We are approaching the conclusion of the retrospective; in fact, this is the last bad batch of stories.
Thankfully, I’ve already covered one of those.
Dazzler #10-11 (1981)
Writer: Danny Fingeroth (“from an idea by Tom DeFalco”)
pencils and cover by Frank Springer
In fact I’ve already talked about these issues TWICE, once prior to the whole Dazzler retrospective and once during it.
Even I am not masochistic enough to go through it a third time.
But there are a couple of Galactus details to point out.
One is this is the second appearance of the zoo located in his ship.
This is also the second storyline featuring Terrax, and he has ALREADY betrayed Galactus.
Of note is that Galactus explicitly acknowledges Terrax is evil, something that I don’t hink works well with the typical Galactus speech of being “beyond good and evil”.
We also have Dazzler temporarily becoming the 7th herald.
(if you’re lost, it’s because I’m counting Air-Walker twice: the original and the robot)
Number of Galactus heralds: 7
Once Dazzler rescues Terrax from a black hole through the power of sound and light… just go with it… Galactus decides Terrax has learned his lesson.
We’ll see how well THAT goes.
What did I score this trainwreck last time?
Historical significance: 7/10
Silver Age-ness: 1,000/10
Does it stand the test of time? 5/10
Yeah I think that holds up. There are way, WAY worse stories in the Dazzler series, and at least this one was entertainingly bad.
And as I have talked about once before, this storyline saved the whole Marvel Multivers.
Rom #26 (1981)
by Bill Mantlo & Sal Buscema
Let’s move instead to a series with far more dignity: the one based on a toy that is only remembered thanks to a series that had no reason to be as good as it was.
And we lose no time at all, because the story does begin with Terrax bringing Galactus to Galador, the planet Rom is from.
Hey at least he’s polite enough to give everyone the rest of the day off.
Kind of weird that this is only the first time where we actually see the entire reason for Terrax being a herald: that he doesn’t care about victims.
I’m not overly familiar with the surprisingly complex Rom lore (all of which comes from the comic by the way), so it’s nice for the characters to provide infodumps on their origins.
And even if they don’t, there’s always the narrator.
Not that we really needed to know the Prime Director, because he’s just a snack.
This leads to, what else, a Big Dumb Toy Fight.
Rom’s doppelganger Terminator (long story) goes straight for Galactus, with predictable results.
Amidst the confusion, Rom decides to go for the Galactus ship.
Slight error here: the one shown isn’t the spherical ship Galactus typically uses to travel to planets, this is his SOLAR-SYSTEM SIZED mothership.
Galactus doesn’t typically move that thing around, presumably because he doesn’t want its sheer gravity from spoiling his meals.
After a few unrelated subplots, Rom infiltrates the zoo. That place sure gets a lot of attention in this period.
Being existential, depressed and angry is kind of Rom’s thing, and Galactus brings out everything out of him.
Meanwhile Terrax is busy fighting Galador’s protector, the cybernetic Spaceknights.
This is also our official confirmation that this is set after the Dazzler story.
Rom’s design is a bit silly, but the Spaceknights are real powerhouses: they eventually overwhelm even a herald.
Terminator doesn’t have as much luck: once Galactus starts fighting, he obliterates him.
There’s a reason why this is the last appearance of the Galactus zoo: Rom destroys it.
That was just to get his attention though: Rom’s real plan is to have Galactus eat the planet of the sworn enemies of his people, the demonic Dire Wraiths.
Rom #27 (1981)
by Bill Mantlo & Sal Buscema
cover by Al Milgrom
The cover makes me wonder what would happen if Rom met Silver Surfer.
Probably 24 straight pages of angsty monologues.
This series can be… a lot… but Mantlo really put a lot of heart and thought into this.
It would’ve been easy to make Terminator just the evil copy of Rom, but not only this is actually pretty deep…
…it also sells how uncaring Galactus is VERY effectively.
AND YET, Galactus is still humanoid enough to be affected by Rom’s plea and pay his respects to Terminator.
It must also be very frustrating to Terrax: not only he lost the fight, but Galactus is forcing him to bury one of the guys who beat him.
I have to stress that Mantlo had barely anything to work with: he built Rom’s entire mythology from scratch. It might have ultimately been a toy tie-in, but Mantlo made sure it would be more.
Of course saving your planet by dooming another isn’t very heroic, but it doesn’t take that long to convince the Spaceknights.
You may think this is an extreme reaction from the Spaceknights, who are supposed to be warriors of honor, but… the Dire Wraiths suck the brains out of their victims to assume their shape and memories, it’s not like the universe is going to miss them.
Galactus does bring up the fact that he really doesn’t have any reason to honor his word, but it’s pretty clear he’s mostly trying to convince HIMSELF.
Rom is similar enough to Silver Surfer to have Galactus reminisce about his long-lost lover herald, which makes Terrax quite jealous.
By this point, how long Silver Surfer had been herald wasn’t super-clear (we’ll eventually learn it was at least several thousand years)… but even at the time the idea that Terrax had led Galactus to more planets must’ve sounded ridiculous, right? This is only his THIRD storyline!
After some subplots, Galactus reaches the Dark Nebula: the place where the Dire Wraiths live, centered around a black sun.
I’m not trying to understand the black sun thing since there’s magic involved, but I have to say as an astronomy enthusiast that this series is VERY frustrating to me since it uses the terms galaxy and nebula as if they were interchangeable.
Terrax is a monster, sure, but can you blame him for trying to quit his job when his employer is CONSTANTLY pointing out how much he sucks?
Terrax tries to conquer the Dire Wraiths planet by himself, and it doesn’t go well.
And even Galactus is like “COME ON, how tough can those guys be?”.
I think the planet might be called Wraithworld; the comic isn’t super clear about that.
At this point, the specifics of what planets can feed Galactus was a bit nebulous, but at least the fact that they had to be PLANETS was consistent.
Now he decides to change his diet.
Mostly because Wraithworld is incredibly inedible.
In fact, Wraithworld kicks his purple ass all the way to the Milky Way.
I think that at this point both Galador and Wraithworld qualify.
Planets Galactus failed to eat: 6
At least he can fight the Black Sun itself.
NOPE!!!
Times Galactus has been beaten in a fight: 3
Galactus either laughs at this or he’s about to sneeze.
Galactus does take his revenge though, teleporting Galador out of its galaxy.
Had this series been ANYWHERE consistent whether it means an actual galaxy or a nebula or a solar system, I could’ve evaluated how impressive that was.
Historical significance: ???
I’m not knowledgeable enough about Rom to make the call whether this is significant for his series.
Silver Age-ness: 3/10
On one hand we have a planet trying to eat Galactus (!!!) and the extremely expositional dialogue. On the other hand, way too much existentialism.
Does it stand the test of time? 7/10
As a Rom story, it’s pretty much the standard for the series. Which I recommend reading, if you find a way: Marvel has lost long the license.
As a Galactus story though, it’s pretty weak. It doesn’t seem to make up its mind whether we get the aloof Galactus or the more villainous Galactus, making his scenes feel inconsistent.
While it was cathartic to see him lose quite badly, it does introduce a trend that tends to come and go with Galactus: the easiest way to introduce a powerful adversary is making him beat Galactus.
It’s not THAT frequent, as several writers are reticent to downgrade Big G too much, but it’s a recurrent problem for him.
If it was just the Rom scenes though, I would probably rank this a little bit higher because despite the now old-fashioned dialogue there’s a lot that holds up very well.
Silver Surfer vol2 #1
script by Stan Lee
plot, pencils and cover by John Byrne
This is a one-shot, but it’s officially counted as the second volume by Marvel.
It’s the first time Silver Surfer is able to leave Earth because of some Reed Richards invention.
And the first time he returns to his native planet Zenn-La, only to find out it’s been devastated.
All because Galactus was angry about him leaving…
…leading him to EATING ZENN-LA.
Adding insult to injury, Mephisto has kidnapped Silver Surfer’s lover, Shalla-Bal, and the two fight for her soul.
Shalla-Bal dies in the fight, but Silver Surfer resurrects her and sends her back to the new home of the people of Zenn-La… with enough cosmic charge to heal the world.
I’m not going to review the special because Galactus is BARELY in it.
He certainly feels out of character, and overall the story isn’t all that great… but I still recommend checking it out because the artwork is absolutely stunning, especially with the Tom Palmer inks.
This special really feels like it’s not supposed to be canon… but it was directly referenced in 1987, both in the first and the second issue of the following volume.
