Silver Surfer 8 from the IDW Artist Edition - a Review

Silver Surfer #8 (September 1969)
"Now Strikes the Ghost!"
Stan Lee-John Buscema/Dan Adkins

Raise your hand if you have a love/hate relationship with the Silver Age Silver Surfer. He's a cool character - to that we can all agree. But if you've ever sat and read a lengthy stretch of his solo series, you may have needed therapy. It is one of the most annoying, even somewhat depressing, runs of any comic I've ever read. In the hands of Stan Lee, the Surfer is moodily over-written. I think if I'd purchased the books off the spinner racks when they were bi-monthly I could have put up with it. But reading from an Epic Collection, Masterworks, etc. is just too much. Am I wrong?

So what we have here today, friends, is a bit of a twofer. I read from the softcover Silver Surfer Marvel Masterworks, volume 2, and used a few scans from it to place alongside photographs from IDW's John Buscema's Silver Surfer Artist Edition. Who doesn't need a splash of color every now and then? Let's get after it...

100-Word Review:

Always seeking a way to torment the Silver Surfer, Mephisto schemes a new plot to win the hero’s soul. Finding a human through which to create a conduit to Limbo, the demon is able to summon a once-dead ship’s captain from centuries ago: the Flying Dutchman! After hearing how the Dutchman had lived a hateful, self-centered life and had made a deal with the devil, Mephisto imbues him with power enough to battle the Surfer. But will this new Ghost prove up to the task? And what of the Surfer’s continued quest to reunite with his love, Shalla Bal? Will the Ghost ruin that wish?

The Good: I love it when characters behave just as we'd expect them to. But wait, you say - above, it was stated that the Silver Surfer could be a tired character. Yes indeed - and that's not who I am staring with. I want to focus on Mephisto. You know, for most folks the Surfer is so closely associated with Galactus, and then perhaps Dr. Doom. But you know who turns up continually in the Surfer's solo mag? The Prince of Darkness himself. I'd go so far as to say he should get a supporting-actor credit. I'm not sure his whole angle about having to find the devil-worshipper in order to create a gateway to bring the undead back to life (wait...) made sense, but then I suppose the supernatural doesn't have to make sense. Probably better just to roll with it.

The backstory of the Flying Dutchman and the creation of the Ghost was well done. I liked the rationale for the character, growing from his past motivations. The Ghost was enough different - and super-creepy - to be an effective updating of the former ship's captain. I even thought it was interesting that he'd get around on his former watercraft.

John Buscema's splash page as the Dutchman is revived was powerful, both in the original art as well as the colored version. It might have been a bit more effective, however, with more blacks in the background. But what do I know. Buscema did a marvelous job of taking this dead body and reanimating it in such a way that the two characters looked similar.

The half-splash when the Ghost is revealed, with a little Kirby Krackle in the first panel, was also pretty awesome. One can almost smell the brimstone from all that swirling smoke!

Lastly, that the Silver Surfer hardly appeared in his own mag, but it was still a fun issue, was the mark of an effective plot and execution.

The Bad: I don't have much to say here, as usual. I think I'd just reiterate the vibe I was sending above when I remarked that sometimes this series just wore on a reader. If there was one thing we could count on, it was Norrin Radd's incessant pining for Shalla Bal. And guess what? We got a 2-page vignette of just that in this story! Thank goodness Shalla is so beautifully rendered by Big John. In the hands of a lesser artist, I'd have annoying words and a less-pleasing lady to look at.

The Ugly: I don't even know what to call what happened at the end of the story. It's sort of the opposite of the Dreaded Deadline Doom in that we didn't get shorted an original story - instead, we got a cut-in-half tale with the promise of a big finish in the next installment. I tossed this out on Twitter a few weeks ago and asked readers if they thought this was a) crafty marketing or b) a way to draw attention to a magazine with sagging sales. Most respondents scored those choices a tie. I've included all the particulars on the last three art samples, which will enlarge for your perusing enjoyment.

Jim Starlin - Cosmically Aware...

Longtime readers of my musings will recall that my writing partner, Karen, is far more attuned to the work of Jim Starlin than am I. Relatively speaking, I'm a newcomer to appreciating Starlin's cosmic sagas in the Marvel Universe.

I think it must have been budgetary concerns (hey, a kid only has so many quarters!) in my youth that caused me to skip the Captain Marvel and Warlock comics of the early-mid Bronze Age. I'd wager that my only exposure to Starlin's art as a child were a few issues he did on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and of course the immortal Avengers Annual #7 (but even then, I didn't read Marvel Two-In-One Annual #2 until years and years later!). I have since made up for this transgression against one of the all-time greats, acquiring numerous trade paperbacks and hardcover collections that reprint his work. I have especially enjoyed the massive Avengers vs. Thanos tpb, which made a nice tutorial ahead of the latter Marvel Cinematic Universe films.

Starlin also had a turn at DC, but my encounters with him across the 1980s often saw him in the writer's chair.

Enjoy today's sampling of his characters and his line art. And as always, I make no claim to any of these images, but am appreciative to those friends around the Internet who make them available so that we all might enjoy.

 

 

 

 

Jack Kirby - A King with or without Colors!

 

True confession: As a kid growing up in the mid-1970s, I didn't "get" Jack Kirby. I was asked on Twitter a few weeks ago if I was in the market for the Kirby Returns King-Size Hardcover. Nope, I am not. While I already own the Behold: Galactus! hardcover and would like to get the Kirby is Mighty King-Sized Hardcover and the Kirby is... Fantastic! King-Sized Hardcover, I really hold no love for the King's return to Marvel. For that matter, I couldn't say I'm a fan of his short tenure at DC - but that's more to the fact that those years fall just before I became a regular reader of comics. But even then, it was mainly Marvel Comics. So the DC stuff has always been on my "I should really check that out someday" list. Perhaps that's my loss, because I know there are those who absolutely love Kirby's Fourth World and Kamandi.

My childhood memories of Jack Kirby are his fingers - chunky and boxed on the ends. I'd often look at my own little hands and wonder who had hands with square fingers? Of course Kirby's Silver Age material was always in print, in Marvel's Greatest Comics, for example, as well as in the Origins of Marvel Comics series of trade paperbacks from Fireside Books. I always liked the older FF and Captain America art I'd seen, and often wished that the then-present stuff still looked like that. But up against the Bronze Age's young guns? Kirby's art seemed distant to me. Of course, the years have shown me how immature I was, and I have a much greater appreciation for Kirby across his career.

Today I just want to celebrate some of Jack Kirby's pencil work, mainly in the form of convention sketches. Even here, when the King might have just banged out an image in a couple of minutes, we feel the energy. Jack never left his fans wanting in that category, and I hope you'll feel likewise today. Thanks to the wonderful folks across the Interwebs who have shared these works that I in turn bring to you today.