Thor Epic Collection, vol. 10: The Eternals Saga

Date Completed: 20 June, 2025

Grade: C

This is a fairly strange volume, and little of it actually feels like it was meant to be Thor’s story. The main story, and what is the subject of the title, is the Eternals Saga, but frankly this feels like an attempt to pull together Kirby’s work from the canceled Eternals comic into a more cohesive narrative, while at the same time bringing the Eternals into the Marvel Universe. I’m glad I read the Eternals Complete Collection before I read this, because otherwise I think I would have been very lost while reading this volume, and likewise would have thought less of it. 

I would encourage anyone to read Kirby’s Eternals just for the art alone, but from reading that I got the impression that Jack Kirby, in addition to being an amazing artist, had fantastically unique ideas, but he fumbled to maintain a coherent plot. I also suspect that while Kirby can be given credit for inventing a lot of the Marvel Universe, he needed Stan Lee to basically keep him in line. So when Kirby had been given free rein to write and illustrate the Eternals, it was amazing, but also meandering and confused. So, it seems these issues of Thor were trying to fix that and bring in this new mythos to the Marvel Universe.
Something else that caught my attention was the 50 year judgement that the Celestials were engaging in. I had long had the impression that the 50 year judgement had only begun in Kirby’s Eternals book, but Thor issue #300 has a throw-away line suggesting that the characters were at the end of those 50 years, and that the Celestials had never spared a planet that they had judged. I’m glad that line got in there, because the whole time I was wondering why everyone was so worried when they had 50 years to come up with a plan. More should have been done to make this point.

And then, there is the Ring Cycle. The Ring cycle interlude starting in issue #294 is a little weird. Roy Thomas had been doing a lot of novel adaptations for Conan in the early 70s, and maybe this made writing easier for him (He mentions in Thor Annual #8 that he was quite busy at the time). I enjoyed having this story in comic form, but it was a little weird for Thor, and it feels like it was trying to stretch out to issue #300. Luckily 300 brought back a resolution to both the Ring Cycle and the Eternals Saga, and manages to weave them both together so the interlude didn’t feel entirely wasted, but it did seem like an odd thing to string along for six issues (half a year when these would have been published!).



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