Kid Eternity: Book One (Kid Eternity

Kid Eternity (1993-1994) #1-8

by Ann Nocenti, Sean Phillips (Illustrator)

He died as a child, decades before his time, and spent the next 30 years in Hell thanks to a mix-up in the afterlife’s bureaucracy. Then a miracle occurred, and the Kid escaped perdition for Earth. His mission: become the new Messiah. His gift: the ability to summon any human, god or devil who ever existed-or who anyone once believed existed-with the cry of a single word…

“ETERNITY!”

Redeeming humanity, however, is trickier than it seems. From America’s forgotten highways to the endless realms of cyberspace, from the clamor of TV talk shows to the chaos of insane asylums, from the siren song of sex to the menace of mad gods, a whole host of forces-good, bad and ugly-have united to thwart the utopian efforts of this savior in sunglasses.

Fortunately, he has a little help from his friends-including a hacker, a hobo, Zeus, Freud, Neal Cassady, Marilyn Monroe and many more. When it comes to saving the world, not even the power of Eternity can do it alone…

KID ETERNITY BOOK ONE collects the first nine issues of legendary writer Ann Nocenti and superstar artist Sean Phillips’ classic VERTIGO saga of magic, madness and the strangeness of the twentieth-century psyche.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels

247 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 17, 2017

About the author

Ann Nocenti is most noted as an editor for Marvel Comics, for whom she edited New Mutants and The Uncanny X-Men. She made her comics writing debut on a brief run of Spider-Woman (#47-50) and subsequently wrote a long run of Daredevil (1st series) #236-291 (minus #237) from 1986 to 1991, directly following on from Frank Miller's definitive Born Again storyline. She also wrote the 1986 Longshot limited series for Marvel, and in the same year produced the Someplace Strange graphic novel in collaboration with artist John Bolton. She wrote "the Inhumans Graphic Novel" in 1988. In 1993, she wrote the 16-issue run of Kid Eternity for the DC Comics imprint Vertigo.

In Incredible Hulk #291, published in September 1983 (cover date January 1984), Ann Nocenti made a cameo appearance, talking to Dr. Bruce Banner, in a history written by Bill Mantlo, drawn by Sal Buscema and inked by Carlos Garzón and Joe Sinnot. That time Ann Nocenti was Assistant Editor for Larry Hama on Incredible Hulk and X-Men.

She is noted for her left-wing political views which, particularly during her run on Daredevil, caused some controversy among some fans who didn't agree with her politics.

She created several popular characters, including Typhoid Mary, Blackheart, Longshot and Mojo, and wrote the 1998 X-Men novel Prisoner X.

Although Nocenti left comic books in the '90s after the industry sales collapsed, she later returned to the field, penning stories such as 2004's Batman & Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows.

In Ultimate X-Men, a reimagination of the X-Men comic, the character Longshot, who was invented by her, has the civil name Arthur Centino. His last name, Centino, is an anagram of Nocenti and a homage to Nocenti. The name Arthur is for the co-creator of Longshot Arthur Adams who was Ann Nocenti's artist on the Longshot Mini Series.

She edited High Times magazine for one year (2004) under the name Annie Nocenti and is the former editor of the screenwriting magazine Scenario.

Reviews

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 1 out of 5]

I loved Morrison's Kid Eternity, so I was eager to see what Vertigo did next with the character. Unfortunately, this is entirely incoherent.

It's like someone tried to write a Grant Morrison comic, but they didn't understand that his comics have depth. Tropes and symbolism. The weirdness is there, but it hides something deeper. This, it's just weirdness.

There's no plot. The characters are one-dimensional. They wander around and stuff happens, and none of it makes a lick of sense.

I can't believe that Vertigo published a year and a half of this.

[Dallas Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love classic literature and the ways those books wander while providing philosophical debates on aspects of the human experience, I highly recommend!

If you enjoy Vertigo's trippy edge and books like "Sandman", I highly recommend!

This comic series is everything I love in a comic series. Philosophical ideas being shared on all sorts of concepts from television to homelessness to gender to what is insanity in our world really? There are slight bits of hedonism among genuine curiosity of how we work.

Kid and his supporting cast slide right next to Vertigo's "Shade the Changing Man" as an unendingly fascinating group of characters that I can not get enough of!

[Kit · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won’t lie; this book is a struggle, but consider this: that’s actually the whole point.
Why on earth expect a book about finding truth, meaning, infinity, divinity, and eternity to be straightforward?
It may have taken me two years to read, but I am very happy to have done the forward and back again messiness of going through this story. It’s going to be a struggle to find the next part too, I suppose.

[Byurakn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not a comic book reader, so my opinion might be biased because of that but I had a sense that there was no story and no proper characters. Everything was quite messy and hard to follow but there were some sharp lines that I liked.

[Will Cooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't finish it. Started out as an interesting quest trying to find the next child born to be the Dalai Lama, but then just got too weird where nothing really was happening while too much was happening.

[Ansate · Rating 4 out of 5]

such a product of its time, but I do actually want to read more, so it wins out over say, animal man

[Clint · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. I really wanted to like this, and Philips’s early 90s art is enjoyable to look at after enjoying so much of his later work with Brubaker, but it can only carry the writing so far. There’s so much dialogue and it’s almost all uninteresting and hard to follow, the sort of overly wordy pseudophilosophical prattling on for page after page that just feels like homework.

Who knows, maybe this is great if you really work for it, but I don’t trust a mostly forgotten, short-lived early Vertigo series to be worth so much effort.

[Alana]

DNF. Probably would've had more patience for it in the 90s.