Silver Surfer #1 (1968)
by Stan Lee & John Buscema
This doubles as both part of the chronology of Galactus as well as the hero origin of Silver Surfer. Because while it’s not his first appearance, if might as well be considering it influences the character way much than the original Galactus Trilogy.
We begin with Silver Surfer, still trapped on Earth, doing his good deed of the day: saved an astronaut after a botched return from orbit.
And being attacked for it. Well it IS the Marvel Universe.
Notice the astronaut name is given as Jameson. It’s assumed this is John Jameson, the son of J. Jonah Jameson who is indeed an astronaut who occasionally turns into a werewolf, but weirdly enough he’s not credited.
This series has a lot in its favor to be my tastes:
1) it’s historically significant
2) Stan Lee was very proud of it, and I really like Stan’s writing
3) I really like Silver Surfer as a character, and this series clearly influences him a lot
That being said… I can’t freaking stand Silver Surfer in this series!!!
I find his e-n-d-l-e-s-s monologuing and moralizing to be absolutely insufferable.
Silver Surfer then begins narrating his origin story. Turns out that before he was a bald alien, the Silver Surfer was actually… a bald alien. But of a different color!
We learn that Silver Surfer was once Norrin Radd from planet Zenn-La, your typical utopia full of incredibly bored people.
At least according to Norrin? Honestly everybody else looks fine with the way things are.
Being turned into Silver Surfer isn’t what burdened Norrin with the curse of endless monologuing. He was already like that.
We interrupt this flashback for a scene where Silver Surfer fights some yetis.
Kind or random, but at least it prevents me from falling asleep.
Dude, have you considered that the reason why people don’t want you around is that YOU NEVER STOP TALKING about how much your life sucks!
The life of being immortal and the most powerful being on the planet, by the way!
Who keeps monologuing how terrible human beings are for not helping each other? Who barely ever uses his PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS to bother helping humans?
Are you sure that has nothing to do with people not liking to be around you, Surfer?
No, silly me, it’s just that humanity sucks. Which… yeah he’s got us there. But that still doesn’t make me like Surfer.
Silver Surfer also recalls his encounter with Doctor Doom, and this is a good moment to talk about the artwork. John Buscema is the saving grace of this series; he’s awesome through most of it, and even manages to get a passable Kirby imitation.
Most of the time. That is one awful Doom mask.
I swear every single page I want to scream at this comic to just shut up.
The flashback introduces us to Silver Surfer long-lost love, Shalla Bal.
Although I would argue that his one true love is angst.
Until one day, Zenn-La gets its first invasion in who knows how many millennia.
The Zenn-lavians
The Zenn-las
The Zenn-lacans
The people of Zenn-La are pacifists are not defenseless: they have the Weapon Supreme.
Well they SAY they are pacifists, but they do have a weapon that can apparently obliterate entire solar systems. I’m not convinced that thing has only been used for peace.
Aaaaand it does nothing to the invader.
I should point out that the invader hasn’t done anything nefarious to Zenn-La up to this point, and it doesn’t look like they actually know who this is.
These guys just saw there was ONE SHIP approaching the planet and they went into full panic mode!!!
You know what? I’m actually reconsidering my distaste for how insufferable Silver Surfer is in this series, because apparently the rest of his people are even worse.
I really must stress once again that the ship hasn’t actually attacked, it just got past the defenses.
I get being scared, but this level of panic is frankly ridiculous.
Norrin manages to take a ship to confront the invader, who you might have guessed is a Galactus splash page.
Norrin tries to argue with Galactus that he doesn’t necessarily have to eat THIS planet.
Galactus answers is basically “why should I bother going to the grocery store where I’m already sitting at a restaurant?”.
Surprisingly, Galactus is the one to bring up the idea of having a herald to look for planets.
This actually fits nicely with later retcons that clarified there were other heralds BEFORE Silver Surfer.
Norrin offers himself as the next herald. The position actually has great job security: sure Galactus can fire you at any moment, but you get to keep your powers indefinitely!
The fact that Galactus accepts this bargain is proof that he isn’t as beyond humanity as he pretends to be. He keeps comparing the inhabitants of the worlds he eats to ants, but then accepts to exchange said planet for one ant. Clearly he cares more than he wants to admit.
Planets Galactus failed to eat: 3
We get two full pages for the transformation from Norrin Radd to Silver Surfer.
The first is quite experimental and often forgotten.
The second one though, that’s the one that becomes part of Surfer’s iconography.
Galactus is the one to come up with the surfboard, weirdly enough. Future retellings will add the fact that he took this idea from Norrin’s mind.
But in the original version? Galactus surfs.
This is the greatest thing that could possibly happen to Norrin Radd.
Except for, you know, all the genocides he’ll help commit.
Given their earlier interactions, I’m not so convinced he’s heartbroken about leaving Shalla-Bal behind.
There really isn’t a compelling reason for why Silver Surfer couldn’t take Shalla-Bal with him.
Galactus clearly doesn’t care, his powers would be enough to allow her to survive in space, and there’s more than plenty of room in Galactus’s ship.
I wish someone wrote a What If where she does accompany him, that’ be interesting.
And after a quick recap of the Galactus trilogy…
…we have the setup for Endless Monologue: The Series.
Historical significance: 10/10
With a few additions… most of which to make Norrin’s life actually depressing for legitimate reasons before his transformation… this is still the current origin.
And Silver Surfer actually owes more to this incarnation that to the Galactus Trilogy, where he didn’t really do much.
Silver Age-ness: 6/10
That is some serious overacting and over reacting by the people of Zenn-La.
Plus, random yetis.
Does it stand the test of time? 5/10
My distaste for this series is mostly due to the following issues; this one is almost fine.
The origin is a classic, drawing on a lot of tropes from classic science fiction.
But for a 1968 story it’s weirdly decompressed… not a whole lot actually happens here, and there are A LOT of establishing panels that go nowhere. Good Buscema artwork, but it gets tiresome after a while; especially since we already know Norrin will become Silver Surfer.
For some reason, the issue also has a re-telling of the Watcher story from Tales of Suspense #53.
That will actually be relevant to the Doom retrospective soon-ish.
It’s still written by Stan Lee, but unlike the original version it has some AMAZING artwork by Gene Colan.
How close is this to the modern character? 8/10
I’ve already about the creation of Silver Surfer in the review of the Galactus Trilogy.
It’s often misremembered that Stan Lee did this series after Kirby left Marvel, but that’s not the case at all: in fact Kirby will draw the last issue of the series.
Speaking of which, since it only lasted 18 issues it’s worth mentioning what happens next.
Issue 2 introduces the Badoon alien race. They won’t bother many Marvel characters for quite a while, but they will be important for the introduction of the original Guardians of the Galaxy.
Issue 3 introduces arguably Silver Surfer’s nemesis, and an important part of the Marvel Universe… Mephisto. Who is just INDESCRIBABLY COOL with Buscema pencils!!!
Issue 4 is a slugfest with Thor.
Issue 5 was reportedly one of Stan Lee’s favorite stories. Sadly, not because of Surfer’s incredible disguise.
No it’s mostly because it’s the tragic story of a scientist who befriends Silver Surfer and ends up sacrificing his life to save the world.
I really can’t tell why Stan was so proud of it; it’s not BAD (aside for Surfer being insufferable, but that’s a given), but he’s written way better stories.
Issue 6 is a kind of unremarkable time travel story, and in issue 7 Silver Surfer fights Frankenstein.
Not Frankenstein’s MONSTER, mind you: a mad scientist who is the descendant of the original Victor Frankenstein.
Believe it or not, that’s far from his most unexpected foe in this series.
I mean, in issue 8 his enemy is the Flying Dutchman.
He then fights regular humans until issue 11, then Abomination in issue 12 (which I’ll review at some point) and a super-robot in issue 13.
Then Spider-Man in issue 14 (you might remember we saw the Spidey Super Stories version of this) and the Human Torch in issue 15.
It’s back to Mephisto in issue 16, SHIELD in issue 17, and in the final issue 18 the Inhumans.
This is the last time Jack Kirby draws Silver Surfer in an in-continuity story; he’ll have one final story later in the Galactus chronology.
As for why I don’t like this series… well… like 95% is like this.
Not a bad message of course, but man does it get tiresome after so many pages.
And despite going on and on and on about how much humans sucks, occasionally Silver Surfer pulls crap like THIS.
The series ends with THIS splash page (and a plot thread that will basically be ignored until continuity inserts decades later), so… yeah I can’t imagine why people don’t like you, Surfer.
And that was the closest thing I’ll do to a retrospective on this series.
I like Silver Surfer, I like Stan Lee and I like John Buscema, but man is this series a chore.
After the series ended, Stan Lee became very protective of the character: either there was an actual rule that nobody could use him, or at least writers were reticent.
An exception, which will be relevant soon, was made for Steve Englehart who in 1972 made him join the Defenders. Or, given the status of the Defenders, maybe it’s better to say that he teamed up with them.
Silver Surfer bounced from series to series for decades, but nobody seemed to find a place for him.
Which I get: he’s ridiculously powerful and a loner, that’s a hard sell for a team book, and a solo series was out of the question for the longest time.
Plus, again, Silver Surfer is just too damn powerful to be confined to Earth: there are MAYBE half a dozen characters who could possibly be a challenge to him.
And given the importance of the Galactus Trilogy which established the barrier that prevented Surfer from leaving, you couldn’t even take him to space.
Until in 1987, when either the rules were relaxed or someone made up his mind to actually use Silver Surfer for SOMETHING.
It’s notable that the one to launch the new Silver Surfer regular series AND to take him back to space was none other than Steve Englehart, probably because he already had a connection with the character.
But how to make Silver Surfer get past the barrier? He tried countless times for TWENTY-ONE YEARS and nobody, not even Reed Richards, ever asked: could you try without the surfboard?
AND IT WORKED.
Stan Lee wasn’t happy about someone else writing a regular Silver Surfer series.
After I gave up Spider-Man then someone else did Spider-Man, and someone else did the Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange and the X-Men and all of them. I felt that it was kind of nice for me to have been the only writer of the Silver Surfer, so I felt a little bit disappointed when somebody else did it. I would have liked to have been the only person. Had I known they were absolutely going to have the book done, I would have found the time to do it myself. I didn’t really have time but I would have made the time, rather than have anybody else do it… this is not at all a criticism of Steve or of Marshall [Rogers, first penciler of the series], it’s just that it’s one book that I would have liked to have always done myself.
STAN LEE
I couldn’t POSSIBLY go into depth about the rest of Surfer’s history, but I can talk about his editorial history.
Surprisingly enough, the second series (annoyingly classified as “volume 3” because volume 2 is a graphic novel) was quite long-lived: it lasted 146 issues, until 1998.
And it included some solid runs:
-the Steve Englehart run
-the Jim Starlin run, my favorite
-the much-maligned but in my opinion underrated Ron Marz run
-the utterly confusing, non-sensical and continuity-breaking Perez run
-the semi-incomprehensible DeMatteis run
And while I acknowledge Kirby and Buscema are the superior artists… for nostalgic reasons, I can only imagine Silver Surfer with Ron Lim pencils.
That’s still BY FAR his longest running series:
-Volume 1 lasted 18 issues
-Volume 2 is a one-shot
-Volume 3 lasted 146 issues
-Volume 4 is the celebrated Stan Lee and Mobius two-parter
-Volume 5 lasted 14 issues, 2003-2004
-Volume 6 is a two-parter from 2011
-Volume 7 by Slott & Allred lasted 15 issues, 2014-2016
-Volume 8 by the same exact team lasted 14 issues, 2016-2017 (why even launch a new volume???)
And then he died in 2025.
In this 5-issue miniseries, he has to sacrifice his life to save the universe.
But before he does, he transfer his powers to the human Kelly Koh, a SHIELD agent who had been tasked to kill him.
Yeah that’s blatantly so that we can have a female version of Silver Surfer to coincide with the EXCELLENT Fantastic Four movie of the same year.
Time will tell if she sticks around. While the miniseries wasn’t bad (although not anywhere near as good as the movie), I doubt Marvel has many idea of what to actually do with her.
At most I’m giving Silver Surfer three to five years before the old version is back, but Kelly might stick around as a minor cosmic character.
If nothing else, no matter how annoying he can get… few characters can look as cool as Silver Surfer.
Just don’t give him pants or put a fin beneath the surfboard, I think either one makes him look sillier.
