Galactus - The Hand Of God!

The Silver Surfer graphic novel from 1978 is part of the Fireside publishing program which gave us the four Origins of the Marvel Universe books and the The Art of Marvel Comics.

It's to my understanding the final collaboration between Stan "The Man" Lee and Jack "King" Kirby. The Silver Surfer is Jack Kirby's creation, no one disputes that these days, but Stan is a little coy on that particular detail in his introduction to this alternate version of the Surfer's initial trip to Earth.

There is no Fantastic Four to stop Galactus this time, and as far as I can tell, there are no other superheroes of any kind. No Watcher appears to give warning that Surfer is about to descend and bring the Devourer of Worlds to the hapless globe.

Instead we have a story from the Surfer's perspective for the most part which begins with the hand of Galactus opening and releasing the Surfer into the universe.

The dialogue tells us this is Norrin Radd of Zenn-La who left his planet and his love Shalla-Bal to serve Galactus. We see the Surfer as he comes to Earth and for reasons which even the Surfer seems confused about is struck by some aspect of humanity which he deems worthy to keep. So he turns on his master and is stuck down, forced to stay on the planet he has championed.

Later Galactus seems to regret his decision and having consulted his own quality of deviousness fashions a woman intended to seduce the Surfer and return him to the side of his master. Ardina is a golden woman who appears to have the essence of Shalla-Bal in some sense and the Surfer is indeed much attracted to this golden woman and the two have a dalliance. But afterwards when confronted with the choice of returning to Galactus, the Surfer rejects his master again.

The two meet and have conversation with humans but in the end the Surfer leaves and Ardina having failed in her initial mission is drawn back to her master who has set up a base of sorts on the Moon.

Ardina is again tasked with bringing the Surfer back, this time with a different bargain. Galactus has found he needs and wants his herald back and offers the Surfer his freedom from Earth and a return to servitude for Galactus. All this and Earth can live.

The Surfer still seems torn and soon loses Ardina who is reduced by Galactus to her atoms. But in the end the Silver Surfer sees that he has little choice if Earth is to survive and so he accepts the conditions offered by Galactus and flies back into space, returning once again to hand from which he had first emerged in his shining glory.

This is a weird story, more a fable really. It's set apart from the Marvel Universe and since it largely capitulates the events of the first Galactus story in the Fantastic Four, it cannot be blended into chronology. I suspect this story occupies an Earth which has been given a number designation by now, but I haven't yet bothered to look that up. This is a very talky tale with exceedingly little "action". There is a battle between the Surfer and Galactus but it's mostly a miss since we know how that has to turn out. There is no Ultimate Nullifier this time, so Galactus withdraws from Earth the first time for his own reasons.

We do get a fascinating sequence when the Surfer adopts a human guise and walks among men, falling victim to crime almost immediately. Despite this, he continues to champion mankind and sees in the youth  of the population a great hope. There is surprisingly little racial diversity in this story. All the characters who speak save one are white and even the crowd scenes have an upscale suburban look to them. This is weakness for a story which wants to preach about the needs of humanity to overcome its differences. This is a surprising failure on Kirby's part. There is one significant black face in the story and sadly that belongs to a mugger. Perhaps I overstate this weakness but that it occurred to me at all is not good.

The way in which the Silver Surfer emerges from the hand of Galactus and then returns to it seems much more in keeping with Kirby's original conception of the character as being of pure energy and not really having a past. This story seems to want to have it both ways. Really it could be argued that this whole story is all about Galactus who divides aspects of himself out and then contends with them. The Surfer is part of him, the sly gray bird like man is part of him and Ardina likewise seems to be part of Galactus. It's only in the dialogue really that you see variations on this. Kirby was hurt when Stan absconded with the Surfer and contracted with John Buscema to do the series way back when. It was one of the many grudges he nursed as he took his talents to DC. Now a decade later we seem to get the Silver Surfer story that the King intended.

Kirby's original cover was rejected (sort of) and a version of that same illustration was done by veteran cover artist Earl Norem. To my eye the Norem cover is much weaker than the Kirby original, but that's how things went in the late 70's. If you'd like to actually read this epic fable check out this link. It's an amazing glimpse into the last hurrah for one of the great comic book duos.

And that wraps our Galactus coverage this month. I hope you enjoyed it, I know it's been fascinating to read and comment on these comics. Galactus returned a lot in subsequent years, in some so-so stories and in some wonderful ones, but alas he is by definition a character who is diminished the more you see of him.

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Galactus - Back To The Beginning!

The mystery of Galactus is finally solved in a pair of Thor comics by Jack "King" Kirby, Stan Lee and inker George Klein when Thor is tasked by his father Odin to find the World Eater. The burden is partially a result of Thor's having fallen victim to a berserker rage in conflict with the creature Him. To expiate this sin of wrath Thor is sent into the depths of space to find Galactus which he imagines might take many years. As it turns out it didn't.

Thor is actually found by Galactus who captures his ship and then offers up a sit down with the Son of Asgard, an opportunity to get acquainted. It seems that Galactus needs to open up to someone and he tells Thor about his own enigmatic origins. We meet a Watcher who finds a sole survivor of plague ship and we know we have seen the beginning of the story.

The story Galactus tells (and using arcane science shows) Thor begins on a planet named Taa which was a wonder and glorious place filled with erudite people who traveled about using spheres of pure thought. Into this splendid land comes a plague which is tracking relentlessly across the cosmos.

The people of Taa see the demise of their civilization and seem at a loss at how to save it.

One adventurous soul fights against the despair which the plague has brought and gathers some of his fellows, a few survivors and they use a spaceship to attempt to immolate themselves in a great sun before the disease can take them. They fail and while the ship enters the sun all die save one, the one who weirdly becomes something new and different.

It's that survivor who is saved by the Watcher who then sees this survivor becomes a creature of awesome unstoppable energy. The creature escapes the Watcher's confines and goes into space where it develops instrumentality to finish its transformation, making a great armor and fashioning a vast cube. Going into the cube the creature matures and when it emerges it has become Galactus. Thor is humbled by the tale and then is swept away by Odin back to Earth where he will join Balder and the Warriors Three against a deadly robot menace dubbed the Thermal Man.

This origin was reprinted in the 80's in a singular comic which bore the title of Super Villain Classics and featured Galactus. It sports a handsome cover by Bob Layton. The story presents us with a different kind of Galactus, less a force of impersonal nature and more a man who seems possessed of passions and perhaps even regret. Now reports say that Stan Lee injected his own opinions on this story and had Kirby do some major alterations as according to some he did not agree with Kirby's attempts to humanize the character. This is one of the last stories that Kirby had a major influence on before he left for the Distinguished Competition and to be honest these issues are somewhat cramped by Kirby standards of the day. The story is told swiftly in two issues when to accommodate the splendor of the art clearly three seemed needed. Much of the issues are taken up with another narrative entirely, making the important Galactus tale less front and center as I think it properly ought to have been.

When Jack "King" Kirby returns to a new Galactus story many years will have passed indeed.

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Galactus - Gods And Monsters!

The saga of Galactus, which to this point had almost exclusively been told within the pages of the Fantastic Four, switches over to the pages of Jack "King"Kirby's other opus, The Mighty Thor. At this point in the storytelling it seems clear that Kirby is telling the stories he wants to tell and getting into the saga of Galactus allows him to flesh out the World Eater within a context which will support such cosmic doings.

Thor is contacted by Tana Nile of the Colonizers of Rigel and goes with her to confront a threat to Ego, the sentient planet. Galactus has discovered Ego and despite the almost godly power of the living planet he plans to consume him to fulfill his insatiable hunger. Meanwhile the Recorder is dispatched from Asgard and finds common cause with Thor as they travel together from Rigel to the scene of the galactic conflict.

Ego and Galactus battle it out, each using the enormous power at their respective commands. The Recorder and Thor are lucky to survive the conflict as they deal with the refugees called the Wanderers, a weary race who have long traveled through space after Galactus destroyed their world.

Eventually Thor is able to use their technology combined with his own Uru hammer to create a force which so threatens Galactus that the Demi-God withdraws to preserve himself. Ego is spared and offers the Wanderers a new home.

The Recorder returns to the Colonizers of Rigel and Thor returns to Asgard, but there Odin is not done with Galactus.

He uses his great powers to reveal a devastated world and the desperate souls who attempt to protect it in its final moments as in the space above a cube opens and Galactus is revealed to the universe for the first time.

This glimpse into the origin of the World Eater is shown to empower Thor's mission to again confront Galactus, but that confrontation is forestalled when a threat to Sif on Earth is discovered. After some battles with the Greek god Pluto and the awesome Him, Thor will once again seek out Galactus to learn the rest of the story.

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Galactus - Heraldry!

When the Silver Surfer is stranded on Earth after serving his master Galactus a second time, we get to see what he does in his very own series. This series though was not a Lee-Kirby production. Despite the evident fact that the Silver Surfer was completely the creation of Jack "King" Kirby, Stan Lee developed a proprietary interest in the character which would last for many years. For whatever reasons (Kirby's workload, Kirby's less sanguine attitude towards Marvel and Lee) the series was drawn by John Buscema. This was just one of the many slights Kirby felt toward the end of his famous tenure at Marvel.

"Big" John Buscema would become Kirby's replacement as Marvel's high-profile go-to artist when the King left a few years later. And his Silver Surfer is a wonderful variation on a theme, and to my eye a superior one to that of Kirby. Whereas Kirby gave the Surfer a shiny magnificence, Buscema chose to make him more nimble and this more agile sleeker Surfer actually fits the name better to my mind. Galactus only figures in one issue of the eighteen issue run. In the giant-size debut issue we get a look at the origin of the Surfer and learn his real name for the first time.

We meet the Surfer as flies across the Earth encountering humanity in all its myriad forms, sadly most of those violent and self-destructive. He escapes to the Himilayas where he discovers a lost city and there he muses about his own past. The planet Zenn-La was a technological paradise but citizen Norrin-Rad was disappointed that this people seemed to have lost the drive and ambition which brought about the wonders they reveled in every day. He is a brooding man who is less than fully appreciative of the love of the beautiful Shalla-Bal. The arrival of a mysterious ship throws the placid society into chaos and when it is revealed that Galactus has come to Zenn-La even their greatest weapon is no match for his power.

Desperate to save his people, Norrin-Rad gets a ship and confronts Galactus and makes a bargain that he will serve as his herald if the World Eater will spare Zenn-La. Galactus agrees and transforms Norrin-Rad into the Silver Surfer imbuing him with the power cosmic and gifting him his mighty board. The Surfer says farewell to Shalla-Bal and begins his long service to Galactus, a service which led him eventually to the Earth and his current fate.

Also in this dynamite debut issue is a story by Stan Lee and Gene Colan which tells again the origin of the mighty Watcher. This late Silver Age refreshing of the story of the Watchers and how they learned the error of carelessly empowering other species and how they chose their destiny of merely recording the events of the cosmos is a humdinger. The tie between the Watcher and Galactus is to some degree reinforced yet again.

The Silver Surfer's first series is ultimately a critical success but eventually falls victim to poor sales and is cancelled. Oddly Jack Kirby was asked to step in at the last minute to attempt a reboot in the last issue but that doesn't seem to have moved the needle. Soon Kirby is gone to DC and Stan determines that only he will write Silver Surfer stories from that point on. Sometimes the Surfer shows up in other comics as part of a team, but Stan's prohibition does mean that the Silver Surfer will have to wait a long time to get another shot at his own run.

But before all of that Stan and Jack tells us the origin of Galactus himself. That begins next time.

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Galactus - Second Helpings!

Galactus, the eater of worlds had come to Earth before. It was the scene of his greatest defeat when his herald the Silver Surfer aided the Fantastic Four in turning him away. The Surfer was punished by being imprisoned on Earth itself, but the Earth abided.

Now Galactus is hungry yet again and without his herald he cannot find the sustenance he requires. So he returns to Earth to find his herald, but there's a problem. The Surfer has disappeared. Galactus sends his cyborg Punisher to the planet again to seek out the Surfer and he battles the Fab 4.

Surviving the encounter with the Punisher, the FF must learn where the Surfer has gone and find him or the Earth will end. To further convince them Galactus creates weird and grim dopplegangers of the Fab 4 and has them attack in a deadly and surprisingly frightening struggle.

They figure out that he has gone small, disappearing into the Micro-World and so the FF, or at least Mr. Fantastic, the Thing, and the Human Torch go after him. Sue Richards is pregnant and sidelined for the battle, being attended to by Crystal the Inhuman. The FF get into the Micro-World, the realm ruled by the deadly Psycho-Man and look for the Surfer.

They find the Surfer and tell of the call from Galactus and of Earth's peril. Despite his new-found freedom the noble Silver Surfer immediately returns to full size to once to help save the day. The Fantastic Four are still in Sub-Atomica or the Micro-World and find themselves fighting the android minion of the Psycho-Man.

While the Fantastic Four battle and defeat the Psycho-Man in his own lair, the Silver Surfer successfully finds an alternative planet for Galactus to consume and Earth is saved once again. But the Surfer for all his heroics is once again returned by his former master to his planetary prison.

This story line was my first encounter with the awesome power of Kirby and I at first didn't grok the greatness. The story here is a bit of a placeholder with the FF in fine form and the Surfer getting plenty of the spotlight. Galactus despite some potent splash pages fades out with little effect as the Surfer momentarily meets his immediate need. The problem with a Galactus is that each subsequent appearance will diminish him. But that doesn't stop them from going to the World Eater time and again in future stories.

This storyline set the stage for the Surfer's own magazine and we'll take a look at that next week.

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Galactus - The God Who Came To Dinner!

Last spring we at the Dojo presented a closer look at the original Galactus trilogy from the pages of Fantastic Four which shook up the Fab 4 and (it can be argued) for all time transformed the fabric of the Marvel Universe. Jack "King" Kirby and Stan "The Man" Lee really shook up the world.

When Galactus came to Earth, led there by his herald the Silver Surfer, for the simple reason to make a meal of our "Big Blue Marble", it was well and truly cosmic. The small-time hoods and small-minded criminals and mean-spirited aliens who had largely populated the villain class of the Marvel Universe up to that time were suddenly made very tiny, their threat to society revealed to be humble indeed. When "The Big G" comes knocking, no one cares anymore if Paste Pot Pete is scheming to rob the nearest big box store or the Vulture wants to swoop in and grab a few gems from the local shop. It's a game changer!

To read the Dojo posts about this seminal trilogy last year go here and here and finally here. Going forward this month we track Galactus as he returns to Earth and we shall truly go where no man has gone before when the awesome origin of the world devourer is revealed.

Stay tuned because next week Galactus comes back.

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