Saturday, May 17, 2008

The Eternals

Art from The Eternals by Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr (art). (Colors by Matt Hollingsworth.) Now that's a beautiful comic book.

The story is pretty good too. It's Neil Gaiman trying to capture the crazy energy of Jack Kirby, which he does as good as anybody has done yet. I like the book for it's bigger-than-life feel, the beautiful art, the beautiful colors, the beautiful women, and the beautiful giant robot space gods. There are some really amazing designs here.






6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I haven't seen this, but I've never let ignorance stop me from commenting before, so why start now?

It looks visually stunning, but these pictures seem to feature characters standing still. You didn't get a lot of that in Kirby's work. His signature, it seems to me, was characters in chaotic, extreme motion. It does look like these guys may have the gargantuan backdrops down pretty well.

I'm glad to know Kirby is still remembered, and still inspiring young artists.

Bert said...

The art is reminiscent of Jean-Claude Mézières work in the French series Valérian. Beautiful and exotic...

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Ah yes, I remember Valerian. In Denmark they called it "Linda and Valentin".

Mike, you have a good point. In fact, in an interview, Neil himself joked that while he hoped and thought that Jack would have liked it, he would also have commented: "what's with all the people standing around talking!?"

There are some action pages, but I photographed those I thought were visually most interesting.

Anonymous said...

Jack knew how it was done. It's sort of like early TV where they had to give people a lot of action - they didn't want to see people sitting around talking. Seinfeld would not have played well in 1950.

I have avoided anything Eternals not written by Jack. I had the misfortune of reading the conclusion of the story in the pages of Thor in the 80's. I'd love to know how Jack would have ended it.

Anonymous said...

Taking a look at some of these images, I'd say I would trade Jack Kirby action for the pretentious and stilted dialogue of this version. Blah. Fairly well drawn by today's standards.

Anonymous said...

Hm...I don't think that came out right. Well, you know what I mean. :)