{"id":11374,"date":"2021-11-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-26T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=11374"},"modified":"2020-09-30T20:04:53","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T00:04:53","slug":"silver-surfer-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2021\/11\/26\/silver-surfer-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Silver Surfer 14"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Silver Surfer! I\u2019m not sure it HAD to happen, but it\u2019s happenin\u2019. Odd case, The Silver Surfer. For all the sniping and stories and sides taken in the murky history of who did what creating the early Marvel Universe, the one character basically everyone can agree was created solely by Jack Kirby is The Silver Surfer. Even Stan\u2019s version of the story is telling Jack to draw Galactus and Jack adding a herald to come before him. And yet, despite or maybe because SS is the only character widely known to be 100% Kirby, Stan became weirdly attached to him, even allegedly decreeing no one else was allowed to write him for many years. After The Surfer\u2019s legendary introduction in the original Galactus story, a man from another planet who agreed to become Galactus\u2019 herald if his planet was spared destruction, Galactus confined him to Earth for betraying him, and now he wanders the planet trying to understand humanity and getting up to hijinks. This comic is by Lee, John Buscema & Dan Adkins. Spider-Man is perhaps an odd fit for Buscema, but he was right at home here, easily able to bring the power and the pathos Silver Surfer demands. The story opens with The Surfer flying in orbit when he sees 2 asteroids about to collide, close enough to the planet that it would be \u201clike a hydrogen bomb exploding!\u201d He flies between them and blows them to bits, but some of those bits still crash into him, sending him plunging down through the atmosphere and into the harbor in New York. As he comes to, we move to see a kid watching Captain America cartoons on TV (Which, at this point, was something you could actually do).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A bit aggressive in defending comics within a comic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Oh, hey, look who it is. And look how different he looks without Romita and\/or Mooney around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is among the flimsiest Two Superheroes Fight Over A Misunderstandings I\u2019ve ever seen, but we\u2019re off. The Surfer calls his board to him before he can hit the ground, dragging Spidey along, still webbed to it. He zaps the web off the board, but then sees Spider-Man is now falling to his death, and shoots open a fire hydrant so the jet of water can \u201ccatch\u201d him. Now Spidey thinks The Surfer is trying to make him look like a fool, so he\u2019s not backing down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Silver Surfer is sort of like Hulk, only with much fancier dialogue, always attacked, always sad about it. As that little boy watches, Sufry\u2019s had enough and attacks, but Spider-Man webs him up in a cocoon, and he falls onto a fire escape. Spidey thinks he\u2019s won, but The Surfer super heats the metal of the fire escape, burning himself loose and causing Spidey to fall yet again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Buscema\u2019s Spidey action is so different with no input from Romita. More Kirby-inspired, rough & tumble. While they mix it up, the cops have called into a higher power, and The Army descends on the situation, as they\u2019ve been chasing The Surfer like they do The Hulk, anyway. Tanks, helicopters, Manhattan is being invaded. Back at the fight, The Surfer is fed up, and uses his Power Cosmic to wrap a whole car around Spider-Man, hoping that will hold him. Spidey, tho, is only more convinced The Surfer can\u2019t be allowed to roam free if he\u2019s this powerful, and strengthens his resolve to take him down. Then The Army opens fire, as they tend to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It became pretty obvious that Stan was constantly making The Surfer into a kind of Christ-like figure, and a sequence like that sure makes a fine example. Big John Buscema, man. Powerful pages. And he only gets better going into the 70s. The first I ever saw of his work was an issue of Silver Surfer, actually, in a trade that also included ASM 16 and MTU 79<\/a>. Back in the letters, there\u2019s a missive from Doug Moench, who I think we\u2019ve seen in the pages of Spider-Man, comparing comics storytelling to cinema. Moench is only 4 years from his debut as a Marvel writer here, which will lead to him co-creating Moon Knight and Deathlok and writing a beloved run of Master of Kung Fu, among other things. I first encountered him working on the Batman titles in the late 80s & early 90s. He\u2019s got quite a resume!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Silver Surfer! I\u2019m not sure it HAD to happen, but it\u2019s happenin\u2019. Odd case, The Silver Surfer. For all the sniping and stories and sides taken in the murky history of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[725,810,514,2,6],"class_list":["post-11374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1960s","tag-dan-adkins","tag-john-buscema","tag-silver-surfer","tag-spider-man","tag-stan-lee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11387,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11374\/revisions\/11387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}