3 out of 5

A good idea, just not executed in the most compelling fashion.

In the future, a company (one of those future Big Bad companies) called New Life has ‘perfect(ed) human cloning and consciousness transfer.’  The opening page of this issue is a news report on teen ‘death parties,’ where kids get their kicks offing themselves, knowing their consciousness can be reanimated.  (This would totally happen in this reality.)  Harms doesn’t milk this for dumb death shock value, but her underlines what I assume will be a driving concept in his series, that, “at one time, death provided the contours of one’s life.  But now those countours… are gone.”  Hence the opposition to New Life, the ‘Human Liberation Front,’ which seems to be concerned about the lives of ‘pures,’ who… I guess haven’t yet had their geneticals manipulated with, because something something kidnap Pures and the end result is human cloning.

Now, I’m jumping the gun here, but ‘Eternal’ just didn’t do anything for me because it’s not a story – it’s setup.  These characters are just constructs to get us to revealing exactly what the bridge is from Pure to New Life.  The dialogue and pacing are sound, but we’re already dropping in-world slang like “body jumpers,” and the divide between our squat-dwelling Pures (presumably mined for genetic material..?) and the New Life Biological Enforcement Division is just another reflection of that underdog vs. the Big Bad Company…  And all of this is confused a bit further by the fact that the HLF have now started to take advantage of cloning themselves.  All will be explained; certainly I’m missing some things.  But it feels a bit too much like Been There Done That mixed with a tad of bullshitting until we get to a reveal.

The art by Giovanni Valletta and colored by Adam Metcalfe falls somewhat in the same boat – it’s absolutely competent and holds its own during action sequences, but there’s really not much defining about it, and the stone-cold colors are what you expect of future settings.

Again, on both fronts, ‘Eternal’ is by no means bad.  It’s a sound idea, and I’m sure Harms has some good beats planned out for down the road, and Valletta and Metcalfe have proven capable of giving the book a consistent feel.  However, a first issue should probably grab there reader, and the presentation here just doesn’t do that.