hum, first? Thor, Vision and Captain America already embodied aspects of Superman.
I thought that same exact thing when I saw this. They changed the Eternals origin in the MCU establishing that they are in effect aliens that arrived on Earth 7,000 years ago. Their actual comic book origin holds that they are in fact one of the earliest species of Homo Sapiens experimented on by the Celestials. Not aliens, just an older, more advanced species. Ditto with the Deviants.
Oh well, I figured the MCU would screw up somewhere, somehow. "Eternals" just might be hubris calling.
They already had one. Her name is Captain Marvel. She can even fly in space for an indefinite period of time. Making her more powerful than Superman.
Assassinate Putin!
The Heat Vision is so specific to Superman that a character with that power will seem more an analogue than others.
Jack Kirby took the mythical Thor and recreated him wearing a blue costume and a red cape and flying through the air minus a chariot specifically to make him the Marvel equivalent of Superman.
Movie Captain Marvel was meant to represent a new power level and be a Superman analogue regardless of sex.
But the Eternals may get into an analogue most people see readily as an obvious Superman analogue.
Power with Girl is better.
And here I thought the Enterals were Marvel's versions of various ancient myths from around the world (mostly Greek but with a few others mixed in for variety) not Superman.
I read somewhere that Kirby was heavily influenced by Chariots of the Gods? and the hypothesis that ancient extraterrestrials are to credit for all of early humanity's technology, philosophies, religions, etc. The finished Eternals product was that those extraterrestrials were the 2,000 foot tall cosmic beings now known as Celestials, but originally Kirby had intended for the Eternals to be the Celestials -- of course, a more human sized version, iirc. (Fun side note: DC's New Gods, including Darkseid and denizens of Apokalips are all said to be far taller in their native realm than they are whenever they cross over into the "main" DC space/time continuum.)
I thought Marvel's decision to make the Eternals a species of homo sapiens was the right call as far as the source material goes. But the MCU may have realized just how problematic Kirby's origin for the Eternals is and decided to go with the Chariots interpretation.
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”
~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“If I love you, I have to make you conscious of what you don’t see.”
~James Baldwin
Exactly this.
And it must be noted that the Eternals were NOT intended to be a part of the Marvel universe. I'm not sure but I think it was Roy Thomas that dragged them into the Marvel universe.
Each Eternal was meant to represent a member of mythology primarily the Greek panthenon- Zuras- Zeus, Thena- Athena, Sersi- Circe, Makkari- Mercury e.t.c. That's why there was the weirdness when the met the gods of olympus and looked almost exactly like some of them.
100% True.
But this was also one of the problems with Kirby's origin for the Eternals, because there were civilizations that pre-date the Greeks and Romans. Indeed, some of the Greco-Roman gods are derivative of other gods worshipped in other regions. In order for the Celestials to have experimented at the "dawn of humanity", the timeline simply doesn't work. The Eternals that we know today would have needed to be the distant ancestors of the proto-humans that the Celestials experimented on AND there's no way that the vast majority of the Eternals would look like Greeks or Romans. The only way that Kirby's origin works is if there are hidden tribes of Eternals hailing from other continents, perhaps existing like the gods themselves in dimensions adjacent to Earth's. As depicted, the Eternals population demographics doesn't seem to speak to that at all, unfortunately.