There are times when being a parent is the most inauspicious job imaginable. Your children will do things in the hopes of helping you. In reality they can make your life significantly harder. For the Eternal Warrior his son Kalam means well, but in reality he puts his father in the positon of fighting for both their afterlives.
In part three of ‘Eternal Warrior: Deal With the Devil’ Gilad is having the type of day where it would seem easier to wrangle crickets amongst a field of magpies with a thousand reflecting mirrors than to save his son. First he has X-O Manowar kill him to send him back after finally surviving the trap of the Undying One. He does this out of love for his eldest son. Throughout that storyline, with each death Kalam desperately attempted to get his father’s attention. Instead he got a pat on the head. So he decides that the information he has is too important to wait for Gilad to die again and goes after him. But the path of the Eternal Warrior is riddled with unspeakable evils and Kalam is no match for them. Thus sending Gilad back to rescue his son, first from Humongous then from some usurper, wanna be called Pale Herder. This latest installment by writer Robert Venditti simultaneously slows down the action while intensifying it. It may sound paradoxical, but in order to truly get a sense of what this means you have to understand the duality of the Eternal Warrior’s life.
Here you have a man who dies while fighting for the earth. In death he gets to spend time with his wife and children. All he has lost it seems through some violent act. Still, you get the sense that this is when Gilad is most alive. Perhaps that’s why issue 13 opens with a storm. There aren’t supposed to be storms in paradise, but a typhoon is raging and one of his children is having some serious post-traumatic stress from this. His wife tries to hold the family together and her words describe not just their situation but Gilad himself. In order to survive the storm you have to know why it’s happening and you know it won’t end until Gilad gets his son back. Seeing the quiet terror of his family and then seeing the warrior in action, you understand that Gilad doesn’t bring the storm, he is the storm. The artwork emphasizes this as Robert Gill and his team takes the reader through every emotion of the characters, from Gilad’s annoyance to his enemies’ fear.
On one of the variant covers you see Gilad make his way through a barrage of bodies lying on the ground. His body is tense and his stance looks determined. Nothing will get between him and his query. More importantly the reader may still be interested to know what Kalam found so important that he felt the need to risk his soul. Venditti may never allow us to know. Especially since in the Valiant universe even the afterlife isn’t a safe place.
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