Eternals #5 - "Only Death is Eternal, Part 5"

[laughing_tree]

With Eternals, I've been given a clear stage and a whole lot of space, and I can go for it, and do what I've always done in my own work, with approaches I've pushed in recent times. To choose one aspect, making mythologies from pre-existing ingredients, giving them scale beyond that of the page. WicDiv is a 6,000 year mythology, about art and artists, comprised of every single great artistic movement in history. DIE is a patchwork living critical essay of the ingredients that went into formation of Dungeons & Dragons. Once & Future turns Arthurian myth into a creature which haunts the British isles. With Eternals, I looked at all these separate events in their history and tries to work out how I can turn these stories into a proper Tolkien-styled mythology, all rise and fall and politics and people. -- Kieron Gillen

Comments

[shakalooloo]

Last panel of scan 4 shows why Ikaris came through the wall - there is clearly no window there anyway.

[sadoeuphemist]

Well not anymore there's not. I think you can see the window frame being torn loose when Ikaris busts through.

[doodleboy]

I wonder if Kieron Gillen will continue to write the Earth goofy after this arc.

I guess I can see why he made that choice in the next issue.

I think this issue is probably the most "sloppy" of this arc. The plan to hunt down Gilgamesh only barely makes sense but is still weird. If helping Thanos is what Gilgamesh is doing, why would he care that Sersi is also helping Thanos. Why aren't any of them questioning the "protect the machine" rule before they all fight each other. It feels like the beat for this issue is "fight Gilgamesh" and the rest was there to justify it post-hoc.

But the next issue more than makes up for this one though.

[timefire]

My guess (based solely on the scan here) is that the assumption behind the plan to hunt down Gilgamesh is less a "Gilgamesh and his crew are all helping Thanos", and more "either there's a point of compromise among Gilgamesh's crew that allow information about their method of interfering with the Machine to leak out to Thanos, or if Thanos has Independently arrived at the same method then knowledge of How the Gilgamesh crew did it will still help us knowing how Thanos did it." They ends the interrogation when it becomes clear Gilgamesh's crew used a completely different method, so it's an investigative deadend. They only accuse Gilgamesh of siding with Thanos to get him angry enough at the suggestion to spill the beans.

[gnarll]

I am massively enjoying this series.

Although Ikaris, powerful as he is, shouldn't be a speedbump to Gilgamesh, far less Thanos. Giglamesh outstrips him vastly in all his strong areas except maybe flight. And Zuras, far more powerful than both was slain with no difficulty by Thanos.

[bruinsfan]

I think Ikaris might be considerably better at the eyebeams as well. But the relevant point may be that Ikaris is nearly as hard to kill as Gilgamesh, and Thanos likely can't just casually zap or will him to death like he did Adam Warlock all those years ago.

The more surprising thing to me is Thanos being able to kill Zuras quickly, as I'd have figured them to be roughly equals.

[gnarll]

I think Thanos is a bit of a freak in therms of power level.

However, we've seen that he worked to enhance his natural power levels both as a youth, and its suspected, every time he gets a cosmic cube or infinity gadget.

My headcanon is that the machine does not care about those upgrades, and just pops him out at whatever stage he was backed up. Which was probably very early in his life.

I don't think Thanos realizes how much hes lost. He used to try to mind control Galactus and control every atom of his body. He is clearly not there any more.

On the eyebeams... well Eternal eyebeams are, what did Cyclops call them...

"Adorable"

They take a minute to work their way up to going through a steel beam, and that weakens the user a lot. I think they are pretty useful against mortals or environmental issues, but they are not proportional to how much punishment Eternals who can go toe to toe with Hulk and Thorr can take.