Time for everyone’s favorite* part of any retrospective: unnecessarily detailed analysis of meaningless data, with charts!
*citation needed
SPLASH PAGES
While Kirby is not the first artist to use splash pages in a comic book… Will Eisner on The Spirit is typically credited as such… Jack Kirby is definitely the one who popularized it in superhero comics.
And especially during his time at Marvel during the Silver Age, he made a great use of those.
But one of the first things I noticed in the retrospective is just how abundant they are in both Eternals and in his Fourth World books.
Just how abundant?
Jimmy Olsen doesn’t start with a #1, but the table shows the equivalent during the Kirby run.
Incidentally and conveniently, the same table shows that Eternals was longer than any of the Fourth World individual series.
Depending on the issue, there’s a huge variation of how many splash pages there are.
Eternals and Forever People are the only ones with issues with no splash pages, but they are also the series that reach the highest percentage.
This is even crazier when we sum the splash pages with the double splash pages.
Eternals is the only series with issues that don’t have either a splash page or a double splash.
Despite this, Eternals gets as high as 41% of pages being some kind of splash, and no series drops below 30%.
However that was looking at INDIVIDUAL issues.
When we look at the series as a whole, we can see that New Gods… despite being a little more than half the length of issues, has a higher percentage of splash pages than Eternals.
And even higher than Mister Miracle, which has nearly double the overall pages of New Gods!
(“double splash” is counted as two pages in this count)
If we also include in the count both the Eternals Annual and the two sequels to New Gods that Kirby did in the 80s, New Gods is still in the lead with splash pages… but since those sequels had A LOT of pages, it jumps ahead in the total number of pages.
It doesn’t manage to overcome Mister Miracle in the total number of pages, but it’s still ahead on splash pages.
All series are all over the place…
…but Forever People is especially crazy. You could get over a quarter of the pages made up of more than 25% splash pages, but you could also have issues with a couple or with no splash pages at all.
You can see that the number of splash pages tends to decrease in ALL series except Mister Miracle, but Eternals is the only one with a clear trajectory.
Speaking of pages, that’s another huge difference between series that caught my eye.
NUMBER OF PAGES
The Fourth World books varied WILDLY in the number of pages of each individual issue, but Eternals stayed constantly 17 pages throughout the entire run.
Mister Miracle and New Gods in particular follow basically the same path.
All while Eternals just stays firmly at 17 pages the entire time.
The stark difference makes me think that, when Kirby went back to Marvel, there was a conscious decision to keep the book consistently at the same number of pages.
Which I think is one of the things that damaged Eternals, because 17 pages is not a whole lot when you’re doing SO MANY splash pages!!!
RECORDS
Shortest issue: 17 pages, every issue of Eternals
Shortest DC issue: 20 pages, Mister Miracle from #15 to #18
Longest issue: 26 pages for New Gods from #4 to #9, Forever People #6 and Mister Miracle #5 and #6
REGULAR SERIES
Most splash pages: 7 splash pages, Forever People #4
Most double splash pages: 1. Besides the 80s specials, no other series does more than one double page spread.
No splash OR double splash: Eternals #17 and #19
SPECIALS
Shortest special: 34 pages, Eternals Annual #1
Longest special: 62 pages, DC Graphic Novel #4
Most splash pages: 9 splash pages, DC Graphic Novel #4
Most double splash pages: 3 double splash pages, New Gods v2 #6
I might take a look at the OTHER Kirby series of the 70s, to see if they keep the same trend… but I’m really Kirbyed out, so that’s not exactly a high priority.
Well that was fun for probably just me and nobody else, so to close off the retrospective for real let’s have one last entry in the retrospective: the Kirby Awards, combining both Eternals AND the Fourth World.