternal: Whatever possessed her to bring them here?
Eternal: Their presence will only add fuel to the crisis brefore us!
Eternal; That is a certainty!
Eternal: Speak Thena! This may mean conflict in our peaceful realm! You owe us an explanation!
Female Eternal: She needn't explain the handsome one. I understand.
Female Eternal: So do I.
Thena: These poor beings sought sanctuary from oppression. I gave it to them.
Female Eternal: “Sweet Prince” must have tired of beating off those ugly Deviant females ... I'll wager that he'll find contentment in Olympia.
Thena: He is a rarity among Deviants, indeed. But he has yet to learn the art of romance.
Female Eternal: Then he is perfect fodder for the ladies! A grand diversion from the problems of the moment.
Female Eternal: Welcome to sanctuary, Sweet Prince!
At that moment ... [Karkas crashes heavily to the floor.]
Thena: Karkas! Wha --?
[Thena rushes to Karkas's side and puts her hands on him comfortingly].
Reject: He feels his wounds. Our encounter in the arena almost finished him off.
Thena: Silence, savage! I was a witness to the combat.
Thena: Karkas ... your intellect far exceeds you talents as a monster ... Fear not. I shall see to your needs!
Karkas: Thank you m'lady. I – I am in your debt ...
[A number of female Eternals hover round the Reject in admiration].
Eternal: How exciting! The Deviant is not only handsome - - but he jousts with sinister behemoths!
Eternal: He is a male to be reckoned with!
Eternal: Such shoulders ... such arms! How comforting they could be!
Thena: Have a care, lest they cause you grief. He is not the plaything you take him to be.
Reject: I make no pretense of gentility. My life has been one of killing, to survive combat on the arena.
Thena: And you do it so well – don't you – Sweet Prince --! However, since Eternals cannot be killed, you pretty things have nothing to worry about! But, hold ... why this sudden departure?
Female Eternal: er - - Great Zuras calls!
Female Eternal: W-we must join the Uni-Mind!
Thena (to the Reject): I – I'm sorry I had to do that. Forgive me ... but there is nothing frivolous in you coming to Olympia. Learning to live must precede your learning to love.
Reject: Does not the love of life include the love of all things? Does it not include the company of females?
Thena: Loving is caring! Loving is respect for the dignity of others! You've known nothing of that, 'Sweet Prince'!
Reject: Show me then! I've found little to care for yet!
Thena: I shall! You may begin with Karkas! Stay at his side until aid arrives. As my wards, you are brothers - - and must share each others misfortunes.
Reject: I cannot share his wounds. If he suffers, he must do it alone. It is blood, not tears, that one sheds in the arena. I shall not cry for Karkas.
Thena: Then you will learn. Guard him well.
Karkas: Hear that, “Reject”? HAHAHAH!
Thena: Forget your Deviant ways. Contemplate upon a new life here. I shall return when the Uni-Mind ritual is over.
Thena levitates and takes to the air. Ahead lies a far greater problem than the re-making of Deviants ...
Thena: On, Eternals!
Eternal: We follow, Thena!
Meanwhile, Karkas and the reject have been left to themselves ... with dark thoughts of their past ... and the disturbing question of their future ...
Karkas: HAHAHAHAH! Smile Sweet Prince! Destiny plays the clown with both of us! Here, I may yet become a philosopher of note! And you, master killer, may inherit the balconies and rose gardens of fair young maidens! Ease your battle stance! The shadows hide nothing but cool breezes ... There are no enemies - - in Paradise!
Reject: Fool! It's small wonder that you fall prey to smaller opponents! Paradise is just another place! - - And each place has corners for the wary eye to scour and seek out - - to certify the state of their impotence!
First of all, we see once again how very disturbed the average Eternal is by the idea of any kind of interaction with Deviants, let alone having two of them in their midst. We see that Thena has a reputation with them of daring to break outside the norms of standard Eternal behaviour – they guess that it is her before she fully appears. Bringing the Deviants to Olympia is an unprecedented act. We see the reflexive Eternal disregard the monstrous Karkas even as he falls to the ground from his injuries, and how they flock to the handsome Reject, ignoring his victim.
One thing I want to note here is that Kirby doesn't make this into a means of making us feel good about ourselves. If this story were told today, by a typical contemporary superhero writer, I think it very likely that he/she would insert a human character (preferably Captain America or Batman or Superman, but anyone would do) who would proceed to give those snooty Eternals a lecture about their callous disregard for the fallen Karkas; thus changing the scenefrom one which makes us call our own attitudes into question to one that reinforces our own fantasy-wish (it's the self-styled superior, know-it-all Eternals who don't respect Karkas because of his looks, not our representative human hero). But the point of the scene is that this callous disregard on the part of the Eternals for anything they see as “ugly” is a reflection of the very same tendancy in our own psyches. This is another reason I think it's important that Kirby did not give a prominent place to many human characters. (Margo and her father, and Sam Holden are the three most important, and they all three act as passive observers for much of the time). By doing this, he avoided the pitfall of having the reader displace any unpleasant emotions or behaviours onto particular charactres who can then be demonized in relation to the heroic characters who are present to act as wish-fulfillment figures, in respect to both power and morality, for the reader (as occurs in many contemporary superhero stories). As I said way back somewhere in the thread, the human psyche is the scene and setting, at the symbolis level, of much of the narrative, so it makes sense that the human characters are for the most part relatively passive observers, not active participants.
But what about Thena, someone might object, doesn't she act as a sort of wish-fulfillment when she tells the Reject to take care of Karkas and lectures him about the nature of love? I believe Kirby avoids this pitfall for several reasons: When she tells the Reject that “Love is caring. Love is respect for the dignity of others,” she is being a teacher, in the best sense of the word, not a self-righteous know-it-all who is liable to lay down the moral law to anyone anywhere. Note that she doesn't take the other Eternals to task for their callous disregard for Karkas and unthinking admiration of the handsome Reject. Also, we are aware of the special relationship between them, both at the story and symbolic levels; Thena has a right to speak to him this way because she is the Reject's fostermother, not because she thinks she is morally superior to everyone around her. Even more importantly, in a very bold move, Kirby doesn't make Thena the main protagonist of the series. Even in the Eternals Annual, in which she, the Reject and Karkas are the main actors, she stays largely in the background, acting as a guide and directing the two Deviants, but leaving most of the action to them, as we may see if I ever get around to talking about that issue in detail. [EDIT: just to clarify this thought: I don't think Thena would ever have been made the main rpotagonist of the whole series, because the Eternals concept entailed an ensemble cast, various members of which would have taken turns in the spotlight at various times, as we've already seen; but it might have seemed obvious and logical to at least make Thena the main protagonist in the ongoing sub-plot involving her and her two foster-sons, since she was the focus in that sub-plot's introduction in #'s 8-10; but unexpectedly, IMO, Kirby showed signs in the Annual that he was not going to take this route; I think it was a very creative decision, for the reasons I've tried to hint at in this paragraph].
Her attitude in this scene to her two wards is revealing. She is reassuring and comforting to Karkas, but stern and commanding to the Reject when he needs it. We mustn't that he really is a “master killer” who could easily snap at any second if he is not kept under control. Right now, at these initial stages, that control may sometimes be stern and strict; but remember her gesture of compassion to him at the end of #10, and even in this scene, she apologises to him without any hesitation or false pride when she thinks it right to do so. And this apology unerscores the seriousness of the situation for the Reject and Karkas, after the humour of the sudden turn-around of the flirtatious Eternals' attitude. The ultimate goal, of course , would be for the Reject to learn to control himself; and his first task, taking care of Karkas, is the first step in what would have been, I'm sure, a long process had the series continued.
But then we have a line that might appear problematic in light of much of what I've said here: As Thena flies off to join the Uni-Mind, the caption says that “Ahead lies a far greater problem than the re-making of Deviants ...”which seems to be at odds with the importance I've assigned to that very theme. I think we can look at this in a few ways: the “re-making” of thew Deviants is only one of a cluster of related problems: they must adapt to the world of the Eternals, but the Eternals must also learn to accept them. Thena has a large degree of control over the one problem – re-making the Deviants and all that that entails symbolically, but she has very little direct control over the problem of their acceptance by other Eternals. She can't force the others to accept them (and even if she could, it would defeat the purpose). Moreover, the ultimate problem is dealing with the Celestials. “Re-making the Deviants and gaining their acceptance from other Eternals and humans is, I believe, an indispensible part of or step towards that goal, and as such, “smaller” than the goal that “contains” it. The shadow of the Fifty-Year-Judgement hangs over all: if the sentient races of the earth, Eternal, Human and Deviant, cannot survive it, then all is for naught.
Before leaving the scene, I want to say how much I love the deftness with which Kirby draws his characters. The Reject's chillingly bleak view of the world is summed up nicely with his line, “Paradise is just another place.” i.e. A place where enemies can hide behind every corner (we'll see a humourous turn on this attitude in the Annual); and Karkas's dreams for a better future, charactersitically, not only for himself, but for the Reject as well, show his instincts for compassion and contemplation in a touching way. I think the scene is significant, then, for its characterization, and because I believe it is the opening scene in what would have been an important plot element had the series continued: the development of the characters of the Reject and Karkas, of their relationship with each other, with their foster-mother Thena, and with the Eternals as a whole.
Continuing with #12, there's a short scene with Ajak and Doctor Damian that I think is worth looking at briefly:
On the ancient ceremonial pylons, Arishem, leader of the Fourth Celestial Host, stands immobile as the mountains outside the dome. Yet all that moves upon the earth becomes motion within him ... his body is alive with the pressures and the cracklings caused by the movement of the planet itself ...
Dr. Damian: He stands there, day after day, without twitching a finger ... yet, somehow, I know he is active ... doing things that will change our world.
Ajak: These things are happening evenas we talk, Doctor Damian. Arishem's host is now abroad upon the land and sea ... making its presence known and felt!
Damian: Well, that should jolt the seats of the mighty! I would like to look at the face behind that giant helmet, and see if it wears a smile. But no ... I think Arishem is above that sort of thing. His coming has already shattered our concepts of history ... and as for his mission ... well - - I – I retract my previous statement ... I don't think I'd want to see his face at all!
Ajak: To dwell on him is to challenge the cosmos itself, Damian.
I included this scene because I think it once again points up the significance of the Celestials in the series. They are the very “cosmos itself,” as Ajak says to Damian. And as such, it is a frightening experience even to contemplate looking beneath the giant helmet that masks Arishem's face. Damian's words on this score hearken back to the quotes from Nietzsche and Pascale noted earlier in the thread. To look into the face of the abyss is a daunting proposal, and dangerous for the human psyche at its present stage of development . Damian's last words reflect this realisation.
Note that “cosmos” means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, not only universe, but "order" and “a sum total of experience.” It signifies reality and the order of reality (I don't mean order as in the simplistic order/chaos dichotomy). We're far too cavalier, as comic-book readers, about tossing around words like 'universe' and 'mulitverse' as if the concepts that underlie them were mundane commonplaces easy to grasp. Ultimately, they signify the mystery of reality itself, not just a pretty picture of stars and galaxies, or measurements of how old the universe is or how many light-years separate the most distant stars.
I keep harping on this idea of the fearsomeness and dangers of “looking into the abyss” because I think it's an important element of the Eternals concept and one that many people have difficulty acknowledging to themselves, precisely because it is so deeply imbedded in our psyches. We hide from it, trying desperately to maintain the illusion that our science (actually, more like our technology) has given us a complete understanding of and power over reality; or that our religion has answered all our questions about the purpose of exisitence. I came across the following passage in Steve Gerber's blog (http://stevegerber.com/sgblog) the other day that, while taken from a somewhat different context, expresses the situation very well:We’ve seen what the universe looks like, and it scares the shit out of us.
Faced with a cosmos comprised of amoral, vibrating strings, a universe utterly indifferent to human concepts of right and wrong — utterly indifferent to humans, for that matter — we lunge for simplicity, for the certainty of black and white, the comprehensibility of fundamental (and fundamentalist) dualities. Good and evil. God and Satan. Us and them.
We have to believe.But, as Kirby says later in this issue:
the Space Gods are creatures of time and space and the fibre of unknown equations. Time and space, cold equations, vibrating strings, ... "We've seen what the universe looks like and it scares the shit out of us," so much so that we can't admit it, even to ourselves. And so much so that we react with our most primitive instincts of fear and hostility - we see the universe or external reality or environment as a threat, something to be dominated, exploited, controlled - and that way lies ruin. This is one of the most important themes, IMO, running through the Eternals.
Glancing back over the last couple posts I've made, I noticed that I've been using, probably throughout the entire thread, the phrase "our most primitive instincts" or "primitive drives" quite frequently, usually implying things like fear, hostility, violence, and so on. It strikes me that this might be a little mis-leading, as if our feelings are divided between the primitive (bad) and the advanced (good). But I actually think that our basic drives and impulses include many that would be categorized by most people as "good" - things like the instinct for compassion, for wisdom, knowledge, co-operation, and so on. And many of the drives we categorize as "bad" - the capacity for violence, fear, and so on, are actually necessary to our survival. They're only "bad" if we let them run the show; if we, rather than controlling them, are controlled by them, as I think I got into a little when talking about Eternals #10. To belabour the obvious, if we react automatically to every frustration, every conflict with violence or hostility, this is obviously not a good thing. But in certain circumstances (admittedly very rare in contemporary society) we might need that capacity for violence in order to defend ourselves or someone else. We certainly need the capacity for fear if we are to survive long, even in the modern world, but a person ruled by fears is considered neurotic at the very least. Less obvious, perhaps, is the idea that we shouldn't be ruled by our "good" instincts either; if we react exclusivelywith compassion to everyone we meet, for example, we might well be taken advantage of by unscrupulous people; we often need the "bad" instinct of suspicion to protect ourselves from this kind of situation. The point is of course that all these drives are useful - otherwise evolution would never have left us with them; but they are most useful when we understand and acknowledge them, when we guide, rather than are guided by, them.
The other point that came to mind after re-reading the last post was that one of the things I dislike most about contemporary stories is that they tend to reinforce what I think is the self-serving illusion of power and control we think our technology has given us over external reality. I think it was in Promethea, maybe elsewhere as well, that Alan Moore called his superheroes "science-heroes," a telling phrase IMO. Many if not most of them have been given pseudo-scientific "origins" for a good reason: they are not only power-fantasies in the sense that they enable individual readers to vicariously experience emotions of triumph, indomitability, moral righteousness, and so on; I think they are also representatives of this very dangerous illusion that science has given us complete control over our external reality - the universe. This is one of the reasons mythology never works well in the superhero genre, Since the gods are basically symbols for the reality in which we exist, in all its mystery and all its cold indifference to human values; and since we are in denial that such mysteries exist, or that we are frightened by the thought of an indifferent universe; for all these reasons, I think, we often see stories in which gods or god-like beings are introduced and then defeated or lectured or otherwise "put in their place", physically or verbally, by our heroic representatives (Superman, Batman, the FF, etc, etc). Which leads to stories that are little more than sterile exercises in wish-fulfillment, no matter what good intentions the writer might have started out with. One of the things that makes the Eternals series unique is that it did go beyond all that, it did force us to face up to some unpleasant, even frightening ideas concerning human existence. It didn't just slap us on the back and tell us how great we are.
Sir Tim Drake
04-29-2005, 08:31 PM
The other point that came to mind after re-reading the last post was that one of the things I dislike most about contemporary stories is that they tend to reinforce what I think is the self-serving illusion of power and control we think our technology has given us over external reality. I think it was in Promethea, maybe elsewhere as well, that Alan Moore called his superheroes "science-heroes," a telling phrase IMO. Many if not most of them have been given pseudo-scientific "origins" for a good reason: they are not only power-fantasies in the sense that they enable individual readers to vicariously experience emotions of triumph, indomitability, moral righteousness, and so on; I think they are also representatives of this very dangerous illusion that science has given us complete control over our external reality - the universe.
Jack B. Quick is interesting in this context. His stories suggest that if science does give us total control over the universe, then that control is actually a very dangerous and scary thing, and does not come with any sort of moral compass.
Sir Tim Drake said:
Jack B. Quick is interesting in this context. His stories suggest that if science does give us total control over the universe, then that control is actually a very dangerous and scary thing, and does not come with any sort of moral compass. Interesting. I didn't read many of that anthology series. Of course, we've shown that we can't responsibly handle even the limited degree of power our technology has given us thus far, so anything even approaching absolut power would mean disaster. The thing that makes most superhero stories so distasteful to me is that they usually fantasize that we do have the maturity, or the "moral rectitude," to put in terms of that genre, to handle these vast powers responsibly. Our heroic representatives aren't only able to triumph physically over their enemies, they also triumph morally. Superman has close to absolute power, and is also the nicest guy in the world, and even the most "morally perfect". Batman might be grim and intense, but he has a code against killing and so on. This often means some less popular hero is portrayed as morally weak or suspect, no matter if it fits his/her established character or not, in order to highlight the moral superiority of the representative hero. Orion's mis-characteriztion in Starlin's Cosmic Odyssey comes to mind. Or, to bring it back to the Eternals, Thena's mis-characterization in the 12-issue Eternals series.
T GUy
04-30-2005, 03:59 AM
One of the things that makes the Eternals series unique is that it did go beyond all that, it did force us to face up to some unpleasant, even frightening ideas concerning human existence. It didn't just slap us on the back and tell us how great we are. Not unique: 2001: A Space Odyssey does much the same thing. Possibly to a greater extent - or, it's just occurred to me, through anthropology and history rather than psychology.
T Guy said:
Not unique: 2001: A Space Odyssey does much the same thing. Possibly to a greater extent - or, it's just occurred to me, through anthropology and history rather than psychology. Oh, not unique amongst all artistic media, just mainstream comics. And even then it isn't absolutely unique in this one respect: there have been everal other series and stories that don't function primarily as wish-fulfillments. Steve Gerber, Alan Moore, ... there have been lots of exceptions. So, yeah, that was an overstatement. I do think that the contemporary superhero scene tends to lean very heavily in the wish-fulfillment or power-fantasy direction, though. And I do think the Eternals were unique, but not just because of this one aspect all by itself.
I should also correct a mis-statement I made here: "The point is of course that all these drives are useful - otherwise evolution would never have left us with them;" The way evoltuion actually works, of course, means that we could be left with 'hard-wired' characteristics, physical or mental/emotional that may have been useful at some point in our evolutionary history but are not so any longer. Some people might argue that the capacity for violent agression is an example, or at least might become one in the distant future. But I think that many of these negative instincts can be useful, even necessary, as long as we develop our awareness of them and don't allow them to control our behaviour (including mental/emotional behaviour).
And while I'm at it, I might as well clarify this phrase: "Thena's mis-characterization in the 12-issue Eternals series." I meant the 12-issue series done a few years after Kirby's original was cancelled, I forget who the writer was (Peter Gillis?). And Thena's mis-characterization there might not be a good example for the point I was making above anyway, since she wasn't being degraded in relation to a representative human hero, but rather in relation to Ikaris, who was being transformed into a typical Marvel 'leading-man' or heroic male protagonist. The denigration of Thena's character had more to do with Marvel's attitude towards female characters in general, and a lack of appreciation or understanding of Thena and the Eternals in particular.
#13, “The Astronauts" is a 1-issue story which plays with some of the basic ideas underlying the seris in I think a pretty clever way. The Astronauts of the title come in three sets: you guessed it, Eternal, Human, & Deviant.
The Deviants are sending up a suicide mission, sending a ship that is basically a huge bomb up to the orbiting Celestial vessel, intending not only to destroy it, but to “scorch vast areas of this planet and rid us of millions of cursed humans,” as Great Tode says. “When it is over, the Deviants shall rise safely from the depths of the sea and wrest control from our shattered cousins.”
The Human expedition is an American probe that wants to merely observe the Celestial ship. Their conversation reflects the awe and fear they experience at the sight of the Celestial space-craft, but their mission is not an aggressive one, at least not directly and not at this moment (we don't know to what use the Americans intend to put this gathered information).
The Eternal expedition is an improvised one on the part of Sprite, who notices the Deviant attack and realises its up to him to do something, since all the other Eternals have been absorbed into the Uni-Mind and have no idea what's going on (the Uni-Mind requires all its faculties for the effort to reach some kind of limited understanding of the Celestials and the problem they present for the earth). Unable to find anyone else, he finally goes to the Forgotten One, the only other Eternal not participating in the Uni-Mind ritual. He has been exiled by Zuras from the other Eternals to a “neglected sector” of Olympia: “Zuras banished you for your pride! Your will to meddle in human affairs,” Spite says, “But I call upon you for your strength ... and for one unselfish universal act.” The Forgotten One agrees and Sprite creates a protective space-suit (one of Kirby's more attractive costume designs, incidentally) and a spaceship out of the molecules of their surroundings.
So we have three space-ships on their way to the orbiting Celestial vessel: Eternal, Human, and Deviant.The Deviants bent on destruction, the Humans on observation (for now, at least), and the Eternal on stopping the Deviants.
Cosmic eyes watch the approach of the ships from earth. A cosmic mind quickly discerns the missions of the astronauts. The Celstial is faced with a simple problem: The crews are on the wrong ships ... The One Above All, who commands the Fourth the Fourth Host, is also the wielder of justice ... And in his blazing eyes, the solution has already formed ...
The solution? As the caption has already hinted, the Celestials simply transfer the crews: the Deviants find themselves materializing in the Human space-shuttle; the Humans fade away and suddenly re-appear in the Eternal space-craft; and the Forgotten One is teleported to the Deviant ship, which he proceeds to wreck, exploding it before it reaches the Celestials. The Humans, once they realise that the Eternal ship responds to mere thought, have no trouble bringing it back to earth for a safe landing. The Deviants, though, are unable to master the controls of the Human space-shuttle and end up crashing it, destroying the shuttle and bringing about their own deaths in the process. The Forgotten One? Unconscious,
he drifts free of the flaming wreckage, until his injured body is drawn into the giant Celestial ship. There it rests ... unable to function ...smashed by an ordeal of indescribable limits. Thus, when the hand of The One Above All reaches for him, his form is like a flea in its shadow. However, he is a flea proven worthy of the gods!
We have here a nicely succinct presentation of several ideas we've already talked about: the crews are on the wrong ships because the Deviants (hostility, aggression, etc) cannot be left in control of the huge bomb they've built. That is, such enormous destructive power cannot be remitted to the control of unthinking, irrational impulses of hostility and aggression. This dangerous destructive potential must be controlled by the most rational, evolved mental faculties, so the Eternal Forgotten One is transported to the Deviant ship. The Human mission is slightly ambivalent, but appears to be mainly peaceful: the Human crew is transported to the Eternal ship, where their rational tendancies are encouraged and developed – they learn to control the ship by thought alone. The Deviants, on the humans' space shuttle, lose control, bringing about its destruction and their own. That is, if the ego relinquishes control of the psyche to its most irrational drives, the result is the destruction of the psyche – including, of course, those irrational instincts.
Tell me again that Kirby wasn't a good writer.
That's the main idea of this issue, but there are a few interesting side-lights as well. The Forgotten One is one of Kirby's best creations, even though he never appeared in another issue (of any series: don't talk to me about Marvel's so-called 'Gilgamesh') The fact that the the Eternals or “higher faculities” are here represented by a rebel and an exile is thought-provoking, especially since the story contrasts this with the brain-washed Deviant suicide bombers and the militarised, rank-conscious American pilots (check the issue for dialogue). Is Kirby making a statement about individuality and conformism here? This might be a line of thought to follow up later on. Although his blindness evokes the Judaeo-Christain Samson, he seems to be a possible stand in for any number of mythical heroes who helped rid the earth of monsters and dangers. But his exile for meddling in human affairs does bring Prometheus to mind as well, although his meddling was of a different sort than the Titan's. Anyway, the story's ending, with the limp form of the Forgotten One lying on the deck of the Celestial ship, covered by the shadow of the great hand of the One Above All, is one of the more memorable of the series, and I think Kirby might have had more to say about this character had the series carried on longer than it did.
Eternals Annual #1 (“and only,” they should have added) is the last of what I think of as the classic Eternals. I don't recall sure exactly when it came out in realtion to the regular issues, but it was sometime in the midst of #'s 14 – 19, which I think fall short of the standard set by the first 13 issues. The Annual, though, is right up there with the very best stories, not least because it stars three of the best and most important characters: Thena, Karkas, & the Reject. For that reason, this'll be the last one I'll talk about in some depth.
Since this is a double-length issue, I'll try something differnt: I'll intersperse my comments as the story goes along. So all the indented passages are either driect quotes from the book, or bracketed descriptions of the action; and my comments will not be indented.
For countless centuries, great Zuras, prime Eternal of Olympia, has watched the course of human progress lurch continuously between triumph and disaster ... Held from plunging over the brink by the hidden hands of the Eternals, humanity is ow in a new era ... when its ancient friends stand revealed - - and its enemies, the Deviants, still busily sow the seeds of catastrophe ... like - - “The Time Killers”.
[“The Time Killers” opens with Thena and Zuras watching a view-screen on which they see a pre-historic, ape-like “Neanderthal' wreaking havoc in the middles of “a modern human city.” Zuras informs Thena that this is only one of several similar incidents that he's observed, in which “throwbacks” from the past appear in the present and react violently to their surroundings. He also tells her that he's found out that the Deviants are to blame, and specifically a Deviant named “Zakka the Tool-Master.” ]
Zuras: This evil Deviant has survived the centuries - - and the outrage against his madness for tampering with things forbidden! I fear for this planet if these incidents spread. The hand of Zakka must be stopped – his talents contained.
Thena: Say no more, Father. I've got the means to accomplish this task.
Soon after ...
Reject: We were summoned for an audience, Thena?
Karkas: It is an honour to stand in the presence of Great Zuras.
Thena: Come in, you two.
Zuras: So ... these are the lovable monsters you imported from the Deviant domain.
Karkas: Hold your temper, Sweet Prince. Great Zuras merely jests.
Reject: Jests are few in a life spent at killing in the arena. Am I a monster for having been bred to this sport? I'd hate you if I didn't hate the Deviants more.
Thena: Do you understand now, father?
Zuras: Yes. We shall ferret out Zakka - - with his own kind.
Reject: Hah! I thought so! You need us for some unmentionable design task of devious design. You pious Eternals are as eager to employ the asassin as our former master!
Karkas: For shame, sire! To use us as pawns in some shoddy venture does ill to your noble image.
Thena: Oh, be still, Karkas. To measuer Great Zuras with a Deviant yardstick is ignorance at its ultimate.
Zuras: I give you no order to kill! You two shall carry out this task in a manner which your own natures dictate!
The opening lines give us a picture of human history as being continually on the brink of disaster but for the intervention of the Eternals. In other words, the more enlightened parts of our minds are what have saved us from falling into the chaos of ungoverned instincts. The appearance of violent and primitive “throwbacks” in a modern city signifies the eruption of the primtive, the instinctive, the unconscious, wresting control of the psyche from the ego. And of course, as we'd expect, these appearances are due to Deviant activity. But “Tool-Master” may seem an odd name for a Deviant representative of uncontrolled impulses. And what does Zuras mean when he talks about Zakka's “madness for tampering with things forbidden.” And his statement, “ I fear for this planet if these incidents spread, “ seems a bit of an overreaction to a few cavemen running around scaring people. What's going on here?
I think the clue is in those very words, and in Zakka's nature as a scientific/engineering genius. Remember, those dwellers beneath the floor of the ocean, the Deviants, even though representing the unconscious in the series, have never been portrayed as technologically backwards. On the contrary, their technology is far more advanced than that of the humans. Why, if they represent violent, primitive instinct, didn't Kirby write them as scientifically
primitive? Well, for one thing, at the narrative level, they wouldn't have been very credible adversaries for humans, let alone the Eternals. But equally importantly, at the symbolic level, their technological advancement allows Kirby to make the point that this sort of technological development does not necessarily imply a commensurate psychic development. It's a comment, of course, on us, humanity as the point it has reached right now, where we have a tremendously capable technology, but are mentally still at the level of the stone age. And that, of course, is one way of stating the basic problem posed by the Eternals series: how do we break out of this dangerous predicament? Zuras says, “The hand of Zakka must be stopped – his talents contained.” In other words, the immediate menace must first be dealt with (“The hand of Zakka must be stopped”), and then the course of technological evolution and the uses to which its discoveries are put must be kept under some kind of rational control (“his talents contained”). Zakka standing for the completely un restrained development and use of technology, and of course the Eternals for the guiding hand of rationality and wisdom.
Thena volunteers for the task, saying she has the means to accomplish it: i.e. The Reject and Karkas. They are suspicious of Zuras's motives: is he just using them to keep his hands clean? Is he sending them out as assassins, so that he can say he didn't order any deaths, the two Deviant Rejects did it because that's their nature? But we know he's already said (to Thena, in private) that he only wants Zakka “stopped” and “contained”, not killed. And now he makes it clear to the two Deviants: “I give you no order to kill! You two shall carry out this task in a manner which your own natures dictate!” So this task will be a test and an opportunity for the trio, especially for the two Deviants. Will they will be able to work as a team? Will the Reject be able to control his lethal violence or will he revert to the “Killing-Machine” of the arena?
[There follows a scene introducing Zakka, who looks like an elderly human and is staying in an apartment in “a modest quarter of a large American city.” He gets rid if his landlady, and then uses the “time-beams” of his movie- camera-like machine to extract a warrior from the Dark Ages to the present:]
Zakka: I shall fish him from his own time and haul him into this century. Fear and anger will do the rest!
[The warrior materializes in the street below and begins lashing out with his mace:]
Warrior: Od's blood! I've been snatched to a demon's place !!
Passer-by: Help! Help! We'll all be killed!
Here, Kirby tells us explicitly that Zakka's technology is eliciting the most basic, primitive emotional reactions from the psyche: “Fear and anger drive the ancient warrior to a murderous fury, “ and “In the cause of Deviant power I shall plunge the humans into a frenzy of terror!” In other words, once again, Deviant activity is provoking these basic impulses to break through and take control of the psyche. And this time, it's due to the mis-use of an advanced technology, one that has been designed for no other reason than to wreak destruction and elicit fear.
[We next see the Reject, Karkas (looking like a tall, red-headed man), and Thena entering a large hotel in the same city:]
Reject: Human habitats have too many corners. Places favourable to a lurking enemy.
Karkas: They instill no anxieties in me Reject. I rather like this trip.
Thena: All is illusion, Karkas. Including your image. We are here for serious work.
Bell-hop: This way, gentlemen.
Karkas: We shall await your orders, Thena.
Thena (leaving room): It is not I who may call you to action - - but the dangers that brought us here. Be ever alert to them.
[We see the Reject whipping all the sheets & pillow from the bed]
Reject: Proud and haughty Thena! Does she take me for a drooling novice?
Bell-hop: W – what's he doing!?
Karkas: Looking for enemies in his bed.
Reject: Sneer if you like ... but I plan to be alive when this mad task is done!
Karkas: Live you may, killer. But it shall always be with a fear of shadows.
Bell-hop: Er ... if you gentlemen need anything else I'll be glad to help.
Karkas: He waits for the monetary tipwhich Thena spoke of.
Reject: We owe the humans nothing! They should be in our debt for coming to their aid.
[He lifts the bell-hop off the floor with one hand and thrusts him towards Karkas]
Reject: Hahahah! Take a good look at your rescuers, human!
Karkas: Stop it, Reject! He knows nothing of our mission. Stop it, you ugly fool!
Reject: He'll soon see who the monster is, Karkas - - as I draw him closer to you! Look at him, human! Use you native instinct instead of your eyes. Look deeply - - at the real horror.
Thena (re-appearing): Reject! Put an end to this!
[We see the Bell-hop running off as fast as he can]
Thena: You are wise to obey my command. You'd be wiser to control your own animal instincts.
Reject: I'm not here to play games, Thena.
Thena: Neither am I. But the humans have been subjected to Zakka's terror. They need not suffer from yours.
Reject: I am what I am! A thing taught only to make its kill - - and prepare for the next. It is strength, not kindness, which sustains me.
Thena: When the fates fashioned both you and Karkas, they foolishly put the wrong hearts in each body. You are the true monster, Reject.
Reject: If I am pleasant to gaze upon, I hide nothing from the world. I do not choose to be an illusion - - like Karkas.
Thena: Hold! We've spent too much time in idle talk. The instrument given to me by great Zuras signals the presence of a mind alien to this age.
Reject: Here ... in this hotel? Your father judged well where the blow would fall.
This scene highlights the Reject's cruel, sadistic streak: the arena doesn not breed compassion or consideration for others. He needlessly scares the poor bell-hop, instead of just giving the poor guy his tip. At this stage – and remember, this is their first real adventure since he and Karkas were brought up to Olympia - he still requires a firm hand from his foster-mother, Thena, to keep his worst impulses from getting out of hand. Karkas, on the other hand, may be adjusting too well. He's relaxed as if on vacation. I think we can read between the lines that he's pleased to be transformed into an unfrightening human form. The panel where the Reject searches his bed for potential enemies is funny: Kirby could do humour well at times, although it wasn't always his strong point. Generally, the interplay among these three characters is so good, their personalities and inter-relationships so well contructed, that I'm surprised Marvel never tried to do anything more with them.
[The scene switches to the floor above, where we see a cloaked figure stalking an oblivious woman as she walks along the corridor].
Ripper: She's a perfect choice for Jack the Ripper. This metropolis is teeming with her type. I shall be very busy here.
[Just as he's about to strike from behind with his cane/sword/dagger, the Reject grabs his arm]
Reject: Stay that weapon!
Thena: Stop him, Reject!
Woman: Good lord, he was going to kill me!
[They struggle briefly, but - ] the Reject strikes out with deadly accuracy ... [and we see the Ripper knocked down]
Reject: I did not put killing power behind that blow, you dog. It would have ended this fight too soon for my purpose. You shall die slowly - - and hard!
[The battle continues as the Ripper takes a vicious slash at the Reject, who dodges the attack and throws the Ripper to the floor, relieving him of his weapon in the process. He holds the Ripper down with one hand, while the other, hold the dagger, is raised to deliver the final blow]
Reject: Scream, Ripper! Join the chorus of your victims! Feel the terror before dying!
Ripper: No! NO!
Thena: Don't kill him, Reject! We came only to find Zakka – not to revel in the death of his pawns.
Reject: I am not an Eternal, Thena! Restraint is not my way.
As the sword plunges home, its target vanishes in a flash of light ...
Reject: H – he's gone! ... I've been cheated!
Thena: By the pattern of time, Reject.
Reject: So ... he couldn't last in this age. Time's pattern does not allow the permanent transition from one era to another.
Thena: However, Zakka's subjects do stay here long enough to inflict damage and panic.
Once again, we see the viciousness and savagery of the Reject. He's a scary character, not in an 'I-wish-I-could-be-that-cool-and-intimidating' way (as with, e.g., Batman, Wolverine, et al), but in a 'this-guy-is-dangerous-and-I-wouldn't-want-to-be-anywhere-near-him' kind of way. Rather than taking out the Ripper right away, as the story makes clear he could easily have done, he wants to play with him, to drive hiome to his opponent the hopelessness of the struggle, to make him feel the terror of his impending death. Hen he's pissed when his victim disappears before he can deliver the killing stroke. Of course, you could argue that the Ripper deserves it, since he's a cruel predator of helpless victims himself. And the story never lets us forget that this savagery isn't entirely the Reject's fault: he had to develop that way or he would never have survived his life in the combat arena. But it never lets him off the hook either: he's going to have to learn to take responsibility for his actions, to control his savagery, if he's to earn the trust and respect of his new peers.
[The police appear, having been brought to the scene by the Ripper's escaped victim, who presumably fled as soon as she became aware of her danger. Thena and the Reject deflect their questions by saying that the attacker just vanished. Later, after the police have left, they search the corridors for Zakka, using the readings on Thena's 'psycho-band' to home in on his presence. The scene switches to Karkas, who is talking to a small toddler who has momentarily escaped his babysitter, who soon appears in search of him. While they're talking, two more ancient warriors materialize in the corridor behind the human pair. Karkas pulls the child and the girl into his room and steps outside to face the warriors.]
Karkas locks his charges in the room and lunges into the corridor.
Warrior 1: What is this place!?
Warrior 2: Speak or die!
Karkas: We'll see who speaks - - and who dies!
The warriors from the past are quick to attack. They close with Karkas.
Warrior 1: This one is stronger than he seems! Beware! He has the grip of a behemoth!
Karkas (thinking): I mustn't waste any time. There are innocent lives at stake in this hotel.
Warrior 2: Taste the axe of Attila!
[We see Karkas reverts to his real form:] Karkas, the Deviant mutate, is merciless in battle. The rage that seizes him in the arena now crushes his adversaries ... [He hurls them to the street below, but they vanish before hitting the pavement.]
Karkas turns once again toward his room, only to confront the terrified witnesses to his image ...
Babysitter: Oh my God! It's horrible! Horrible!
Human 1: Run! Let's get out of here!
The reaction of the onlookers is a blow to Karkas. He is trapped ina fearsome body which drives all to see it to flee in panic ... [full page shot of panic-stricken crowd fleeing Karkas in all directions as he tries to reason with them:]
Human 2: It's happened again! This hotel is besieged by dangerous freaks!
Karkas: Wait. Wait! You needn't fear me! I am not here to cause harm! I have come to prevent the very plague of visitations which threaten your city!
Human 3: EEEE! Call the police!
Human 4: This way! There's safety on the upper floors!
The cooridor falls silent as the last of the fear-driven crowd fades from sight ...
Karkas: Fools ... you poor fools.
[Zakka appears from behind a corner]
Zakka: Abandoning your Deviant heritage has cost you dearly, Karkas. Here you are a shark among minnows.
Karkas: Aren't you a bit frightened of facing me at such close quarters?
Zakka: I was hoping that this demonstration of affection by your human friends would give you pause to wonder at the worth of your task.
Karkas: If you think to to win me to your side – to become another of your creatures in this reign of terror – best think again! Bringing Chaos to the humans can wreck this planet – for all of us!
Zakka: Bah! In the end they'll blow themselves up! Lemuria will rise to power! Our rulers will be served!
Karkas; I've forsaken that family of toads! It's time they were brought to heel ... as well as their fawning servitors.
Zakka: Then we are at odds, you and I! Too bad Karkas. A giant Mutate could have spread more havoc than a thousand killers from time. In this age you were the pick of the crop.
[Zakka pulls out a gun and blasts away at Karkas until he falls to the floor, down but not out]
Zakka: Fall, curse you, fall! If I can't use you, I'll destroy you!
Karkas: You'll ... fail ... Zakka .. Thena ...the Eternal ... and the reject ... are ... still ... on ... your ... trail.
Zakka: They'll find you dying, mutate! As for me ... I shall be casting my net in the proper waters this time – where the Deviants bred the most powerful muttate of a bygone age! He will make a fit substitute for you!
Here we have a contrasting scene with Karkas, who shows a natural kindliness and gentleness towards the todler and his babysitter, in contrast to the Reject's manhandling of the bell-hop. But Karkas still acquits himself well when he does have to use force, showing that he is already a much more rounded persona than the Reject. His reaction to the humans who flee panic-stricken at the sight of his true form is totally characteristic and shows again why he's one of the most likeable characters Kirby ever created. It's a pitiful scene, the reader feels sorry for this monster when he recieies such a poor return for saving their lives, but Karkas himself doesn't give in to self-pity or resentment. He tries to reason with them; then after they've left, rather than feeling sorry for himself or angry at their ingratitude, he expresses pity for them. And when Zakka tries to exploit the situation, he doesn't fall for it.
Zakka's statement, “Bah! In the end they'll blow themselves up! Lemuria will rise to power!” re-states the situation of the series for us once again: if the Deviants have their way (i.e. the unconscious takes over the psyche), the humans will “blow themselves up - destroy themselves with their technology (self-destruction of the ego). And Karkas's line, “ Bringing Chaos to the humans can wreck this planet – for all of us!” reminds us that, if the psyche (planet) is destroyed, that's the end for all of its aspects, however we want to describe them - unconscious, ego, & superego, or whatever.
[Thena and the Reject follow the trail of Zakka's 'psycho-reading' to find Karkas fallen and the Tool-master departed.]
Reject: Your mechanism is accurate, milady. A battle has already taken place.
Thena: It must have been a fierce encounter. Karkas lies wounded and robbed of his human mask.
Karkas: I overcame the killers, Thena, but Zakka was as swift and lethal as a viper.
Thena: So ... the old fiend came out of hiding, did he? We'll soon track him down again. But first, Karkas, I shall restore the image you must wear among the humans. Your condition should improve rapidly. My powers also include the replacement of shattered cells. Rest a moment and then rise to your feet.
Karkas: M-my strength is slowly returning ...
Thena: Karkas is recovering, Reject. He will need your help.
Reject: He needs lessons in dealing with a treacherous enemy.
Karkas: Do as Thena commands. We have work to do.
[the Reject helps lift Karkas, supporting him with the injured mutate's arm over his shoulder]
Karkas: If we don't stop that Deviant wizard now, his reign of terror will increase tenfold.
Reject: We'll find him ... if I ever manage to lift you.
[But the psycho-band has registered Zakka's disappearance from ther hotel. He's invented a 'dimension-transit' device that allpws him to travel through walls at he speed of light. We see him entering his room across the city, and then a few panles where he vaunts his genius to himself]
Here we may be seeing a small progression in the relationship between the Reject and Karkas. If we compare it with the similar scene in #12, this time the Reject, while still harsh in his assessment of Karkas's innocence, does help him up and supports him. He doesn't laugh or jeer at his fellow reject's wounds and just stand bylooking at him, as he did in the earlier scene. It's a step forward, a small one, but still an advance.
Zakka: Is there a secret left that is not within my grasp? Is there a task beyond reach of my skills? ... I shall focus my [Time Projector] on an area where death and destruction can be inficted with massive effect. ...The inner circuits shall penetrate a century in ancient Deviant history. From the distant past I shall draw one whose name still inspires fear among our people. Tutinax, the Mountain-Mover! This city awaits you!
[We see a flash of light and something smashes into Zakka , throwing him across the room]
Zakka: Demons of the Pits! That violent backlash was totally unexpected! I-it shouldn't have happened. My calculations were infallible. Zakka doesn't make errors.
The Deviant is startled by a muffled sound. Something huge moves across his field of vision ...Zakka's vitals churn miserably with the truth. What should have been projected across the city has instead arrived in his own apartment ... A nightmare shadow closes in upon him ... [Zakka crawls towards his 'Dimension-Harness' hoping to use it to escape, but just as he's about to reach it, a huge hand clamps his ankle.]
Here we once again have the theme of the dangers of unguided scientific work being brought to the reader's attention. Zakka's words, “Is there a secret left that is not within my grasp? Is there a task beyond reach of my skills?” show a hubris completely lacking in any awareness of the greater repercussions of his actions, beyond his ultimate of inducing humanity to destroy itself (i.e. Causing the ego to self-destruct, and thus allow the unconscious free reign). And of course, those words are followed by the event of his own demise as the consequence of his own mis-use of his own scientific work. The message is that (1) uncontrolled use of technology and science could unleash forces that will destroy us, and (2) the destruction of the ego only to allow unconscious drives to take over the psyche could lead to the destruction of the psyche itself, including the unconscious. (There is another sense in which the destruction of the ego can have more positive associations, but that isn't the one referred to here; Imight get inot this idea down the road, when I talk about what the future of the series might have held).
[The scene switches to the corridor outside, where the other tenants hear a scream. As they crowd around the door of 'Mister Zachary's apartment, the Reject, Thena and Karkas appear on the scene, having tracked Zakka down with Thena's psycho-band again. They're puzzled by the crowd and by the sudden disappearance of Zakka's mind-waves from the psycho-band.]
Tenant: Isn't there a man with nerve enough to break down that door!?
Reject: You've found a volunteer, Miss. I seek the occupcant of that very apartment.
[We then see the interior of the room as the Reject breaks the door open; Zakka is hanging head down from the ceiling, dead and the place is completely wrecked. Then we see the same great hand that grabbed Zakka grasp the Rejects' arm and he'd pulled into the room.]
Reject: Alert! Mutate!!
Thena: Great Zuras!
Karkas: Stand aside, Thena!
[Karkas heads into the room]
Thena (to the crowd of tenants): Clear this building at once!
[tenants take off]
Thena gasps as she enters the apartment.
Thena: Of all the dangers loosed upon us, this is indeed the vilest of all. Tutinax is among us!
[Full page shot of Tutinax, huge, ogre-like, but humanoid, pinning the Reject down with one hand and effortlessly swinging Karkas off the ground with the other]
Karkas: Quell your murderous rage, mutate! We two are of your kind! This is not the combat arena! You've left it far behind!
Tutinax: Thena tell me, squealing vermin! How was I snatched from the throat of a worthy foe – to this accursed place!?
Reject: Thena! G- go back!
Thena (thinking): He's in a killing frenzy. I must help them!
[We see a flash of light from Thena's hands]
Tutinax: An Eternal!
Thena: Release them, mutate! I can use the bolts of Zuras!
[Tutinax crashes through the wall of the building.]
Tutinax (thinking): This is a place of madness! These creatures are not what they seem to be.
Thena: Breathe easier, my heroes! The Mountain-Mover has been frightened off. But woe to this town when his rage returns.
Karkas: Woe to all who feel his grip! He is a beast with the power of a god.
Reject: A curse upon Zakka and his meddling with the forces of time.
Thena: The scoundrel has paid for his evil deeds. This last one was his costliest. We have but to stop Tutinax to eliminate any further threat to the city.
Reject: Be rational, milady! Each of us knows the mutate's history. To defeat him would be a triumph beyond our combined talents. ... Yet ... to do battle with thi totan from the past would be an honour for any veteran of the combat arena! I would try, Milady! I would test my skills in such an epic fight!
Thena: I never doubted your decision, Reject. Let this stature be yours! I shall restore your true image, Master-Killer!
[A flash of light, and the Reject stands arrayed in his silver battle-armour (another very simple, but well-designed Kirby outfit)]
Karkas: He looks most attractive - - for dying!
Reject: The reaper is ever present in the arena. Should he beckon me. I shall go to him in proper attire. Thank you, Milady.
[the Reject looks upwards and raises his fists above his head]
Reject: Yea, though I be as the wasp to a giant that walks the earth, my wit and speed and deadly sting shall magnify in power - - when the Furies course in my blood!
Thena (thinking): Poor Reject ... he has the death-wish!
Thena: come then! I shall levitate us to the task which lies ahead!
Karkas: Lead us, Thena!
[They take to the air.]
At the beginning of this scene, I think we are seeing yet another small progression in the Reject's behaviour. His politeness to the human bystanders wouldn't be noticeable in anyone else – it's just the everyday courtesy with which you'd deal with any stranger – but for him, it's an improvement, contrasting noticeably with his earlier treatment of the bell-hop. Part of this change could be due to the simple fact that he's more business-like now that they're close to their target, as opposed to the earlier scene when they had just arrived in the hotel, but that's just the overt explanation. At another level, I think the change is a sign of another small step forward in the Reject's development.
We also see that the Reject isn't shy about taking the initiative in an action situation, even if Thena is at hand, and that Thena doesn't have any problem with about letting him do so. She doesn't need to control his every action, stifling all independence: she remonstrates with him only when there's a reason: when he's in danger of giving in to his savage impulses, or when she has a task for him that will help teach him something he needs to learn (e.g. making him help Karkas). And the same goes for Karkas: she doesn't protest when he tells her to stand aside and charges into the room after the Reject. Thena is the leader of the trio, but she isn't an insecure one: she allows her two wards to take the initiative if the situation calls for it.
But there's another level to this, as well: notice Thena's words when she enters the room after them and sees Karkas and the Reject being man-handled by Tutinax: “He's in a killing frenzy. I must help them!” This indicates that she had another purpose in allowing the reject and Karkas to enter the room ahead of her. This entire mission is a test and a task for them, an opportunity for them to grow, to prove their abilities, to develop their own bonds with each other as foster-brothers. Thus, it is only when she sees them in need of immediate assistance that she steps in and scares Tutinax off with the bolts of Zuras.
To speculate a little about the future, I think this would have been the general pattern of the trio's subsequent adventures, had the series continued. And as they progressed, the Reject and Karkas would probably have become more and more independent, with Thena stepping in less and less frequently. Perhaps, eventually, she would have been sending them out on entire missions on their own, intervening only in very special cases (which could have been used for great dramatic effect: if Thena showed up, you'd know something even more serious than usual was going on). And even then, she wouldn't be a deus ex machina, coming in to blast out the enemy with sheer power; she'd probably come in with a piece of advice, or information, or something else that would give her two wards the chance they need to get the job done. But they'd still be the protagonists, since the whole sub-plot is about their development and, hopefully, their eventual acceptance by the rest of the Eternals and the Humans. But I was going to save this kind of speculation until after I finished going through the issues, so I'd better stop right here.
The little exchange between the Reject and Thena towards the end of the scene is very interesting. First of all, the Reject's doubts about their ability to cope with Tutinax show that he isn't just a deluded maniac who thinks he can defeat anything. He's realistic about the force confronting them. But in the end, he can't refrain from the challenge: this display of warrior spirit is much more impressive than the usual bravado we see in superhero comics, where the hero never doubts himself, never has to overcome any mental barriers to engage with his adversary, no matter what the odds.
But, as so often, there's more to this exchange: when the Reject raises his arms and vows to make his power felt against Tutinax, Thena thinks “Poor Reject ... he has the death-wish.” This hearkens back to Freud, who posited a Death-instinct which he contrasted with the Eros, or Life-instinct. These two concepts encompassed a far wider range of impulses and behaviour than their nmaes might suggest to some. The death-instinct was traced bak to a basic impulse to revert to a pre-organic state of matter, for cells to dis-integrate from one another, for all the complex inter-molecular relationships that are necessary for life to be dissolved and matter revert to its inorganic state of non-life, or death. But in the evolved organism – i.e. animals, including human beings – the death instinct expressed itself in all aggressive and destructive urges, not just self-destruction. All urges to commit violence against the other, to control, dominate, or possess the other, including cases when those urges are disguised as 'love'. This doesn't begin to scratch the surface of Freud's concept, but for the purposes of this scene, I just wanted to indicate how much depth is hidden beneath Thena's seemingly simple observation. That the Reject has the death-wish does signify a self-destructive urge in one sense; at another level, he's always had the death instinct, we might even say he's defined by it, since his life in the combat arena has made him a “Killing-Machine.” And at another level, we all have it - it's an inescapable aspect of the human condition, one which the symbolic representation of the Reject allows us to see in a new light.
Anyway, Thena shows her understanding of, and basic respect for, the Reject's nature by creating his battle -armour for him. “I shall restore your true image, Master-Killer,” she says, with no censure implied. She does not take the self-righteous attitude that the Reject is just basically and completely wrong and bad, that he will have to become something entirely other than what he is if he is to succeed in his development. There is a time and a place, for the harsh talents of the Reject, and this is it. Interestingly, she does not restore Karkas to his true image: he remains in human form throughout the remainder of the book, even when facing Tutinax, indicating, perhaps, that this is his true self, at the symbolic level (just as, in the New Gods, Orion's true self, in some ways, is the 'false' image created for him by Mother-box).
[The scene switches to Karkas, toppling a water-tower from the top of a building into the crowd below.]
Tutinax: Begone, you frightened ants! Scatter to the safety of your stone hives! And seek o mercy when the shadow of Tutinax falls across your path! Where I tread - - I claim dominion!
[He sees the the Reject and Karkas, with Thena between and behind them, land in front of him. The Reject challenges him to combat, and Karkas joins in.]
Tutinax: Did I really hear those words?
Reject: The ages haven't changed our kind. As it was inyour day - - we've been bred and born to die.
Tutinax: You've been bred to madness! Look upon me and know that death is certain. I need nothing more than my thumb to defeat you both.
Reject: Use what you wish, behemoth, but FIGHT!
Karkas: Er – yes - - fight!
Tutinax: By the gods of battle! I grant your wish!
Karkas: Th-then so be it! Let destiny decide!
Tutinax: Silence, fool! Your courage is not as promising as the dark one's eagerness!
Reject (one fist raised in slaute): Then I am chosen! In the tradition of the ancient code of Deviant combat, I slaute you!
Tutinax (making the same gesture): I slaute you, deadly microbe!
Karkas: You ignore me in vain. My force will be felt. Thena - - you mustn't interfere.
Thena (now in her golden, Eternal outfit): Only to the extent of choosing the proper arena. Stand fast - - all of you!
Reject: What are you up to, Eternal?
A bright flash follows the gesture of Thena's hand. The group vanishes from the rooftop, and then ... [we see a condemned building and its run-down surroundings]
Thena: This is where you shall fight! Since the humans have no part in this, their presence should be avoided.
Karkas: Wisely done, Thena! What happens here will not effect them.
Reject: Cease your chatter! Give me space to manoeuver.
Thena: It's yours, Reject.
I emphasised that, when the trio (I should think up a cool name for them ... 'The T'riffic T'rio' ? 'The Thrilling Three'? 'The Fantastic Four-Minus-One'?) - anyway, when they confront Tutinax again, the Reject and Karkas are in the van and Thena is quite far behind them, because it highlights once again one of the things I pointed out in the preceding scene: this is the Reject's and Karkas's fight. Thena will stay in the background throughout, because, in the process of psychic individuation and development we talked about earlier (in issues 8 - 10), she has already taken her big step; now it's the turn of the Reject and Karkas to begin theirs. And I think their story would have followed this pattern for some time, with the two foster-brothers having more adventures, becoming more independent as, for example, the Reject gained better control of his savage impulses, and as they developed more respect for one another and so on. Thena's role, in addition to helending them aid, counsel, and guidance when necessary, would have have been to confront her fellow Eternals and win acceptance for her two foster-sons in Olympia; and all these things would be connected, of course. I'm sure she might have had other adventures as well, but I'm just tlaking about this one sub-plot right now.
Tellingly, Thena does decide the setting for the combat, though, teleporting all of them, including Tutinax to an abandoned, derelict site, desolate of human presence. I'm not sure if we should attempt to read anything into this: she makes the point that this combat must take place away from humans, since “they have no part in this.” Can we see here a message that this conflict is being brought down to the level of the unconscious, protecting the ego, or consciousness, from its violent effects? Perhaps. The desolate setting and the language seem to supprt this view, as well as the fact that all the participants are Deviants (Thena explicitly agreeing not to “interfere”).
(Note: had to cut this into two posts because it was too long).
[Tutinax displays his immense power by lifting a bulldozer with one hand into a throwing position, He fires it at the reject who dives under it, then swiftly grabs a length of steel pipe and smashes it with tremendous force into Tutinax. It has no effect.]
Tutinax: Mightier weapons than that have shattered on my vitals. Yield, flea - - and I shall grant you - - life!
Reject: Save your mercy for lesser foes!
Tutinax: Must I move a mountain to give you a true vision of the odds you face?
Reject: I shall not yield though you move this city!
Tutinax: Then you shall see it done! Such epic madness deserves to end in epic style!
Reject (thinking): He's lifting the entire building from its foundation!
Thena: Incredible! Tutinax is the most powerful animal that ever lived!
Karkas: It's sheer ohysical force at its ultimate! He can destroy this city!
Reject: And us as well. Leave, Thena! Levitate and flee!
Karkas: Doom is upon us, Reject!
Tutinax (lifting entire building over his head): Let this be both grave and monument! Die!
[the Reject & Karkas run towards Tutinax]
Reject: Then you die with us, mutate! Rush him, Karkas! If we ram him in unison, there's a chance we can topple him!
Karkas: The building will crush us - - but the threat to others will be gone!
Thena (in the background): Hold!
[A flash of light knocks the reject and Karkas off their feet just as they reach their target]
Karkas: T-Tutinax! He's vanished!
Thena: Naturally. It was only a matter of - - time.
Reject: The building has lowered and settled! You knew this would happen, Thena! That's why you stayed – to levitate this structure back upon its foundation!
Thena: Tutinax was fading. It registered on my psycho-band.
Karkas: Thus hedeparted like those before him.
Reject (to Karkas): We've been played for fools! Used by a female as pawns in a delaying tactic!
Karkas: No! Had this lasted a moment longer, our deaths would have been real enough!
Thena: Well said, Karkas.
Reject: We've done our work, Thena - - but what has this done for us?
Thena: It's helped us much more than the humans.
Karkas: How?
[The trio walk away from the viewer, Thena in the middle with her arms around the two Deviants.]
Thena: This experience has given us true comradeship! Each of us was willing to scarifice for the other!
Karkas: Bah!
Reject: Nonsense!
[end]
When the combat starts, Tutinax is revealed as the personification of sheer brute physical force. As such, I think he can be seen as representing physical force in all its manifestations, including, since he has been brought here via Zakka's technology, those created by science. The Reject's strength, speed, and skill looks to be insufficient to defeat this tremendous being, who is simply on another scale of physical power – the highest scale possible, for the purposes of this particular story. When this becomes clear, all the rukes of the combat arena are forgotten, and the Reject tells Karkas to join him in one last desperate attempt to stop Tutinax, event the cost of their own lives. But Tutinax disappears just at the crucial moment. Thena was waiting for this to happen and gently levitates the building back in place, leaving it as it was before.
(By the way, since houses and buildings often function in stories as symbols of the self or the psyche, some people might think that maybe Tutinax's lifting the building off its foundation could be seen as a pre-figurement of what would have occurred if he had not been stopped: the un-mooring of the self and its eventual destruction. If this view had anything to it, the Reject's and Karkas's last-ditch effort at self-sacrifice might not have had the desired effect, even had it been technically successful, since the building would still have been destroyed if. And Thena's levitating the building back in place would symbolise the restoration of the psyche to its previous state. I'm not too attached to this reading, however. It looks like a case of reaching a little too hard for hidden meanings. I include the idea here just to show that we have to be careful, when trying to read the symbolism on a story, not to read forced meanings into every single minor story detail.)
More interesting, and on a firmer basis, is the conclusion, in which Thena tells her two wards that this adventure has “ helped us much more than the humans .” Just as she says, it has helped them come together; the Reject has developed, his attitude towards Karkas and humans has changed; he's taken the first small steps towards seeing other beings can be treated with respect and that his force can be used discriminately.
Karkas hasn't developed as much, but he was starting from a position far ahead of his foster-brother's. The most significant change for Karkas is his human shape and its continuation even during the stressful combat scene at the end, in contrast to he earlier scene in which he reverted back to his monstrous for when fighting the two ancient warriors. The turning point may have been the 'temptation' scene with Zakka, in which Karkas, still in montrous form, rejects Zakka's suggettion to return to the Deviant side. And immediately afterwards, Thena heals him and restores his human image, which he then retains for the rest of the book.
As for Thena herself, she still plays a very prominent and important role in the story. But, relative to her two wards, she keeps to the background when the conflict becomes physical and when it reaches its climax. She intervenes only once, and even then with the minimum use of her force, just enough to scare Tutinax off for the moment and give the reject and Karkas time to recover. That the forces at her personal disposal are considerable to say the least is indicated very subtly by Kirby: remember that, in the fianl climactic moment, Tutinax's unbelievable physical strength is manifested by his lifting an entire building off its foundations. But, after he disappears, Thena gently lowers the same edifice back down to its foundations, using her power of levitation. So it would seem that Thena's mental power is in fact on the same scale as Tutinax's physical power. The story glides over this little fact, and nothing draws the reader's attention to its implications, but those implications are there: Thena is a being of great power. And it's a credit to the subtlety of Kirby's story-telling and characterisation that this fact is always implied, but hardly ever displayed overtly, much less in a the crude manner so typical of most superhero comics, in which characters are usually built up by knocking other characters down, sometimes literally.
I love the last panel, and Karkas's and the Reject's reaction to Thena's assertion. As I said somewhere above, these three work so well together as characters, their individual personas are so well conceived and their -inter-relationships so well constructed, I still think the right writer could do something very special with them, if there was just someone out there who understood what they were all about. But of course, that would imply an understanding of what the Eternals were about, and every single post-Kirby use of the concept has demonstrated otherwise. I guess this is a little unfair: the view of the Eternals concept espoused in this thread isn't the only one possible, and I wouldn't claim that it is. But every single non-Kirby Eternals story has struck me as a betrayal of the original series and its characters – and I felt this way long before I ever started trying to analyse the book's hidden themes and symbols.
I just read over the last few posts I made, and I notice that they're pretty badly written. Maybe I'll try to go back and edit them later on. Anyway, my apologies. I ask all readers not to dismiss the ideas contained in those posts, however badly they might be expressed.
#14, “Ikaris and the Cosmic-Powered Hulk,” marks, I think, a turning point in the series. This story and its successors appear to me to retain much of the thematic basis I think was delineated in the earlier issues, but their use of that basis is much less impressive. The link between theme and plot is sometimes tenuous, the stories less well-constructed, and the characterization more conventional. It looks to me as if Kirby felt some pressure to make the series more accessible to Marvel fans who wanted it to fit in with the regular MU. If this was the case, his first response was simultaneously a concession to this pressure, and a thumbing of the nose towards it, since his story incorporates a well-known Marvel character, the Hulk, but the actual Hulk never appears – just a facsimile built by two human college students, a device that must have frustrated a lot of those fans when they actually read the story.
Anyway, this Hulk simulacrum becomes imbued with some excess “cosmic force” that is somehow brought back to earth by the Eternal's Uni-Mind when it returns from its attempt to commune with the Celestials. It goes on a rampage, behaving much as the real Hulk does, except it's completely mindless and savage, not just child-like. Ikaris and Makarri try to fight it, but it's cosmic-powered strength is too powerful for them and finally Zuras has to intervene and neutralise it by draining it of the cosmic energy. This very simple story takes a whole 2 and a half issues to be related to the reader, most of it taken up by some very pedestrian chase and fight scenes, all pretty typical of about a million other Marvel stories before and since.
One incident of interest to the continuing thematic development of the series is the end of the Uni-Mind ritual and its outcome: the message, as one Eternal says, is that “All men must become as one,” which fits in with what we've seen earlier in the series. This theme was first articulated by Thena in # 6, I think it was. But behind Thena's statement was a much deeper understanding of the problem and a much more disturbing concept: Eternals, Humans, and Deviants must all unite in some sense if all three are to face the Celestials. The Uni-Mind has ignored the Deviants, none of them were involved in the ritual, and I don't think they are included in the anonymous Eternal's statement. On the other hand, this is as it must be at this stage: the Deviants aren't ready for such a step – they are still engaged in dangerous, hostile actions against the Celestials and Humans (e.g. #13 and the Annual) – and neither are the Eternals, let alone the Humans. The process of reaching a point where the Deviants, Eternals and Humans could unite would IMO have been one of the basic plot-lines of the rest of the series, had it continued. I think that this process would have been played out at the story level in large part by the adventures of the Reject and Karkas in the Human and Eternal world. But there would probably have been occaisional glimpses of the machinations of Great Tode and Kro in Lemuria. Perhaps a successful future stage of development, far down the road, might have been symbolised by the participation of the Reject and Karkas, at Thena's invitation, in another Uni-Mind ritual, possibly over the protests of many Eternals. Perhaps, an even later and more successful step might have been represented by a Deviant revolution overthrowing Great Tode, maybe led by an enlightened Kro. But this is very speculative and I'm getting ahead of myself once again.
I think we can see that the Hulk, as a mindless, violent, rage-driven ogre, represents the same violent unconscious drives often symbolised by the Deviants. So the struggle of Ikaris and Makarri against this Hulk-robot is the same we've seen earlier in the series on a thematic level: the struggle of the higher centres of cosnsciosness to suppress these violent instincts. However, the story doesn't really do anything interesting with idea, and it all seems to me a little dead. Maybe we can read something into the fact that it's powered by the Uni-Mind: a comment that the absence of the Deviants from this ritual and from its message of unity renders it more dangerous than helpful? Maybe, but it doesn't hold together all that well, IMO. But I admit being put off by the story's dullness and the presence of the regular MU in the form of the Hulk to the extent that I'm just not all that motivated to look more deeply behind this narrative. Maybe someone else would like to take a shot at analysing this one, later on. I tend to think that Kirby was, perhaps unconsciously, a little dis-heartened at having to make even this back-handed concession to Marvel convention, and that consequently his creative energies weren't at their height in this story.
The next story, #16 – 17 is much more interesting. In fact, I think its conception shows a temporary return to form for the series, but then it strangely fails at the climax. In the first pages of #16, Zuras drains the Hulk automaton of its cosmic power (“I shall now relieve him of the mystery he was not meant to bear”), and it flees in fear, trailing the escaping energy behind him. Ikaris and Makarri follow it to make sure it does no further harm. Zuras, Sersi, Margo and Sam Holden are interviewed by a tv crew. Zuras takes the opportunity to state his Uni-Mind inspired message: “ Humans and Eternals must herein be as one.” He goes on to give some specifics about what this will mean, e.g. “We intend to exchange knowledge important to our mutual welfare.” (Note that Zuras doesn't mention the Deviants; probably wisely, in that the humans more than likely are still not feeling too friendly after their first encounter with them, and the Deviants themselves aren't fully ready yet to interact constructively with them).
Meanwhile, Ikaris and Makarri have tracked the Hulk-robot to a deserted area where they see signs of activity beneath the surface of the earth: and we should all know what that means, by now. Yup: Deviants – and/or, of course, the unconscious.
The scene switches back to Zuras, who ignores the orders of the human authorities present to put out a fire started by the cosmic energy from the Hulk-robot (the fire-fighters tell him he's off-limits). “You will learn to respect the power of Zuras,” he tells them, and proceeds to quench the vast fire with a raised hand, leaving “a motionless crowd stand[ing] in stunned silence.” When the fire-fighters express their awe, he simply replies, “That trick took a thousand years of practice.” (This or a similar phrase is repeated several times throughout the series when various Eternals perform some amazing mental feat; it's one of the details that subtly distinguishes the Eternals from the vast majority of Marvel heroes, and I think has been overlooked by too many subsequent writers. The fact that the Eternals aren't just bor with all their amazing powers, that they have to develop them, sometimes over hundreds of years or more or intense discipline, is crucial to the entire concept, IMO.)
But the extinguished fire has revealed “a huge, dark, gaping pit,” which seems to disturb Zuras for some unknown reason:
Zuras: The ancient fears that lie buried in this old heart have been mightily stirred here.
Sersi: Can the pit be the source of your fears? It is of awesome size and depth.
Zuras: Heed me child: though you've seen ages pass, you are very young within the Eternal context. The shaft below was formed long before you came into being.
Sersi: Please Sire, if there is somehting I should know about this place, I ask but to share the knowledge.
Zuras: Later, Sersi. This demands my personal attention. I must descend into the pit.
He does so, and we see Zuras plummet down into the depths of the cavern. When he hits bottom, he thinks to himself: “My worst fears have been realised. The crypt is here as I expected – and torn open by the explosion. Woe shall be the lot of all if the tomb has not withstood the force exerted here.” But he does find the tomb empty.: “Dromedan, the Brain-Snatcher, is free to plague this century!” However, the creature has left behind “the helmet which imprisoned the enormous assault of his mind.” “In my hands this can still be the weapon to contain him. When the Deviant Empire was at its height, they bred Dromedan to destroy the Eternals. Instead, they had to entomb him ... for fear of their own safety.”
He searches for Dromedan, and comes upon Ikaris and Makarri fighting each other. Their speech shows that they are being forced to do so against their will. Zuras intervenes, showing himself, and Ikaris and Makarri are freed from the mental assault. “Stand back,” Zuras says, “I must face Dromedan alone.” as the Deviant mutate focuses his attention on the Prime Eternal. “He remembers me now. He remembers tormenting me with wind and flame. Turning me to stone was another move that failed. My lone resistance taught him fear. Come out Dromedan! Your nemesis awaits you once more! This time you shall wear the neutraliser helmet for eternity – and plague the world no more.” But the last panel shows Dromedan in the ascendent, standing tall and thtreatening before the crouching Zuras. “I'll do with the world as I please. Your day is over! Kneel, Zuras!” Kirby makes him very impressive and dramatic, visually: he's a tall, massive figure, wrapped in cloth bindings like an ancient Egyptian mummy.
Issue #17,continues on from this cliff-hanger.
In an ancient crypt unearthed by exploding gas lines beneath a modern city's streets, the mighty powers of the foremost Eternals are under hammering attack. Their opponent once made the world tremble. If he wins he may do it again. Unless the wrath of a female can stop him! Read “Sersi the terrible.”
Dromedan: Kneel Zuras! Bow to the will of your master.
First Makarri, then Ikaris attack, only to be stopped easily by Dromedan, who takes control of their minds, though they strain to resist. Then Zuras melts the stone upon which Dromedan stands, so that he sinks to his neck, and then hardens it, immobilising him.
Dromedan: DO you think to imprison me? You should have tried to destroy me instead.
Zuras: I am not a destroyer, Dromedan. I must make you wear this helmet.
Dromedan: Long ago you forced it upon me by trickery. But it shall never happen again.
Zuras: The ground has hardened. It holds you fast. Yield to what must be done. This will bring you peace – and give final security to all that you threaten.
But when he tries to put the helmet on Dromedan's head, the mutate attacks effectively, and Zuras drops the helmet. Then he makes Makarri free him from the hardened ground. “Well done, Eternal. Your mind is a useful tool indeed,” Dromedan triumphs. But just as it seems he's won, and all three are subdued, Sersi appears, attacking Dromedan with a serpent she's created out of the surrounding molecules. It morphs into another monster, keeping Dromedan occupied so that the other three Eternals can recover somewhat. However, they all tell her to flee, and generally don't seem to think much of her staying around to help. Dromedan, after destroying her monstrous constructs, shows her his power, and the four Eternals draw back to confer. Sersi says she has a plan. “Speak swiftly, girl,” Zuras says.
Next we see Sersi confront the mutate: Dromedan! We cannot admit defeat – since you cannot fully control us. “ “ Dromedan then threatens to destroy their minds, since they won't serve him. But Sersi confuses him by creating multiple replicas of Ikaris, so that he doesn't know where to strike first. They assault him physically, but after a struggle he defeats them all, including the last and strongest one, which he disintegrates with a mind blast. Zuras asks him once more to submit to the helmet; Dromedan has had enough: “Not even the edge of doom can keep you Eternals from your love of wisdom. Then take it with you – into the realm of micro-particles!”
But just as he gets ready to blast them all, Ikaris appears and disintegrates Dromedan with his eye-beams. They flee the aftermath of the explosion:
Ikaris: That mind-monster must be made of stuff from the pits. His death may bring these caverns down upon us.
...
Zuras: This is a sorry day. Dromedan was unique. Had he worn the helmet it would have isolated his powes amd kept him from madness.
Sersi: Great Zuras could have unleashed his mighty bolts, but his compassion was greater than his fear.
Ikaris: Polar Eternals lack this all-consuming faith. We kill when we must. I say that with due respect for the wisdom of Great Zuras.[/indent]
I think we can see that Zuras's descent into the pit is, as so often, a descent into the unconscious. Dromedan himself represents not only the usual, vague “primitive and violent instincts” but something more specific. His mental power is a counterpart to that of the Eternals themselves, who are known for their incredible mental development. The story itself displays Dromedan's power most often by having him control various Eternals. I thin that Dromedan represents the temptation for the Eternals to attempt to use their incredible abilities in a selfish way, for example to control humans instead of guiding them. In this regard, he may well be the ultimate Eternal enemy.
The seriousness of this temptation he represents may help explain the sentence of exile Zuras imposed on the Forgotten One, which might have struck some readers as a little harsh. Even though the Forgotten One interfered in human affairs in a benevolent way, Zuras might have seen this as the first step on a dangerous path that might have led to Eternals taking too much control over human affairs, stunting their development. This view also fits in with the neutraliser helmet, which would represent the self-control every Eternal must exert over him/her-self.
I find intriguing signs that the story may have originally been conceived with a further level of meaning: the dialogue seems to emphasise that this is a personal struggle between Zuras and Dromedan. I wonder if Zuras's descent might have been a descent into his personal unconscious, and that Dromedan might be his personal shadow figure, his personal unconscious desire to exert his enormous power as a tyrant – perhaps a benevolent one, but still a tyrant. A little less specifically, Dromedan might be seen as Zuras's shadow-figure, in the Jungian sense: that part of his unconscious that contains, not so much his repressed desires, but all his tendancies to act in ways that might not seem becoming to conventional morality. This would include much that we would agree should be repressed – violent and manipulative impulses – but also some modes of thought and behaviour that could be useful if controlled. Zuras's desire to stop Dromedan by means of the helmet (i.e. Control) rather than killing him would fit in with this view as well. A lot of the dialogue and narration in #16 and some of #17 tends to point in this direction, but the latter issue seems to veer off this course in other ways.
I admit that I can't much sense of the story's denouement. If the climax matched the title, I'd be inclined to think that Sersi represnts, just for this story, Zuras's anima, and that her defeat of Dromedan was intended to signify the importance of that element of the psyche – that Zuras, an iconic patriarchal figure, was not able to control his psyche's shadow-figure without coming to terms with his anima, the feminine part of this very masculine psyche. And there is dialogue in #16 that might support this, when Sersi asks Zuras to let her participate in the exploration of the cavern (i.e. The anima advises the ego that it needs her help in dealing with the unconscious). The emphasis on Sersi's feminine gender would fit in with all this, as well as the fact that Zuras accepts her advice in the end.
But the method of defeating Dromedan does not inspire any insights from me and I can't relate it to the thematic set-up I've described for the story's first half in issue #16. Sersi's plan, the multiple images of Ikaris, and the fact that Dromedan is destroyed by Ikaris, in spite of the story's title (Sersi the terrible) – none of these elements seem to me to fit well with rest of the story or the themes that appear to me to underly it. I'm tempted to conclude that Ikaris's prominence in the climax is another concession to convention. Kirby may have felt, perhaps sub-consciously, that Marvel or its readers wanted and expected a “normal” book with a recognizable heroic male lead. If so, his attempt to meet these expectations appear to me to have rendered the end of the story somewhat incompatible with the rest of it.
Oops; I meant to put this next paragraph at the end of the last post, but here it is anyway:
It's certainly true that Ikaris is more prominent in issues 14 – 19 than elsewhere in the series, and that these issues mark the only time in the series in which the same character plays the leading role in consecutive stories (not in consecutive issues, of course).
The next, and final, story of the series, in #18 – 19, is a very average, conventional Marvel tale, which could have almost been taken from the last days of Kirby's Thor run or the imitative Thor stories that followed it for years afterwards. The last story of Kirby's run, as I stated above, is a pretty mediocre story in most ways, at least by the high standards Kirby set in the first 13 issues and the Annual. It does contain some of excellent artwork, though. And I think there is at least one important line of dialogue for the thematic underpinnings of the Eternals concept.
#17 ends with a scene switch to the cousin if Ikaris, who is bullying a small, older Eternal named Sigmar to divulge the secret of an awseomely powerful weapon Druig wishes to find. We find out in #18 that it's a Celestial weapon that can apparently destroy even individual Celestials themselves. And we get a very impressive double-page spread of a Celestial of the Second Host, in which a war between the Celestials took place, being struck by its rays and “converted to pure energy” as Sigmar says. Sigmar, a scientist type, had wanted to study the weapon, but valkin, leader of the Polar Eternals, took it from him and apparently entrusted the secret of its location to Ikaris.
We then see Ikaris flying along, taking film of a Celestial for the American government with whom the Eternals are working. 'The welfare of humans is bound to our own,' Zuras says to the American govt rep, “We do share this palnet together.” Zuras goes on to advise restraint and caution in dealing with the Celestials, and to avoid conflict. Then we get this exchange:
Human: What are they upt to, Zuras? Who or what are the Celestials?
Zuras: I think that they will tell us – when they are ready.
Human: Your statement carries ominous echoes. It smacks of something omnipotent and unapproachable.
Zuras: The Space Gods are not omnipotent. Merely ... older.
I think these last words of Zuras are significant, but I'll get back to them later.
Anyway, the rest of the story isn't that interesting to me. It isn't bad, by any means, but compareed to the first 13 issues and the Annual it's pretty disappointing. As I said earlier, it could have been a Thor story from the last issues of Kirby's run or one the many imitators who followed. Druig is very reminiscent of Loki, even visually. He captures Thor, I mean Ikaris, and tortures him until the location of the weapon actualy appears on Ikaris's forehead. “The Pyramid of the Winds” is where it is. Druig leaves Ikaris and takes off for the place. Ikaris escapes and makes Sigmar accompany him because he has knowledge of the Pyramid. They get there and Ikaris and Druig fight (Druig has the power of fire). Finally, Ikaris has no choice but tiouse his disintrgrator eye beams, since Druig is about to fire the weapon. But the beams hit the weapon itself, releasing the “devouring Celestial force” and disintegrating Druig. Ikaris and Sigmar escape the Pyramid, fleeing ahead of the destructive force which is consuming the atoms of the mountain in which the pyramid was hidden. Thye fear it may spread and destroy everything, but the Celestial appears, gesture his enormous hand and releases a “counterforce” which neutarlises the destructive energy until it fades away, leaving a “scarred and molten landscape”.
Sigmar: Stranger and stranger are the varied ways of fate. That terrible force has fallen prey to its intended victim.
Ikaris: The great Celestial had the answer to the problem all the time. Druig could never have succeeded with his plan. The Space Gods remain an unconquerable enigma – mysterious and majestic among the creatures of the cosmos.
Thus, like his fellows, the celestial moves on ... perhaps dwelling on a time when men will have gained the stature to face them eye to eye ... and know all!
The End?
There are a few developments in the larger Eternals narrative here – we see an example of co-operation between the Eternals and the humans, for example. We also get a somewhat startling insight into the Celestials: they've waged war among themselves in the past. Perhaps this shouldn't come as a huge surpirse, since they've always been presented in anthropomorphic guise – they look like enormous men, travle in ships, and carry out recognisably man-like activities like exploration. But it still seems to undermine the picture of incomprehensibility we've been presented in the rest of the series.
I think it ties in with Zuras's later statement, “The Space Gods are not omnipotent. Merely ... older.” The point here is that the Space Gods are symbols of the unknown, of the incomprehensibility of space and time, the universe, reality itself, and so on; but no matter how unapproachable they may seem to the human mind at this stage of its development, mankind should not fall victim to despair. Rather, their incomprehensibility should be an incentive for us to change our ways and strive to develop our understanding, to continue to evolve so that,,in some far distant, unforseeable future, we might finally be able to confront the mystery they represent and even to comprehend it, i.e. to grasp the fundamental nature of reality.
Another way of looking at this problem might be the following: the fear and terror experienced by the psyche, when faced with the abyss, with the inhuman external reality in which it exists – is largely a feature of the Western tradition. Western culture has achieved incredible results with its analytic method of breaking problems down into components and of dividing reality into subject and object, allowing us (the subject) to place everything else at a distance and examine it. But this success has a cost and that cost is the terror we unconsciously feel in the face of a an inhuman universe in which we exist as something separate and apart. We've lost the capacity to see ourselves as an integral part of that universe, hence our division of everything into subject vs object, self vs other, internal vs external reality. But this is only one way of experienceing reality. Eastern traditions, especially Taoism and some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, do not have this problem, because at some very basic level they see these dichotomies as literallyself-constructed (i.e. built up by the self) illusions. The very idea of the self is an illusion in some sense. This concept is not entirely alien to Western culture: it was alive and well in its very beginnings in “primitive” forms such as animism and pantheism; it re-emerged in the thought of various heretics and mystics down through the centuries; and in the last few decades it has reappeared from another direction, with thinkers such as Derrida and Lacan calling into question the assumptions that underly much of Western thought, pointing out the binary oppositions we construct to make sense of things, even questioning the concept of the self.
This does not mean that the dread of an inhuman universe can be dismissed. It's a part of our heritage, and denying it's existence is just another form of escape, of denial and repression. To 'overcome' it (to use a typically Western metaphor of struggle and victory) we first have to acknowledge its presence, to try to come to some sort of understanding of its nature. It is so intimately connected with the very basis of Western thought, of the way we perceive the world, that 'switching over' to another mode of perception is not something that can be accomplished just by wanting to do so. Even in the Eastern traditions, where the concept of the self as an illusion, of the one-ness of 'internal' and 'external' reality, has never disappeared, achieving a true experienceof that concept requires intense discipline and training.
Anyway, Zuras's statement, IMO, is a way of indicating that at some basic level, the human mind (I mean human in the general sense, not humanas opposed to Eternal and Deviant) is capable of evolving or developing to a point at which the Celestials will no longer be the unfathomable enigmas they are at present. Note that this does not mean that some Marvel Universe genius should be able to 'figure out' a piece of their technology and use it to 'defeat' them. Or, worse yet, avert destruction by giving them a lecture about ethics and morality. For long into the foreseeable future, the Celestials must remain a mystery, just as the nature of reality itself is. The point of hinting that this doesn't have to remain the case forever is to encourage us to continue trying to develop, not to give us the comforting illusion that we're already there or soon will be. That's the difference between the Eternals and the vast majority of superhero stories, right up to the present moment.
I think that I've now said most of what I want to say about the Eternals. I do intend to go on to speculate about how the series might have continued, in light of the reading I've given it in this thread; actually, I've already done that from time to time in various earlier posts. But maybe it might be a good time to ask for reactions to what I've presented so far. Any comments on the thematic scheme I've outlined for the series? Any criticisms? I know it's hard to comment if you haven't read the series for a long time (or at all), but maybe there are some obvious flaws I'm missing. Or supporting evidence I've missed. Am I wrong to dismiss the last several issues? Am I being too hard on Ikaris, too enthusiastic about Thena, the Reject and Karkas? Any comments or criticisms will be appreciated. This is all a matter of opinion, and the reading I've presented here is by no means the only one possible.
MilkManX
02-07-2006, 09:47 AM
Amazon.com now has a listing for the Kirby complete Eternals HC.
ETERNALS HC (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0785122052/ref=wl_it_dp/002-9600228-7039253?%5Fencoding=UTF8&colid=1E4O17O1DXSH8&coliid=I22H1H9TXORUBP&v=glance&n=283155)
I will definatley be grabbing this one.
InfoBroker
02-07-2006, 10:11 AM
Eternals Annual #1 (“and only,” they should have added) is the last of what I think of as the classic Eternals. I don't recall exactly when it came out in realtion to the regular issues, but it was sometime in the midst of #'s 14 – 19...
My memory banks link it to issue #17 (yes that late in the run). I'm not sure how I would link it via continuity without consulting my issues (which are not availible to me at the moment). As I recall or at least mentally noted at the time of the first read in the summer of 1977, there is some Thena timeline material that should give it a pretty good area of placement.
-jb the summer of Star Wars ib-
MilkManX
02-07-2006, 10:43 AM
Why the Hulk?
Was this Marvel staff pushing this on Jack for sales or did Jack really have this idea in mind.
I always wondered how it was set. In the Marvel Universe or in my opinion it was set in our world and we were given referances to Marvel as it was...a bunch of comics.
scratchie
02-07-2006, 11:39 AM
Amazon.com now has a listing for the Kirby complete Eternals HC.
ETERNALS HC (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0785122052/ref=wl_it_dp/002-9600228-7039253?%5Fencoding=UTF8&colid=1E4O17O1DXSH8&coliid=I22H1H9TXORUBP&v=glance&n=283155)
I will definatley be grabbing this one.Ouch! 75 bucks! That's more than it costs to get a complete set of the comics on Ebay.
Still, it is tempting.
I've been discovering lately that hardcovers hold some distinct practical advantages over trade paperbacks when it comes to certain artists. It's nice to be able to open up those double-page splashes nice and wide without worrying about breaking the spine.
InfoBroker
02-07-2006, 11:52 AM
Why the Hulk? Was this Marvel staff pushing this on Jack for sales or did Jack really have this idea in mind.
I have some vague memories of post-Eternals interviews with Archie Goodwin and/or Jim Shooter that refer to some editorial suggestions to have guest-stars and some form of continuity integration to the Marvel Universe.
The Cosmic Powered Hulk was a manifestation of those discussions.
The structure of the Eternals' storyline just doesn't work within the boundaries of a Single Universe For All Super-Types platform. Jack's instincts and creative sensibilities understood that.
This wasn't a bad creative compromise, but the story wasn't as powerful as the earlier issues.
-jb the deviant ib-
Cei-U!
02-07-2006, 11:54 AM
My memory banks link it to issue #17 (yes that late in the run). I'm not sure how I would link it via continuity without consulting my issues (which are not availible to me at the moment). As I recall or at least mentally noted at the time of the first read in the summer of 1977, there is some Thena timeline material that should give it a pretty good area of placement.
I agree. Both release dates and story flow place the Annual between #16 and 17.
Cei-U!
I summon my notes!
InfoBroker
02-07-2006, 12:02 PM
Thanks Kurt. My wandering mental synapses still have some spark in them after all this time. Reassuring to know that. As I've mentioned before, Eternals Annual #1 was such a powerful story and Karkas is one of my many favorite Kirby-Kharacters. That probably explains why there is still some mental glue for its placement within the tapestry of the Eternals tales.
-jb the nueronic ib-
Cei-U!
02-07-2006, 12:16 PM
I've always thought Karkas would make an interesting Avenger and a *perfect* Defender.
Cei-U!
I summon Rush Week!
MilkManX
02-07-2006, 12:20 PM
Damn all this talk of the annual.
I am only missing issue 18 and the annual.
:(
I don't believe Kirby really thought of the MU in the same terms in which most fans, then and now, would think of the question, "Is the Eternals set in the MU?" While I agree with Infobroker that the answer is no, I think Kirby was an intuitive artist who probably saw no contradiction in using some minor MU elements - e.g. SHIELD agents - while discarding the most prominent - all those superheroes who would have been attacking the Celestials had the story really taken place in the MU.
Editorial insistence on moving the Eternals into the MU is yet another example of commercial motivations taking precedence over creative ones. Fans like stories set in the shared universe, therefore this story is set in the shared universe, even though it actually isn't and no longer makes any sense if we insist on making it so. No sense at the narrative level and, much more important, no sense thematically. Other changes intended to force the series into a conventional superhero mold, like more or less making Ikaris the solo star, also work against its original spirit, rendering the final few issues much less interesting than everything up to and including #13 and the Annual.
From the little I've read about it so far, it doesn't appear that Neil Gaiman will be addressing any of these problems in a constructive way. Interviews suggest that he holds the conventional opinion that the Eternals was an interesting concept marred by poor execution, in contrast to the MU which he thinks of as a great artistic success. So we can probably look forward to Gaiman's creative energy being expended on trying to find new ways to fit the Eternals into the MU, perhaps inventing some clever device to explain the glaring narrative inconsistencies, a direction that entirely misses the point, IMO.
Gothos
02-10-2006, 01:48 PM
Berk:
Re: your mention of the Forgotten One's blindness and the possible parallel to Samson--
There's also the Greek myth of a certain hero who is blinded and has to be assisted by a young boy riding on his shoulders. The latter imagery, I believe, is duplicated during Kirby's run on ETERNALS, using Sprite as the boy on the Forgotten One's shoulders.
The Greek hero's name?
Orion.
Berk:
Re: your mention of the Forgotten One's blindness and the possible parallel to Samson--
There's also the Greek myth of a certain hero who is blinded and has to be assisted by a young boy riding on his shoulders. The latter imagery, I believe, is duplicated during Kirby's run on ETERNALS, using Sprite as the boy on the Forgotten One's shoulders.
The Greek hero's name?
Orion.Good catch, I wasn't aware of that story. The Orion of ancient Greek mythology is a confusing figure whose myths seem to be derived from a hodge-podge of different sources. But he did once boast that he would rid the earth of dangerous wild beasts, which would fit in with the hints we are given about the Forgotten One's activities among human-kind. After seeing your post I skimmed through the Orion chapter in Robert Graves's Greek Myths and saw that his sight was restored by Helius, the sun. Now that I think of it, I believe Walt Simonson also had Orion of the New Gods lose his eyes in his solos series a few years ago.
telle
02-11-2006, 01:54 AM
Ouch! 75 bucks! That's more than it costs to get a complete set of the comics on Ebay.
You can always have the original comics bound by a pro for about the same price. It looks like that is what Paul Levitz has done to his collection in a picture I saw from the NY Times interview online.
Very few classic comics series fit in one volume. Kirby's 70s runs fit in this category.
IMHO Karkas is one of the most interesting things Kirby did with the Eternals --a variation on the Thing, in a way, but taking the concept of the monster-hero in a new direction. Monstrous hero, at heart a pacifist and philosopher, who nontheless is fatalistic about his prospects as a Deviant and as a gladiator, using violence almost ironically, as a knowing participant in an action comic book. The two characters, Reject and Karkas are one of the great superhero teams in U.S. comics despite only really starring in one story.
As a sub-plot/pocket universe within the larger Eternals universe, the Thena/Deviant story had the makings of a great epic, a more personal version of the larger Eternals saga and a reflection on our cultural concepts of good and evil.
IMHO Karkas is one of the most interesting things Kirby did with the Eternals --a variation on the Thing, in a way, but taking the concept of the monster-hero in a new direction. Monstrous hero, at heart a pacifist and philosopher, who nontheless is fatalistic about his prospects as a Deviant and as a gladiator, using violence almost ironically, as a knowing participant in an action comic book. The two characters, Reject and Karkas are one of the great superhero teams in U.S. comics despite only really starring in one story.
As a sub-plot/pocket universe within the larger Eternals universe, the Thena/Deviant story had the makings of a great epic, a more personal version of the larger Eternals saga and a reflection on our cultural concepts of good and evil.Yeah. I feel the entire three-issue story in which Thena descends to Lemuria and eventually returns bringing Karkas and the Reject with her to Olympia is the core of the series, and that the further adventures of the three, especially the interaction between the two Deviants on the one hand and the Eternals (and humans) on the other, would have been one of the key elements to the series' future development had it not been cancelled and taken away from Kirby. There's an entire long commentary on all this earlier in the thread if you can find it.
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