He may feel positively, but he has expressed doubts about it.
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This may be a foreign concept to you, but perhaps he was just being humble.

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That depends on how you define "commercial success". SANDMAN was/is published thru Vertigo, and the expectations over there are a lot lower than in the other DC departments. If SANDMAN had been published as a regular DC book, alongside SUPERMAN and BATMAN, it would not hve been seen as quite such a "success".

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Hi, JB. You are, of course, correct in that respect. I remember working on staff at Marvel in the early 90s and  was always astonished by the how low the numbers on the Vertigo titles were. I think SANDMAN was only selling about 50K back then (and it was Vertigo's top seller). So yes, had SANDMAN been published as a regular DC title, it would have crashed, burned, and been cancelled inside of a year.

However, I was referring to the fact that someone in DC's sales department recognized that they had a steady seller in SANDMAN with an audience that kept coming back for more (not to mention a large female crossover audience). This is borne out by the fact that DC is still reprinting SANDMAN in trade paperback form (and the fact that there have been countless SANDMAN-related spinoffs over the last decade). So, yes, compared to THE ETERNALS, SANDMAN can be seen as a commercial success. 

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I have read every issue of Kirby's ETERNALS (even following it up with the Peter B. Gillis run in the 80s) and have co-written an ETERNALS one-shot. After reading the first issue of the current series, I had no impression that any revisions were being made. There is a mystery, to be sure, but I see this as no indication that prior continuity is being ignored. As a matter of fact, Gaiman even references events from the original Kirby series...I'm interested to see what he adds to the mythos.

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Since Gaiman has informed us that Kirby "got it wrong" it would seem a bit pollyanna to assume that he will continue the game plan Kirby set in motion. I somehow cannot imagine Gaiman, after a year on THE ETERNALS, cheerily announcing "See? I got it wrong, too!"

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Gaiman never said Kirby got it wrong. If I'm not mistaken, he is quoted as saying "Kirby didn't get it quite right." Big difference. In school, whenever a teacher said I got something wrong it was different from saying I didn't get something quite right, the difference between getting an F or a B, the difference between being grounded by your folks and being told to study harder next time.

Long story short: IMHO I think Gaiman is trying to say that if Jack Kirby couldn't make THE ETERNALS into a commercial success (the criteria by which companies like Marvel and DC decide to continue publishing funny books) like his previous creations (FANTASTIC FOUR, HULK, THE AVENGERS, etc.), then it's doubtful that he will either. That doesn't sound like hubris to me. 

I wonder if Kirby had created an ultimate villain for the Eternals like Darkseid it might have been a bigger success than it was....

The Deviants were very cool but they didnt have the one guy that really blew your socks off as THE BAD GUY. Although I would guess that Kirby didnt want to repeat himself that much with the series...

Kirby's villains to me were always the more compelling.

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I thought Kro was a compelling complex villian. Karkas and the Reject are two more interesting Deviants.

Doesn't matter Matt.  People here what they want to hear.  I think many don't like Gaiman just because so many people do.  Its sad that popularity has become such a crime.