By [ad_1]
Today, we look at how Makkari of the Eternals was secretly TWO different Golden Age superheroes!
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).
Just last week, I talked about how Sersi of the Eternals was revealed to have been around in the Marvel Universe BEFORE Jack Kirby actually created the Eternals by suggesting that the Circe that we saw in Strange Tales #109 was also Sersi (as when Sersi was introduced in the pages of the Eternals, she was revealed to have been the Circe of Greek myth, as well). So many people wrote in to me after that article (over e-mail, Facebook and Twitter) to say that I need to do Makkari next, and I will now!
As a quick tangent, my pal Sam also noted that Circe had an earlier appearance in Venus #9 in 1950, so shouldn’t THAT be Seris’s “first” Marvel appearance?
It’s a fine question, but I think the issue is that we’re still not quite sure how that Venus series fits into Marvel continuity. That’s really the trip of “Marvel continuity,” right? As I have said before, there is really no such thing as an overall “Marvel” story because so many stories conflict each other and Venus is one of the major instances where it is really unclear how much of the stories that occurred before the “Marvel Age” of comics currently “counts” towards Marvel continuity. A good deal of those older stories just cannot fit into Marvel continuity and so, in the case of Venus, it seems like bits and pieces have been adopted and currently that page has NOT been adopted, while Circe’s appearance in Strange Tales #109 occurred AFTER the “Marvel Age of Comics” started, so it “has” to be explained. If you think this is confusing, imagine being the good folks who write the Marvel handbooks!
Okay, as I noted last time, 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, however, decided to choose this moment to turn on their creators and try to keep them from returning. Once they proved to be too late, they decided to use their weapons to fight the Celestials, even if the Earth was razed in the middle of all of this. Daniel Damian stayed at the dig, but his daughter, Margo, was taken by Ikaris and since Ikaris needed to be able to go battle against the Devaints without endangering Margo, he entrusted her in the care of one of his fellow Eternals, the mysterious Sersi and in Eternals #5 (by Jack Kirby and John Verpoorten), Sersi turned to another one of her Eternal compatriots, Makarri…
MAKKARI FOUGHT EVIL AS MERCURY
In early 1941, in the pages of Red Raven Comics #1, Jack Kirby introduced the heroic Mercury, here on Earth to fight against his evil cousin, Pluto…
MAKKARI FOUGHT EVIL AS HURRICANE
Red Raven Comics was a total flop, so Kirby just adapted the idea and reintroduced the character as a NEW character named Hurricane, son of Thor, who fought against that same evil cousin, Pluto, in Captain America Comics #1 (the lead story in that issue starred some skinny kid who took some performance enhancing drugs to get into the Army. I wonder whatever happened to that character)…
MAKKARI’S HISTORY WAS EXPLAINED
In Marvel Universe #4 (by Roger Stern and Mike Manley), a group of “Monster Hunters” in the 1950s of the Marvel Universe were formed, including an agent named Jack Curtiss…
Who revealed that he had used a different name when he fought a molten creature in the past…
That, of course, was the retelling of a story from Tales of Suspense #7 (by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko), where a pilot named Frank Harper defeated a creature using a “wind tunnel”…
Okay, in the next issue (with Bret Belvins now on pencils, with Manley inking him), Curtiss reveals that he also went by the name Adam Clayton…
That was the name of a speedster form Strange Tales #67…
But then in the next issue (pencils now by Jason Armstrong), he reveals that he was ALSO Hurricane!
And finally, in the last part of the story, we learn that Hurricane/Mercury were BOTH Makkari in disguise!
And that the “Pluto” that he had fought was actually Warlord Kro of the Deviants, longtime Eternals foes…
Boy, Stern sure is clever, huh?
About The Author
[ad_2]
