How Marvel’s Eternals fit into the Avengers universe, based on comics

2019 Spider-Man is Far From Home brought the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 3 to a close, and the fog lifted on what Marvel planned to do next. There are other earthbound projects. Shang ChiAnd the time-loopy Loki, November’s EternalsMega-franchises make a leap towards the greater cosmic.

It’s a bold move — even for a studio that has previously taken risks on properties like the Guardians of the Galaxy — for two reasons. This is because these characters revolve around a concept that can rewrite all we know about Marvel’s universe. A second reason is that the Eternals, even for those who have been comics readers for a while, are characters that make it easy to ask the question, “Who are they?” You might guess that the answers to this question are rather strange.

Are the Eternals who (or what?) are you?

We need to return to 1970 to find out the date Jack Kirby quit Marvel Comics.

Kirby is a legend creator. He was at Marvel and Timely Comics when he co-created Captain America, Thor and Iron Man. However, Kirby didn’t feel he was being adequately credited for these contributions, one of the reasons he jumped ship to rival publisher DC Comics.

His opening salvo there, beginning in 1970, was the “Fourth World” saga. Kirby created four science-fiction stories and one graphic novel that focused on his mythology of the New Gods. Darkseid, Mister Miracle, and many other characters were introduced in these stories. Justice LeagueDC Universe villain Steppenwolf

Kirby brought with him his Fourth World book preoccupations when he returned to Marvel in 1976. Which is to say that, at first blush, the Eternals are a hell of a lot like the New Gods — another league of superpowered mythical beings, at war with their dark reflection.

Jack Kirby/Marvel Comics

Marvel Universe is sort of born from the Eternals

With The EternalKirby mixed science fiction and mythology to make an origin story that would be applicable across the Marvel Universe or Earth. Millions of years ago, giant beings known as Celestials descended from space and genetically experimented on Earth’s hominid population. This, in the Marvel Universe, is canonically how humans evolved from our ape ancestors — with a helping hand from the gods.

But homo sapiens weren’t the only result of the Celestials’ experiments. They also created the Deviants, misshapen creatures with no genetic stability — each individual looks like they belong to a different species — and Homo immortalisBetter known by the Eternals,

Jack Kirby/Marvel Comics

The Eternals are the winners of this genetic lottery: They’re all in excellent shape, with fantastic hair, and imbued with cosmic power. The Eternals have the potential to shape the world at the molecular level. They also possess super-strength, levitation and telepathy.

The Eternals, as their names suggest, are immortal. This isn’t a quality they were naturally imbued with, though. As with all good superheroes, it’s actually the result of a scientific experiment gone wrong, back in the Eternals’ first home city of Titanos.

Eternals were created in the secret mountains-top cities of their people, and occasionally descend to mix with human descendants. Kirby takes this opportunity to mash up real history and legends and mixes them with the Eternals’ story, referencing the biblical flood and the lost continent of Lemuria, and encounters with Shakespeare and the Incan Empire.

The idea is that the Eternals inspired humans’ earliest conceptions of gods, from the Aztecs’ Quetzalcóatl to basically the entire Greek and Roman pantheon. They live in Olympia and are named after classical mythology. Mercury is now Makkari, Zeus turns into Zuras, and Mercury becomes Makkari. Of course, according to the Eternals, it’s TheirThese names are authentic. It is just human mispronunciation that causes the more well-known names to be less familiar.

Jack Kirby/Marvel Comics

Who are the Eternals, then?

Actual characters The EternalsThey are still relatively unfinished, even though they have been around for four decades. There are many of them, just like other comics covering entire species such as the X-Men and Inhumans. You only need three names to remember.

Ikaris, the original Eternal was introduced and he sits in the superhero archetype as straight-arrow leader. Think Captain America or Superman — the latter especially, given Ikaris flies around in a blue, red and yellow costume, and battles villains with his eyebeams.

It’s worth noting that all Eternals theoretically have the same powers — unity is a big part of the concept, to the extent that any group of them can form a collective consciousness known as the “Uni-Mind” — but since Kirby’s original series there’s been a push to differentiate the way they use those powers. Ikaris is the typical leader archetype character. Unfortunately, she also has a personality.

Jack Kirby/Marvel Comics

Makkari is the Mercury analog. Makkari, like Sonic the Hedgehog, shares the same central motto: He too has to go fast. In Kirby’s original series, that manifested in Makkari being an engineer, constantly inventing new vehicles, but over time, he’s become more of a traditional Flash-style speedster.

The standout character, however, is Sersi. Angelina Jolie is said to be playing this character in the movie. Eternalsfilm. She’s the Circe of Greek myth, best known for transforming Odysseus and his crew into pigs in Homer’s OdysseyMerlin claims that he taught him every trick. Imagine the magic duel sequence. The Sword in the Stone, where two sorcerers constantly change forms — that’s Sersi.

In the present day, she’s also a party animal. Even after the other Eternals retreated to their mountains, Sersi continued to live among humans, just because they’re more fun. She has a low threshold for boredom and a long-standing, highly relatable eagerness to jump Captain America’s bones.

Kirby’s series consistently put Sersi on the sidelines, but since then, of all the Eternals, she’s the one who has left most of a mark on the Marvel universe. She’s had plenty of her own adventures, encompassing time travel and alt-universe boyfriends. To put it another way: She’s the only member of the core EternalsCast who served as Avenger.

Why is it that the Eternals are so obscure?

Even though the Eternals were created by a legend, they never gained traction with their readers. Kirby’s original series was cancelled after 19 issues and an annual, and while the intervening years have seen a few short-lived series and the odd team-up with Thor and the Avengers, they’ve never quite stuck.

Jack Kirby/Marvel Comics

The comic’s main contribution to the wider Marvel universe is probably the Celestials, the massive humanoid space gods who created the Eternals and who returned to Earth in Kirby’s series to judge whether the planet was worthy of being saved from destruction. Celestials were first mentioned in this issue of an earlier year. AvengersThe story ended when the team turned a Celestial body into their headquarters.

This story almost killed all the Eternals. It’s indicative of the characters’ standing in the comics that most of these apparent immortals weren’t even deemed worthy of dying on the page — by the time the Avengers arrived, all but Ikaris were just corpses in the background.

The Problem with Eternals

A little repetition is likely to be inevitable when inventing half of a universe. But it means the Eternals have always struggled to find their place in Marvel’s crowded cosmology.

They weren’t the first time Kirby had mixed sci-fi technology and mythical magic. By the time that the Eternals were created, there had already been a group of Greek gods living in an Olympian mountain, part of the Marvel Universe. These included Zeus, Athena, and Hercules. And they’re not the only secret race of mythologically-named superhumans created by aliens with genetic tampering, either: That also describes the Inhumans, with their Gorgon, Triton, and queen Medusa.

These similarities didn’t go unnoticed at Marvel, and in the years after Kirby’s series ended, editorial attempted to improve the situations by knitting the Eternals closer into the existing fictional fabric. Creators found ways of connecting them to other parts of the Marvel Universe — and that might also give us a clue of how they could fit into the MCU.

A series of “Untold Tales of the Marvel Universe” stories established that the ancient Kree once captured an Eternal, which inspired them to perform their own experiments on humanity, eventually creating the Inhumans. Other stories explained that some Eternals left Earth for other planets, like Alars — brother of Zuras, the Eternals’ all-father figure — who went into self-imposed exile after his brother was chosen as king and eventually landed on Titan. Yes. ThisTitan.

Alars met Thanos, an exiled Eternal from Titan and had two children with him: Eros (also known as Starfox) and Thanos, his elder brother. Thanos from Titan is the Mad Titan. He was born an Eternal. Infinity War made this connection canon in the MCU, with the Red Skull greeting Thanos as “son of Alars.” You might notice that Thanos doesn’t really fit the “human-shaped person with good hair and a tan” description of most Eternals, which is because his recessive “Deviant” gene gave him the appearance of the other Celestial-created race.

Before the film hit the screens, the foundations for Eternals were laid. Although we had only seen one Celestial, our encounter with the Eternals was not uncommon. Guardians of the Galaxy movies: Knowhere, the Collectors’ base of operations, is actually a severed Celestial head floating in space. Marvel’s Guardians proved that even relatively obscure characters could be a blessing. They provide an opportunity to paint a new picture.

However, can Eternals make a comeback and become a niche movie?

If we’re looking to the comics for answers, one potential solution might lie in Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr.’s Eternals. While the 2006 miniseries itself is a little uneven, it takes the promise of the very first Eternals covers — “when gods walk the Earth!” — and reworks it to really focus in on the idea of mythical beings existing in the modern world. Neil Gaiman (author of American Gods The Sandman, to write your comic, you’d better expect a Neil Gaiman story. The story reworks the mythology in a way the movie doesn’t follow, but it found clever ways to cross the characters into Marvel’s heroic world.

And while Marvel didn’t quite run with Eternals on the comics side, this is what Marvel Studios does best. All you have to do is watch the end of the Eternals movie to know there’s a future somewhere in the MCU for these weird, obscure characters.