With the Eternals headed to the silver screen, the sorceress known as Sersi is about to become
a big deal to Marvel fans. But who is this ancient superhero, and what's her story?
From the Odyssey to the Avengers, this is the history of Marvel's Sersi explained.
The first run of Eternals begins with Ikaris on an expedition with a scientist named Daniel Damian
and his daughter, Margo. Ikaris explains the threat posed by the race known as the Deviants,
who, like the Eternals, were created by the Celestials.
But where the Eternals are good, powerful, and kind, the Deviants are cruel,
hideous, and prone to mutation. Knowing a war is coming, Ikaris takes Margo to Sersi,
so that she might keep the mortal girl safe in her chic Manhattan apartment.
Sersi agrees to do so, and proceeds to blow Margo's mind by reminiscing about the time
she turned Odysseus' crew into pigs — as well as the time she taught Merlin
during her stint at King Arthur's court. Margo is, of course, floored by all this,
especially since Sersi appears to be little more than a gal-about town who's prone to practicing
her dance moves during idle hours at home. When the Deviants attack her apartment, however,
Sersi further reveals her skills as a warrior, barraging her foes with cosmic energy, blocking
their blasts of flame, and transforming them all into animals. Old habits die hard, apparently.
Sersi is legendary for her parties — and these shindigs aren't just fun, either, as they often
serve the plot of the stories in which they appear. For example, during one particularly
raucous gathering, Sersi is introduced to Marvel heroes such as the Wasp, She-Hulk, and Starfox,
who she learns is a fellow Eternal. The party is interrupted when the Eternals attempt to summon
her to participate in the Uni-Mind, a kind of merging of their souls, but she ignores it.
Undaunted, the Eternals known as the Delphan Brothers crash the party. Sersi is made to join
the Uni-Mind, which results in the Eternals deciding to leave Earth. Sersi refuses to
go along with this, however, as she enjoys living among humans way too much to leave.
This encounter puts Sersi on the Avengers' radar. When Captain America needs help finding a bunch of
kids in 1989's Captain America #355, he turns to Sersi to transform him into a teenager.
Later, in Avengers #314, she actually joins the Avengers at Cap's invitation.
It just goes to show you: One great party can change everything.
"Avengers… A-"
After the Eternal and Avenger known as Gilgamesh is severely injured, his teammates turn to Sersi
to help heal him. His condition is beyond her abilities to fix, but she does later agree to
join the Avengers in his absence. Facing the space pirate Nebula in her first mission,
Sersi saves the team from total obliteration and helps restore reality in the process.
For a while, things go swimmingly for Sersi. She handles Mother Night's brainwashing tricks,
banishes radioactive foes alongside Thor, and helps a demon called the Unspeakable One
merge with his literal better half. All along, Sersi remains her bubbly,
whip-smart self, and she proves to be a major team asset, despite how different she is from
the rest of the Avengers. In short, Sersi loves the heroics, she loves the people,
and she's awfully good at saving the day. But all that changes in her next mission as an Avenger.
In a storyline beginning with 1991's Avengers #334, the team faces an alien race called the
Brethren, led by the charismatic Thane Ector. Soon after capturing Sersi,
Thane Ector falls in love with her, and she too realizes they have a mysterious connection.
It is later revealed that the Brethren are also creations of the Celestials,
and the Collector, an old Avengers foe, is manipulating them to destroy Earth.
Sersi forms the Uni-Mind with the Brethren to defeat the Collector,
despite the fact that forming the Uni-Mind with another species is forbidden to Eternals.
Sersi's behavior changes in the aftermath of this event. She becomes more violent and unstable,
even as she starts to fall for her fellow Avenger, Dane Whitman.
Things are thrown into outright chaos when the Avengers get involved in a huge interstellar
war between the Kree and Shi'ar, which turns out to be a ruse concocted by the
Kree's Supreme Intelligence. When the Avengers learn of this plot,
a breakaway group — including Sersi — kills him. And this tears the Avengers apart.
Complicating things further, Dane develops feelings for new teammate Crystal,
and against his better judgment, starts a romance with Sersi, too. This does little to calm Sersi,
who soon grows even more troubled. When the team travels to a distant dimension and fails to stop
a young girl from being sacrificed by a priest, Sersi ends up killing the priest in revenge.
After killing the priest, Sersi flees to Wakanda. Dane talks her into coming back, but upon her
return, she inexplicably attacks the Avengers. She is eventually defeated by an imposter of
the Vision who has been sent to infiltrate the team. It turns out that Anti-Vision is one of
the Gatherers, whose leader, the mysterious Proctor, is hellbent on terrorizing Sersi.
Sersi's fellow Eternals Ikaris, Arex, and Sprite arrive and demand the Avengers
hand Sersi over to them. Ikaris says she is suffering from a form of insanity found in
Eternals called the Mahd Wy'ry, and that it was probably caused by her use of the Uni-Mind.
Now, her fellow Eternals plan to take her home to Olympia and have her "cleansed,"
which means disintegrating her at a molecular level — the Eternal equivalent of execution.
The Avengers don't like the sound of this, and a short fight ensues, only ending when
Sprite reads Sersi's mind and realizes she is in love with Dane. Without asking his permission,
Ikaris bonds Dane to Sersi as her Gann Josin, or soulmate. Dane, who had just made a move on
Crystal, is forced into following a terrifying imperative: Be with Sersi, or let her die.
Sersi's life continues to spiral out of control, especially after she is connected
to the deaths of two detectives. And when the police arrive to arrest her for the killings,
she responds by leveling Avengers Mansion and destroying the Brooklyn Bridge.
Dane remains by her side, forced by their bond into standing with her...
until Sersi goes after Crystal, that is. Only then does Dane realize that she needs to be stopped.
At this point, the enigmatic Proctor captures her and reveals himself as the Dane Whitman of
an alternate universe. He was rejected by the Sersi of his world, so he made it his mission
to drive her insane in every other reality, using powers stolen from a Watcher. At last,
Sersi knows her erratic behavior is not her fault — but the damage has been done
regardless. Sersi kills him with his own Ebony Blade and exiles herself to another
dimension. The Dane of her world, his own mind cleared by Proctor's death, opts to join her.
Sersi and Dane enter the Ultraverse of Malibu Comics,
home to an alternate Earth and a whole other cast of superheroes.
The journey has the desired effect, as Sersi is able to exist dimensions away from Proctor's
control and so finally comes to her senses. That clarity doesn't last long, unfortunately,
as she is immediately possessed by a heretofore unknown Infinity Gem called the Ego Gem.
Subsequently, the other Infinity Gems are transported to the Ultraverse,
along with the trickster god Loki.
"Surprise."
Loki obtains the other six Gems, and the possessed Sersi sends a superhero team called Ultraforce,
led by Dane, after him. When the Grandmaster travels to the Ultraverse to seek his old Mind
Gem, he proposes a contest to Loki. His pawns will be the Avengers, zapped to the Ultraverse,
while Loki's team will be Ultraforce. Loki wins, but it turns out that this was all a
ruse for Sersi to get close enough for the Ego Gem to reunite with the other legendary stones.
The Gem becomes a sentient, godlike being named Nemesis.
Nemesis combines the two universes but can't quite hold them together, and is ultimately defeated
when Dane cuts off her crown with the Ebony Blade. That splits the Gems apart once again,
reconstitutes the Ultraverse, and gives Dane and Sersi the chance to return home.
When they return to Earth, Sersi and Dane don't arrive in the present day.
Instead, they find themselves in the midst of the Crusades.
Dane's mind winds up in the body of a Crusader ancestor named Eobar Garrington,
and it takes Sersi convincing Eobar's spirit to move on before Dane can assert himself.
Eobar's best friend and fellow Crusader, Bennet du Paris, isn't pleased about all this, as the
pair had been on their way to find the Eternal Pharoah in his Tower of Power. Dane's accidental
takeover of Eobar's body spells the end of that quest, angering Bennet, who goes on by himself.
Bennet is then found by the Pharaoh, who turns out to be the mutant supervillain Apocalypse.
"I… have returned."
He activates Bennet's latent mutant powers, and Bennet becomes the powerful telepath,
Exodus. Apocalypse orders him to kill Dane and Sersi, but he refuses to kill his old friend. So,
as punishment, Apocalypse strips him of his powers and traps him in suspended animation for the next
900 years. Exodus would later be freed by Magneto in an X-Factor storyline from the early '90s.
In the end, Sersi and Dane manage to return to their rightful time,
albeit once again in different places. The trip tears apart their Gann Josin link, too,
and Sersi and Dane decide to split up for good.
Left with nowhere else to go, Sersi returns to Olympia. At the time, Apocalypse is busy turning
Deviants into mindless monsters who have begun attacking humans, and so the Eternals pose as
a new team of superheroes called the New Breed. Joining them, Sersi takes the code-name Mesmer.
This lasts until the mischievous Eternal known as Sprite pulls his ultimate prank in
the lead-up to the 2006 Eternals series: Erasing the memories of every Eternal.
As a result, Sersi becomes a mild-mannered party planner,
ignorant of her powers and origin. When one of her parties is attacked by terrorists, Makkari,
her former lover and fellow Eternal, helps stop them. Iron Man then shows up to question Makkari,
who is living an amnesiac life as Mark Curry. Stark recognizes Sersi as a former Avenger,
but is shocked to discover that there is no record of her in any of the team's files.
As it turns out, this is all a Deviant ruse, designed to awaken the Dreaming Celestial,
who had been banished to Earth for speaking out against the abuse of Deviants. When
Makkari convinces the Dreaming Celestial to wait fifty years before passing judgement on Earth,
Sersi decides to give up superheroics once and for all. She goes back to her party planning job,
and other than occasionally advising the Avengers, keeps her promise to stay retired.
In 2018's Avengers #1, the bodies of dead Celestials begin raining down on Earth.
Who could have killed these omnipotent beings so easily? As it turns out,
it was the Final Host of Dark Celestials, ready to wipe out the Earth for good.
The Avengers learn that the Celestials serve a transcendent being called the Fulcrum,
and their job is to not only experiment on young worlds, but to destroy them after millions of
years in order to reap their energy. The Fulcrum also created a race of insect creatures called
the Horde, and the Dark Celestials came about when the Horde infected a number of Celestials.
The Eternals learn that their true purpose wasn't to protect humanity after all, but
to cultivate them like crops for the good of the Celestials. This realization drives them all mad,
leading to each of their deaths. Thanks to Ikaris' last words,
Iron Man is able to determine a way for humans to form the Uni-Mind. He is then
told that something in human DNA can stop the Horde, and the Avengers manage to save the day.
Some time later, Sersi and her fellow Eternals are resurrected by the machines that give their
kind their immortality. After a short conflict with Thanos, however, Ikaris discovers another
horrifying truth behind their existence: essentially, that a human being is killed
every time an Eternal is resurrected. Ikaris decides this process is pretty much unacceptable,
and he, Sersi, and their fellow Eternals set out to solve the problem once and for all.
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