Marvel: Eternals

I've just finished reading Eternals #1-7 (written by Neil Gaiman, pencils by John Romita Jr., inks by Danny Miki) and-- this was just weird. I'm completely unfamiliar with any previous incarnation of these characters which were presumably created by Kirby judging from the credits, but clearly I've been missing a *lot* of weird mythological set-up of the Marvel universe by mostly just following Daredevil and Spider-Man, if this is the set-up of things in their main universe. Really a lot.

I mean, a sleeping God-robot ("Celestial"), reminiscent of Lovecraft, others of that kind who come visit as a horde to eat Deviants (or I guess more correctly "Changing People" in their own nomenclature) who are somehow a previous monster evolution that subjugated humans. And the Celestials put the one to sleep because he protested the Deviant eating, but the vegetarian God-robot isn't really a good guy either, because he now kind of wants to destroy earth and only waits to judge for a bit after he watched a lot of tv and absorbed the internet or something? Meanwhile strange immortal protector things (machines?), i.e. the Eternals have secret cities in Antarctica that nobody noticed? Also now one of them is a Messiah for the Changing People somehow?

It's not that I disliked the story, I was even kind of hooked, but also very obviously missing all kinds of context.

ETA: Rereading my entry, I am making much less sense than the comic about what confused me. Well, the story as I understood it is more or less like this:

( cut for more concrete spoilers, and where exactly the story lost me )

banner images?

Does anyone know of any tutorials or pointers or something on how to make banner images made from several elements look not lame?

I have been thinking about maybe switching to one of those "expressive" LJ blog-style layouts, but if I do I'd like to have my own custom banner. I thought it might look nice if I'd use some of the pencil drawings I made for my icons and combine them into a banner, but all my attempts look lame, kind of like those atrocious c&p wallpapers made up from several screencaps, where you can see that someone just pasted some random images onto a background.