WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Eternals, in theaters now.
Today, we look at how a recent twist in the pages of the Avengers gave the Celestials an even darker twist than the twist in the MCU's Eternals film.
This is a feature called "Written in the Book." It is basically the reverse of another feature of mine called "Follow the Path," where I spotlight changes made to comic book characters that are based on outside media, as well as characters who entirely came from outside media. Nowadays, there are so many comic book films and TV series out there that we can spotlight examples of TV and film adapting specific and less famous comic book stories to other media (so no "Spider-Man lifts up debris" or stuff like that).
Now that we have the spoiler out of the way, we'll discuss the big twist in the Eternals, which is that the Eternals only exist to cull the Deviants from planets that have a "Celestial egg" in them. The Deviants started preying on the developing life on the planets and the way that the Celestials work is that each egg needs X amount of sentient life to exist to draw energy from that life so they can, in effect, hatch. The Deviants kept planets from having enough life on them, so the Eternals were created by the Celestials to go to these planets, defeat the Deviants and then just chill until the planet (now unencumbered by the Deviants) begin to prosper and expand their population until there is enough sentient life for the Celestial to emerge, destroying the planet, but allowing this new Celestial to then create many OTHER planets. The Eternals would survive the planet's destruction alongside the Celestial and then have their minds wiped and go off and do this on a whole other planet. The head Celestial, Arishem, maintains that this is still a glorious purpose for the Eternals, since these newly born Celestials create much more life than is ever destroyed in the planet that "births" them...
In Eternals, however, the Eternals, now knowing their real mission, decide to break free from it to save the planet Earth (after all, this is a planet that was able to reverse the "Snap," surely this planet stands out in some way) and in the end, they succeed in killing the Eternal within the planet Earth before it emerged.
The head Celestial, though, then kidnaps three of the Eternals and forces them to explain why Earth was worth the life of a Celestial. That, though, is a story for a different movie.
However, what's interesting is that this rather dark twist was at least partially inspired by an even DARKER recent twist in the pages of Jason Aaron's Avengers run.
A QUICK HISTORY ABOUT "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG" IN COMICS
It is important to note that while it is true that "Everything you thought about comic book character X is wrong" has become a lot more popular of a concept since the early 1980s, highlighted by the historic "Anatomy Lesson" storyline in Saga of the Swamp Thing, where Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben revealed that Alec Holland had never been transformed into a swamp creature known as Swamp Thing, but rather that a piece of swamp was transformed into an animated swamp creature that BELIEVED that it was Alec Holland!
Said concept was mind-blowing (and this was extremely early in Moore's career as a comic book writer, which makes it even more amazing) and it led to many writers doing similar concepts over the years and, as the saying goes, tropes are not bad, BAD tropes are bad. So the idea of revealing that everything you thought you knew about a character was a lie was not an inherently bad idea, it's just that not many writers could write even remotely as well as Alan Moore, so it became a bit of a hackneyed cliche over the years (while also involving a number of excellent reveals, as well, like Grant Morrison's Animal Man).
However, it's important to note that while the 1980s made this a whole "to do," things like this had been going on for many years, it's just that when it was a good twist, everyone just accepted it as if it had always been the case, like the reveal in Green Lantern #1 (by John Broome, Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson) that Hal Jordan was part of a larger group known as the Green Lantern Corps, something that was not part of the very first few Green Lantern stories in Showcase...
and when these twists were terrible, like the reveal that an imp named Mopee gave Flash his powers...
they were ignored. So twists that upend what you think about a comic book character are very normal parts of comic book history. It just seems, though, that the Celestials are SO mysterious that they have more twists than most. One notable recent one was a lot darker than even the MCU twist...
EVERYTHING THE ETERNALS BELIEVED WAS WRONG
In the first issue of Avengers in 2018 (by Jason Aaron, Ed McGuinness, Mark Morales and David Guriel), dead Celestials started landing on Earth...
We then discover that the Celestials are being hunted down and killed by the DARK Celestials...
Well, as it turned out, a million years or so ago, a Celestial killed by the Dark Celestial Horde fell to Earth and its poisoned blood eventually "infected" the Earth and created humanity (as shown in Avengers #5 by Aaron, McGuinness, Juan Vlasco, Morales and Guriel)...
but BECAUSE of this, the other Celestials realized that humanity contained the antibodies that could theoretically defeat the Horde later on. And thus, the Celestials created the Eternals to specifically cultivate humans, and the Eternals were pointless beyond that, and when the Eternals discovered that in Avengers #4, they began to kill themselves en masse...
but not before Ikaris filled Iron Man in on all of the truth...
And, of course, the Avengers DO defeat the Horde, so the Celestials were right all along.
After that, the Eternals all begin to regenerate once more, only they have to deal with the fact that the Celestials really didn't care about them at all. Hundreds of thousands of years of believing they had some deep connection to the Celestials and all of that is gone. Dark stuff, and Kieron Gillen is currently handling how the Eternals are dealing with that in the pages of the current excellent Eternals series.
If anyone has a suggestion for a future edition of Written in the Book, be sure to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com. Remember, I'm not looking for the really obvious stuff, but more stuff that many people wouldn't even necessarily automatically know was adapted from a comic book.