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All the Rage: Gaiman talks ETERNALS

"'This is so Kirby.' But you also felt that it was late stage Kirby. It was Jack creating something with bits of things that went back to New Gods and bits of his 2001 comic and also bits of things like his designs for the Lord of Light theme park, that he did (it was designed but never made). All of that was the kind of stuff going in there. It was also a comic book that never seemed to know if it was in the Marvel universe or not. I remember noticing that when I was fifteen or sixteen when I was reading it. “Is this Marvel or isn’t it? Here you have some S.H.I.E.LD. agents and in the next issue it seems to be explicit that Marvel characters only exist in comics.” Then it never really finished, it just sort of died out and half-heartedly incorporated into the Marvel universe but never really seemed to jell.
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I think what makes them special is that they are neither mutants nor superheroes or supervillains. What I think is so interesting is that they are people. They have superpowers and some of them even have costumes, but fundamentally they’ve been undercover a very long time. And they are people who have cool God-like magical powers but they’re still “us,” only they are “us” without assured death in the same way. That’s one of the things I want to address and play around with.
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I am not Jack Kirby. And I am not even going to try and attempt that. What I’m going to try to do is essentially take the universe he created, the characters he created, the ideas that he created and strip them down and put them back together again. As far as I’m concerned, one of the great things about comics is that you’re always allowed to dump the bits you don’t like. Then the deal that comes with that is that the people who come in next are allowed to dump the bits that you did that they don’t like. So I get to try to retrofit the Eternals and see what’s interesting about them from my perspective and to try to create characters that add value to the Marvel Universe… Like going into the playground and leaving some good toys behind.
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What I love is doing stories about people… what attracts me to it is the idea of people with incredibly long life spans and doing these comics about people who are functionally immortal. People for whom time moves very differently and how things have changed over the years. I want to start creating the idea of the Eternals as a group and watch things change over time. Somebody who might have been your best friend two thousand years ago is your bitterest enemy a thousand years on from that. Or the way that a romance that happened ten thousand years ago can affect things happening fifty years ago. The idea of a hidden hand in human history, hidden agendas across human history. I really like the idea of playing with that."

Gaiman's ETERNALS