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Robert Greenberger
by Robert Greenberger
By 1965, it was becoming clear marvel Comics was thriving beyond publisher Martin Goodman or editor-in-chief Stan Lee’s wildest expectations. After decades honing their skills, Stan and his veteran artists — Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, et. al. — had learned the craft well enough to work things out in verbal shorthand, freeing the beleaguered writer/editor from the pesky process of producing full scripts. By then, his typewritten plots were down to notes and conversations. Whereas people like gene Colan would come to the office with a tape recorder to capture the plotting session, Stan and Jack had it down to conversations on the drive from the marvel offices in Manhattan to their homes on long Island.
Jack would take the gist of the conversation and go draw 20 pages of wonderment, noting crucial elements and rough dialogue in the margins. By this time, their magic had been exceptionally fertile with memorable characters arriving with startling regularity. but even Lee was shocked to receive the pencils to fantastic four #48 and see this gleaming naked person floating through space atop a surfboard. The Silver Surfer was functioning as herald to the cosmic entity known as Galactus and the last great epic of that early marvel Age was underway.
Silver Surfer epic Collection: When calls Galactus SC
The Silver Surfer transcended the four-color pages and became one of the famous figures of the pop art era, found stuck on record album covers, referenced in songs and making his way into the zeitgeist. It’s hard to imagine someone original cutting through the clutter so easily today and to better understand how this happened, marvel has kindly collected those crucial early appearances into volume one of the Silver Surfer epic Collection: When calls Galactus. everything here has been previously collected so you might consider this Silver Surfer: The good parts collection.
Fantastic four #49
Given the odd plotting going on at this point, an Inhumans adventure ends halfway through FF #48 then the Surfer arrives and his story takes up all of #49 but then just part of #50 so we get only the pertinent pages here. Lee, Kirby, and embellisher Joe Sinnott a lot more than supply the action and thrills as the first genuinely cosmic saga of the modern marvel universe was revealed to a breathless audience. given that the FF had only been to the moon before this moment, it’s a significant revelation of what lay beyond the solar system, even though the Watcher himself represented the larger universe, but never spoke of it. (Similarly, pages form issues #56 and 61 spotlighting the Surfer are included here).
Fantastic four #55
Late that year, to show a reporter from The Herald Tribune how they collaborated, Lee tossed out the notion, “The thing finally beats the Silver Surfer, but Alicia makes him realize he’s made a horrible mistake. This is what the thing has always feared a lot more than anything else, that he would lose control and really clobber somebody.” So began the plot to his next appearance in issue #55. As Sean Howe noted in his marvel Comics the Untold Story, “Kirby had changed it, and expanded it, significantly. It appeared as the coda to a grand space opera, a brew of existentialism and high adventure for which he had the heavy lifting…”
Fantastic four #57
If anything, it closed one chapter and set the stage for another which ran in issues #57-60 as doctor Doom arrived with a device that somehow managed to transfer the Power Cosmic from Norrin Radd into himself. now possessed with unrestricted energy, Doom easily defeated his hated enemies while Radd struggled to make sense of life without his power, trapped on an alien world. The story sprawls and is one of the last significant stories the two giants generated for this title.
While both men saw incredible potential in the Surfer, it turns out they saw him differently. To Kirby, he was cold, alien and aloof, a lot more Spock than Shakespeare. Lee, though, saw him as a great tragedian, commenting on human folly while seeking acceptance among mankind. Still, they thought he’d make a fine solo star and even successfully produced a pilot issue, inked by Frank Giacoia, which didn’t earn him a spot on the then-limited publishing schedule so it was run off in fantastic four annual #5. By 1968, when marvel was finally able to expand, the Surfer received his solo book but without Kirby as Lee effectually kept him for himself, refusing to let any other writer use him.
He and Kirby continued to concurrently use him as a guest in FF as seen in the one-off battle from issue #72 before Galactus returned in issues #74-77. this time he has sent his Punisher to retrieve his errant herald but the FF fight alongside their friend. To secure him fromGalactus, they bring the Surfer to Subatomica, which meant, of course, they encountered the emotionally-manipulative Psycho-Man.
Tales To Astonish #93
Interestingly, the first guest appearance the Surfer made beyond FF was in Tales to Astonish where Lee pitted the Power Cosmic against the extraordinary might of the Hulk. In a two-parter from issues #92-93, the Hulk once a lot more seeks isolation and when he sees a “flying saucer” he leaps after it in the hopes it will take him from Earth. Instead, he brings down the Silver Surfer and once they tussle, it’s a titanic matchup. once the Surfer knocked out the jade-jawed giant, he scanned the figure and realized he could reverse the gamma-irradiated blood that indicated Bruce Banner could be “cured” once and for all. When the Hulk wakes up, though, he has other ideas. The artistic interpretation by Marie Severin and Giacoia is a little less majestic than Kirby or John Buscema but still in the mighty marvel manner.
His solo series has earned incredible acclaim but none of that could have happened until these seminal stories paved the way and they are well worth a fresh look.
Purschae
Silver Surfer epic Collection: When calls Galactus
Classic art from the Grand Comics Database