Marvel’s Phase Four is kicking off with Black Widow in May, 2020, and continues on November 6, 2020 with the release of The Eternals, a star-studded film about a group of near-immortal beings that have shaped human history by taking on the guises of gods and mythological heroes. The Eternals were created by Jack Kirby, the prolific comic book legend who had previously developed a different story filled with gods and monsters for DC Comics, Fourth World.

2017's Justice League attempted to translate that work to the big screen by having the heroes fight against the minions of the evil New God Darkseid, and pretty much failed miserably. But there’s a much better version of the same story airing on DC Universe right now in Young Justice: Outsiders, and The Eternals writers Matthew and Ryan Firpo could take a few key lessons on how that show uses Kirby’s complicated cannon.

1. Update the Characters

This shouldn’t be hard for Marvel, which has consistently surprised (and sometimes infuriated) fans by providing new versions of classic characters like Mysterio or the Mandarin. But Young Justice has done a particularly great job with Darkseid’s lieutenants Granny Goodness and Glorious Godfrey. Granny has traditionally been the leader of the Furies, a group of female warrior that she forces to serve Darkseid through torture and brainwashing, or, as she would call it, “discipline.” She’s still doing that in Outsiders, but she’s also assumed the identity of a tech mogul and media magnate on Earth where she’s using cutting edge VR headsets to mind control and kidnap kids capable of developing superpowers.

In this persona, she’s a frequent guest on a TV show hosted by G. Gordon Godfrey, which he uses as a platform to rail against the Justice League. That was always a part of the character, who Kirby based on the televangelist Billy Graham, but Young Justice has remodeled him as a figure that would be right at home on Fox News. Building on current societal anxieties has let the Young Justice writers make both villains scarier. The Eternals’ primary antagonists, the Deviants, are mostly distinguished by being physically ugly and the Firpos would do well to dig for something deeper when designing their villains.

2. Get Historical

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Image via DC Universe, Warner Bros. Animation

The best episode of Outsiders is an origin story for the immortal supervillain Vandal Savage, who has been one of the series’ primary enemies since Season 1. The episode showed how Savage gained his powers and has used them throughout the eras to protect Earth from alien invaders, including Darkseid. While most of the show is set in the modern-day, seeing Savage at work in 2100 BC and the 13th century provided the opportunity for some spectacular battles and shows off just how long-running his ambitions and plans are. Each of the Eternals would have similarly epic histories of living through and manipulating human events, all while forming alliances or fighting against each other and other long-lived beings. The Eternals should make sure to devote some time to showing what they’ve been up to over the millennia and how it’s affected their relationships with each other.

3. Make the Conflict Complicated

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Image via DC Universe, Warner Bros. Animation

Wonder Woman was highly successful, but its worst part was that the conflict between Diana and Ares just boiled down into a divine slugfest. While it’s certainly fun to have characters fight physically, the scale of powers involved in Eternals needs to be take into account to keep it from looking like just another superhero movie. When Neil Gaiman rebooted the Eternals comic book series during Marvel’s Civil War arc, the Avengers asked the Eternals to pick a side and they declined, comparing the fight between heroes to a squabble between children.

Updating the characters will also help with this, allowing them to establish powerbases like running countries or companies that will be harder to attack them through conventional means. That was an issue in Outsiders, where Granny was able to publicly discredit the superheroes after they raided her facilities looking for a kidnapped team member and came up empty.

You can also have fights where victory is much more temporary. In one Outsiders episode, Cyborg is being consumed by technology from Darkseid’s homeworld, Apokolips. Looking for help, the heroes reach out to Metron, a Kirby character based on Leonard Nimoy’s Spock who invented much of the technology used by the New Gods. Metron’s floating chair can cure Cyborg, but he’s unwilling to share it since he’d rather observe the unprecedented effects of his invention. The heroes’ solution is to get into a fight they know they can’t win, holding Metron back just long enough to use the chair to save their friend. It’s a great way to have a high stakes fight with a too-powerful enemy without needing the heroes to come out on top in a really meaningful way. It’s also an example of the complicated morality that can develop for beings that are alive that long, where novelty becomes much more valuable than preserving an individual life.

4. Get Weird with It

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Image via DC Universe, Warner Bros. Animation

Marvel has gradually been moving the Overton window for what viewers will accept from a mainstream blockbuster, starting with a guy in power armor and getting progressively stranger, often through the introduction of other characters that Kirby helped create, like the talking alien tree, Groot, or the Asgardian God of Thunder, Thor. But the Eternals are going to require an even bigger step forward into the strange and the filmmakers shouldn’t be afraid to take it.

Young Justice started as a show about the sidekicks and proteges of well-known heroes including Superman, Batman and The Flash fighting supervillains that the Justice League were too busy to take on. But the new team includes Forager, a Kirby character who’s a humanoid bug from the New God planet of New Genesis, and Halo, whose powers come from the fusing of a dead human with a Mother Box, a sentient computer also designed by Kirby. Fights take place not just on Earth but on other planets, space stations and the extradimensional realm that Granny uses to brainwash her enemies. It’s weird stuff, but the success of Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy laid the groundwork that Eternals can use to tell a story that spans centuries and worlds.

For more on Eternals and Young Justice, check out the links below.

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