Today, we look at how an act of kindness by an Eternal nearly doomed the X-Men (and all of Earth).
This is “Foundationed Deep,” a feature where we look at particular odd/strange/interesting instances of retroactively connecting different comic book characters (for instance, Uncanny X-Men #268 retroactively established that Wolverine knew both Captain America and the Black Widow from World War II).
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing how the very nature of Jack Kirby’s Eternals has led to a number of writers using them to establish retroactive continuities in the pages of other comic books. This is because, as I’ve pointed out a couple of times now, the concept of the original Jack Kirby Eternals comic book series, which launched in early 1976 (soon after Jack Kirby returned to Marvel after briefly leaving to go to DC, where he launched the Fourth World along with a number of other series), is that the Celestials were returning to Earth after millennia earlier visiting the planet, where they altered humanity into three groups, the heroic, god-like Eternals, the evil, demon-like Deviants and, well, you know, humanity. So now that they were returning, the Eternals had to reveal themselves. In the opening issue, a famous archaeologist and his daughter, Margo, discovered all of this during a dig at a temple in the Andes when their cameraman revealed himself to secretly be the Eternal known as Ikaris and that their dig had discovered a cosmic beacon designed to call the Celestials back to Earth. The Deviants wanted to stop the Celestials returning and when that failed, they planned to attack the Celestials when they got here, even if it meant killing all of humanity. The Eternals, naturally, wanted a different result and were willing to fight for it.
Kirby slowly introduced various members of the Eternals and we learned that since the Eternals have been around for hundreds of thousands of years apiece, they were the basis for almost every major myth or deity in human history. For instance, Warlord Kro of the Deviants was likely what people thought of as “the Devil,” Makkari was what people thought of as the Roman god, Mercury, Sprite was the inspiration for Puck, and so on and so forth. However, beyond that aspect of the Eternals, not a whole lot of writers really used the fact that the Eternals have been around for, well, EVERYTHING (part of that, of course, is that they weren’t even part of the Marvel Universe until the late 1970s).
THE ETERNALS CHANGE THE DESTINY OF SOME BEINGS ON EARTH
In June 2011‘s X-Men #12 (by Christopher Yost, Paco Medina, Dalibor Talajic, Juan Vlasco, Marte Gracia and Wil Quintana), we see the Eternals visiting the site of some of the last remaining pre-Homo Sapiens on Earth being hunted down by wolves…
Zuras explains that they can’t worry about these beings, as the Eternals are only concerned about the next step in evolution, humanity. This is the fun other side of the Eternals, where they show up and are super draconian about stuff. Lots of ends justifying the means takes. Anyhow, as you can see, Phastos of the Eternals seems a bit uncertain about whether that position is actually the correct one to take…
THE PAST CATCHES UP WITH THE X-MEN
Yost’s story is cleverly split into two different time periods. The present (and the distant past) had art by the main artist on the series at the time, Paco Medina, Juan Vlasco and Marte Gracia, while we also had flashbacks to the days of the original X-Men by Dalibor Talajic and Wil Quintana.
We see that some beings known as the Evolutionaries came to the X-Men in the early days of the group and offered to help them out by wiping out all of the Homo Sapiens on Earth…
When the X-Men fought back, they discovered a surprising fact about the Evolutionaries, they were not quite human themselves!
We then cut back to the present, where the Evoltionaries (well, at least one Evolutionary) has returned to punish Cyclops for whatever happened in the past, but the problem is that Cyclops doesn’t even REMEMBER what happened in the past! But whatever he said to the Evolutionary, he is not being punished for it in the present…
Back in the past, when Xavier turned them down, the Evolutionaries looked to Magneto to see if HE was the true leader of mutantkind and if he was down with their plan to wipe out Homo Sapiens…
WE LEARN WHAT PHASTOS HAD PLANNED AND HOW IT WENT VERY, VERY WRONG
In the following issue, we discovered that Phastos had rescued some of these pre-Homo Sapien creatures from certain death…
He then outfitted them with Eternal technology and gave them a mission. They were designed to protect the next step in evolution on Earth….
The problem in Phastos’ thinking is that he assumed that the highest evolutionary state on Earth was going to be Homo Sapiens, so he figured he could spare some early pre-Homo Sapiens by allowing them to live to protect Homo Sapiens, but when Homo Superior showed up, the Evolutionaries felt that THEY were who they were supposed to protect (gotta be more specific with your instructions, Phastos!).
Meanwhile, in the past, since the Evolutionaries’ plan needed a telepath to carry it out, they turned to a still-institutionalized Emma Frost…
So Emma Frost had a whole other adventure with the early X-Men that none of them remember. That is because when the X-Men ultimately convince the Evolutionaries to drop their plan, it was because Cyclops convinced them that he would protect mutantkind in their place. Well, post-House of M, they felt that he was kind of full of it and that’s why they wanted to punish him. All of their memories have now returned, so Emma remembers her early team-up with the X-Men (and that she ended up back in an institution at the end of it) and while the X-Men defeated he Evolutionaries (and saved humanity), their new goal in life is just to kill Cyclops period.
If anyone else has a suggestion for a Foundationed Deep (retroactive connections between characters), feel free to drop me a line at [email protected].
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