After looking at The Power Fantasy the other week, I had another look at the ever-dwindling backlog still gathering dust on my shelf. I assumed the issues of Wonder Woman I went through were the oldest thing in the pile, but there’s a series from Kieron Gillen tucked away under some other series that I’ve somehow put off reading for over three years now. So now it’s time to dive into Gillen, Esad Ribić, Guiu Vilanova, Matthew Wilson, and Clayton Cowles’ take on Jack Kirby’s perennially overlooked pantheon, Eternals.

Ikaris is an arrow. Like many Eternals, he has a specialty and his is finding a target. It isn’t that he’s able to track like a hunter, but rather he can hit what needs to be hit. And he does hit very hard. But being able to hit hard can only carry him so far as others—Sprite, Sersi, Kingo, Thena, Druig, etc.—are much more diplomatic or cunning or sneaky. However, when Thanos reappears after being dumped into a black hole and the Machine that keeps Earth intact begins to malfunction, hitting hard will do. But it’s here that the Eternals all learn something about what they are—while they’re immortal due to their ability to resurrect within the Machine, their new life comes at the cost of another life somewhere on Earth. Couple this with their temporary inability to resurrect while the Machine was on the fritz, and Ikraus can no longer be the arrow that breaks against a wall only to come back over and over. There is a cost to consider.

The two-pronged approach to having the Eternals confront mortality is what makes their story work. These characters by design have always occupied the realm of myth and parable. By focusing our attention on Ikarus and his need to protect one person, a kid named Toby Robson, we leave that mythic realm and return to ground-level realism. And we’re grounded further when, after keeping the Machine from imploding, Ikarus sacrifices himself and returns to life to find that Toby’s life was the one taken in exchange for his own. For the first time, the immortals have to consider what it’s like to live a mortal life as they’re programmed to be heroes. Every encounter carries the weight of someone else’s sacrifice and we watch as this new sense of fallibility paints how they interact with the world.

Gillen, Ribić, Vilanova, Wilson, and Cowles show us what can make something immortal so compelling. And in doing that, they show us just what makes comics something we continually come back to read. Even with the perpetual nature of many of these characters, we see the creators reflected in every page as they’re the current personality the characters inhabit. It’s a cycle that never seems to end, but it’s the kind of cycle that we return to over and over because in every mythic tale of someone immortal, there’s always the kernel of humanity at its core. 

Get excited. Get resurrected.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.