Eternal #1
Boom! Studios
Words:  William Harms
Pictures:  Giovanni Valletta

Dying is easy when you can live forever.

Not going to lie: this book is a bit of a mind hump.  William Harms throws clones, socialized group murder, consciousness transfer, and the psychological effects of being unshackled from mortality right at us… and that’s just the first page.  This thing takes off and just goes.  And I’m liking it a lot.

While William is throwing ideas at us like darts at a pub wall, Giovanni Valletta is throwing images at our eye holes like Payton Manning throwing spirals.  No matter what angle he’s coming from, he’s hitting the sweet spot with every panel.  I really like the look of this book.

If you like your sci-fi with a near future lean to it, and dig the idea of downloading yourself into a seemingly limitless amount of clones, well then Eternal is built for you.  We’ve got a society fractured by the haves and have nots.  Of course in this case, the “haves” are those who have genetically altered biologies.  The “have nots” are “pures”, clean dna, free from any tweaking.    

William Harms gives us a lot to think about, and a lot to process in this first issue, and that’s a very good thing.  It’s one of the things I love bout comics.  Something that is fun and neat to look at can make you sit there and… wait for it… actually think.  Questions start to come into your bean, like, “What would I do if I knew I could come back to life in a matter of hours?”  “How would that change the way we treated each other?”  “How would that change the way government treated us?”

I know we’re just one issue in, but William Harms has done such a good job of setting the table for us, I can’t wait to see what comes next. 

4 out of 5 Non-Lethal Electric Rounds