A Sense of Doubt blog post #2231 - ETERNALS #001 & 002 - Gillen
I could put in more time here and re-publish some reviews instead of giving out links that cannot be clicked (though try it; maybe it works for you). But I am working ahead, and The Eternals is a subject I will probably return to as I am re-reading Kirby's and will probably re-read the Gaiman/Romita, Jr. as well.
Here's a variety of content, mostly from Gillen's newsletters.
A click of the link will not take you to these. Must copy and paste
https://comicbookroundup.com/comic-books/reviews/marvel-comics/eternals-(2021)/1
https://comicbookroundup.com/comic-books/reviews/marvel-comics/eternals-(2021)/2
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The lettered preview for Eternals is out. You can go see it at higher resolution here, but here’s it in newsletter-o-vision.
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Coo. Esad and Matt are a bit good.
I smile, and note they decided not to release the data page from this sequence, as there’s no need to scare everyone yet, right? It’s already that kind of open.
There’s also some concept art over in the link.
Out first week of January. Can’t wait.
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Also, I hadn’t shown you Esad’s concept art for the Eternals, which was released with the full lettered preview of issue 1.
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Coo.
Eternals is out on January 6th, which is the next time I’ll be talking to you folk. See you then.
Another big interview about Eternals, this time at Inverse. Includes a lot of fun stuff, including some lettered preview pages for issue 2.
If you have a question for me, my tumblr ask is open. I answered some stuff this morning, and here’s some of them…
Q: I was very impressed by the continuity mining on Eternals – but being the ridiculous nerd I am, I *was* able to find a handful of names that didn't make it on the list (and that I wouldn't expect to be on the Hex). Mostly thinking of Uranians of the Robert Grayson Marvel Boy variety, and other civilian-presenting characters. And Vampiro. I don't want to pry for spoilers, just wondering if those fall into the "don't worry about it" category more than something to expect reference to?
A: I’ll likely be asked about this in depth in an interview at some point, and I also don’t want to jump ahead of the story in various areas, but…
i) Eternals are listed by their Eternal names, not their human names. In some cases this means they’re listed by a name you don’t know. Vampiro would be one of those. Eternals going by many names across history is already an established trope, right? I just couldn’t see the Celestials arriving on earth and thinking “You know what we need? A Vampiro.”
ii) Some Eternal names have been Kirbyised - if they were just the mythological figure’s name without some spelling alterations, I increased the Kirby.
iii) It’s probably too early to talk about the various extraterrestrial Eternal colonies. There are definitely Uranians on the list.
Of course, I completely could have missed some, but I also have contingency plans.
And thank you!
Q: There seems to be more than a hundred Eternals. I typed them out onto a spreadsheet real quick and it looks like there's 102. Unless you count the Delphan Brothers as one Eternal and count [ALL RECORDS LOST] (under "Location Unknown") as two Eternals, it doesn't add up. Nevertheless, love it. Wish we could have issues twice a month.
A: Interesting, right?
And thank you.
Q: As someone who likes wordplay, how do you handle writing a character who has *no* sense of humour? Do you find that difficult/challenging/
satisfying/etc.?
A: I’m reminded of the advice I was given when first writing for oft-dour games magazine Edge. “Write what you would write for PC Gamer, then take out the jokes.”
The real answer is there’s all sorts of no sense of humour characters. By the stressing the NO I suspect you’re talking about extreme cases… in which case, in a lot of writing someone with no sense of humour often says a lot of very funny things. The No Sense Of Humour Character is actually a comedy character. Amaterasu in WicDiv doesn’t have much of a sense of humour, but she’s often one of the funniest characters in the book in context, at least for me.
If it’s more generally writing a dour/serious character, it’s just part of the job. To really answer your question, all characters have to be themselves, which is challenging, which is part of the job, a job I like. Ideally you delete a lot of jokes, even with funny characters.
The bigger trick is trying to make sure different characters make different sorts of jokes. There’s a lot of Wordplay in WicDiv, but I tried to map different sorts of word play to different characters. Baal and Lucifer say different things. This goes more broadly as well - who swears in what way, to choose a banal example.
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I was writing the last of these hours before the US capitol was stormed. I write this on inauguration day, with the fear of violence. I’ve wanted to write something about this, but I’m so asynchronous it feels impossible. It’s a lot. Thinking of you all.
For me, bar the whirlwind of the world outside the house –the push and pull between the death toll in the UK right now with vaccine rolling out. the reality of Brexit biting, etc – on a personal level, things appear to be progressing in a worryingly organised fashion, at least work wise. I’m actually going to finish my newsletter before lunch. That never happens. I feel like I have got my shit together. This is normally cue to shit the bed, but I’m trying to remember that shitting on the bed is the cats’ job, and I’m no scab.
I suspect the reason that I kept on thinking it was Thursday on Tuesday was because I had basically done as much work as I’d have done by Thursday on a slowish week, and I was looking for a reason to panic a bit. I shouldn’t, because this small nexus of being able to just concentrate on work without distractions will only last so long. I should enjoy it. Or use it.
Since we last talked, I finished off two issues of Eternals and now moved onto another script before I return to polish one of them up to hand in. On the side, I’ve been doing rewrites on a variety of projects, all of which are getting to a decent place. I need to do the final notes on DIE 17 for Stephanie to start work on it next week – it’s an hour’s work, but it all adds up. I also have a one page RPG which I want to write up and playtest, maybe today. I suspect that I’m ahead of my work means that it’s fairly likely?
Well, it’s either that or another run at Hades, right?
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I haven’t done a newsletter for a while so links have piled up. Here’s a download of stuff to think about and chew over and/or open up in a tab and forget about for months and years.
This was one of my tab-lurkers– this was in a tab for most of the year, and could have been longer. Jillian Weise on the Common Cyborg, writing about the concepts of cyborg, disability and a whole lot else. In the week Cyberpunk drops, I suspect something that’s worth reading and thinking about.
I was also interested in seeing Mike Pondsmith being profiled in the Atlantic – it’s prompted by the new game, but mainly about him, and his work. I’m aware the first Cyberpunk was likely the first indie-RPG I’d bought – its first edition’s rawness was miles away from everything else I was playing at the time.
A review of Ludocrat’s first trade over at AIPT, which is a lovely piece. I’ve said before, but I wish we lived in a place where there were more trade reviews rather than issue reviews. I know why – finances, readerships, a certain strand of anglophone comics being suspended between two formats and so on – but it’s a shame. A populist, well written site which just reviews trades for people who buy trades is something we haven’t had for a long time.
Chrissy and I spent a lovely lunchtime playing the first Mini Mystery. Puzzle stuff with a lovely online narrative wrapper. Tickles the escape-room urge, and very family friendly.
This is a new Eternals animated trailer from Marvel, which is excellent but includes a lot of material from the first issue. If you’re sold on it, I’d save it for afterwards.
I was interviewed in Three Crows magazine which is a really excellent, deep and heavyweight interview – I can’t think of the last time I went in so hard. Lots of fiction and other content in there too. Go nose.
On a similar note, Wyrd Science is a quarterly magazine of boardgames, rpgs, miniature games, etc and are doing a kickstarter. It’s already made its goal, but if you want a copy, go nose and support. They’ve done a big interview with me, and the photography is pretty astounding.
Olly MacNamee’s Once & Future’s annotations jump in on the third arc. Oh – and a preview for issue 14.
I smiled at this list at the top 10 stories, and the bits of people getting miffed at things not included. Which is what lists are for, right? (There’s a Paul Morley line I often think of. To paraphrase: “a good list isn’t the end of an argument, but the start of one”. A list is meant to be a statement about how its compilers see the world, and you’re meant to think about how you see it differently.)
Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia were one of the bands I was obsessed with in the early 00s and have been thinking about recently. This is Indian Ink, probably their best album. The track to go to would be Morning After Pill, whose poetry-over-post-rock, all resplendent of fluids and regret is still a hell of a thing.
Spire is an excellent RPG of Dark Elves trying to rebel against High Elf persecution, and has some of my favourite worldbuilding in modern RPGs, and is presently in Bundle of Holding on sale. I suspect if you’re a fan of the similarly named but unconnect Spurrier/Stokley comic you’d love this.
The Writer Will Do Something by Tom Bissell and Matthew S Burns is an interactive fiction game about writing on a triple-A development, which is i) really well done ii) explains why I was never tempted to ever follow that route. Well worth a play through.
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Ross Richie of Boom fame has started his youtube channel where he does ludicrously in depth dives into creators’ history. This is the first part of mine, which is an hour. If you click through there’s another two parts up, which are an hour each, which I think is the last one. This has a lot, for basically every stage of my life.
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Secondly, the always sharp Elana Levin over at Graphic Policy Radio had me on their podcast, which was also lots of fun. She uses the tagline “How are The Celestials and The Eternals like Diana Ross & The Supremes?” and I can’t see any reason to change it. There’s stuff on everything, but it does float around the Eternals and Kirby. Oh – it’s also on Youtube. That’s an easy link.
Also, after the Kickstarter, Wyrd Science is now available to buy both physically and in PDF. Click through to see what they’re covering – it’s really that intense approach to tabletop gaming culture which reminds me a little of what Arcade magazine did for videogames back in the day. Oh – here’s the opening of my interview to give you the idea of the design.
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Lots more example pages from the rest of the magazine in the link. Also, so many footnotes in the interview, which does make me smile. It makes me feel like I’m a character in a Pratchett novel.
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Eternals 3 is out, where we reach Lemuria and introduce Thena. I have no idea what folks will make of this one. Actually, that’s not true – I always have ideas of what folks will make of it. But, in a broad way, there’s some of my favourite things in the issue are things which may not even be visible to some folks. Luckily, everyone is going to get the atmosphere which Esad and Matt bring to the page, and the design stuff Clayton has done is the most extensive we’ve done so far. There’s a design spread which I showed C and her response was “I’m glad I’m not working on this book.” I basically want to send apology flowers to Marvel’s proofreader.
All Deviant names, bar pre-existing ones, were generated via the Deviant Name Generator I mentioned coding. We’re still working out whether we can actually get it out there so you lot can play with it – I wrote it Gamemaker, which has exported to HTML5 but we’re still working how best to show it to folks. Everyone I’ve showed it to has highly amused themselves by just generating hundreds of Deviants. I just had a play with it now, and I’m sure that Old-fashioned Ahar'ag, Dasrhudeana Daytooth and Karyheitiny the Grubby will be the break out MCU characters in Wave 7.
Here’s the first two pages of the preview…
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…And there’s another one here. You can buy it digitally or get from fine comic retailers.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2103.28 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2095 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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