Eternals vol. 2: Hail Thanos
Under what conditions could the Eternals be made to utter the dread words of this volume’s subtitle? Perhaps if the Mad Titan became the new Prime Eternal in order to repair his body and destroy the Earth. That’s a bad idea even by Druig’s standards, regardless if he thinks he has the means to control this mighty being. Most of the main cast of this series, however, are too busy getting to know the Deviants and what makes them tick to notice this problem until it’s firing heavy ordinance right in their faces. The good news is that Ikaris, Sprite, Sersi, Kingo, Ajak, and Makkari all know where to go to take care of this. The bad news is that it happens to be the corpse of the Celestial that’s currently serving as Avengers Mountain and there’s still plenty of bad blood between teams Save for the hot tub water between Sersi and Namor.
I thought that throwing writer Kieron Gillen and artist Esad Ribic at the concept of the “Eternals,” along with their profile-raising movie, would be enough to finally deliver a successful series involving them. That turned out not to be the case here as this represents the last proper volume of the series, with Gillen’s final thoughts on the concept and characters coming in the “AXE: Judgment Day” event. So if the Eternals’ quest to find ways to change comes off as significantly abbreviated here, you’ll understand the reason why. There’s also some setup for the event that works well enough here, but feels shoehorned in less gracefully than the last time the writer did this kind of thing for the “Avengers vs. X-Men” event.
This isn’t to say that there’s not a lot to like here. Even if we are getting an abbreviated version of whatever Gillen’s master plan was, it’s all still entertaining on a surface level. Which is to say that scenes like Thanos sparing Thena’s Deviant lover to increase the tragedy of their doomed relationship, and Kingo taking on the Avengers as Skullothar the Destructorite entertain for wildly different yet equally valid reasons. Ribic also continues to deliver appropriately epic-level work for a series of this scale, even though there are a few scenes where you can see he was clearly rushed. This leads to Guiu Vilanova filling in for a scene and an issue with work that really only suffers in comparison. It’s entertaining stuff all around that I would have no problems recommending to fans of the characters or the creators, yet you can’t help but feel that this run of “Eternals” was meant to be more than what we got.