Silver Surfer 1

Oh, look, it’s the return of the Silver Surfer again. Oh my Shalla Bal! Oh, my Zenn-La! Woe is me and shalt I talk in a florid sub-Shakespearean language that invariably ends in exclamation marks?! Shalt I ever develop a sense of humour or shalt I muse over the world’s follies in an obviously messianic fashion?! In my dotage shalt I join my namesakes and take to browsing the web and contacting distant friends via Facebook?! Hey Alicia, how’s it going?! Long time no see! LOL! ROFL!

Cultural icon he may be, but the Silver Surfer has never been an easy character to write. Make him too accessible and he becomes another dumb superhero. Make him too distant and there’s no dramatic hook to capture the reader’s interest.

In this latest series, writer Greg Pak opts for the latter option. This certainly harks back to the personality as first envisaged by Kirby and, as with the Kirby incarnation, the plotline has him drawn unwittingly into events on earth after observing an attack by armed soldiers on a pair of lovers he has been observing. Human interest is provided by a cyber-geek type (Suzie Endo) whose character acts as a contrast to the Surfer’s aloof musings, while the token villain turns out to be The High Evolutionary, a throwback to many of Marvel’s self-consciously “cosmic” offerings in the 1970s.

This is competently done, with Pak thankfully stripping back the excesses of the florid language the Surfer has become synonymous with. There are hints of Alan Moore’s prose style in some of the captioned sequences and a few genuinely well-observed moments in between the token fight scenes (the moment where the Surfer runs his hand through soil, and he observes, “It never sticks, does it?” comes to mind). Offset against this is some rather clunky dialogue, but overall it comes across as a well-constructed whole.

Less successful is Stephen Segovia’s art. There are some striking splash pages, but it generally comes across as overcluttered, with some very noticeable lapses in perspective and composition. He’s especially fond of drawing hair that sticks up in strange Mandlebrotian curlicues, as though it’s been permaset with an overabundance of hair mousse. I’m all for stylised art, but not at the expense of the underlying compositional values. It’s not helped by the colouring which is unnecessarily murky and which obscures where it should enhance.

Taken in the context of mainstream comics as they exist today, this is flawed, but still one of the better examples to be found out there, something that’s mainly down to the odd flash of genuine inspiration in Greg Pak’s script. Hardly essential, but still worth a look at: there are worse ways to as fifteen minutes of your time.

[I received Peter’s review after having already written one myself, so I thought I’d run that too…]

I’ve read plenty of excellent Marvel comics lately (almost all written by Millar, Bendis and Brubaker) and a whole bunch of totally fucking dreadful ones. All that makes it easy to forget that there is stuff in between, including some that are not liable to be up for awards, but are actually pretty good mainline superhero comics. This is one of those.

First up, Pak gives us plenty of what makes the Surfer who he is – not that I am his biggest fan, since I got quickly sick of the Stan Lee whininess, but it’s surely a writer’s first duty on an established character to grasp what makes them distinct and special. Pak shows us his alien cosmic consciousness in more substantial, even shocking ways, than the usual vague hippy-bullshit awe, establishing the Surfer as someone who takes responsibility on the large scale, because he understands that scale in a way almost no one else can. We get a Galactus scene – much as the idea of Galactus as necessary to cosmic balance is rather tired by now, at least Pak uses it in a daring way. He shows the Surfer as part of the same world as gods and monsters, heroes and villains, while clearly distinguishing him from the likes of the Hulk and Spider-Man. We see how he looks at the world, some of how and what he understands and doesn’t, a sense of his compassion and anger. We get some action, always a good idea in a superhero comic, however cosmic in nature. We get an antagonist big enough to be credible (the High Evolutionary – he’s on the cover, so this is not a spoiler), and who Pak uses in a way that fits with his established history, and that has a major effect on our hero, leading to a surprising, even shocking final page, one that genuinely sets up the possibility of the most major change to the character since his first story. He also throws in a promising and ambiguous character called Cybermancer, who I know nothing about, but she could be interesting.

I didn’t love everything about the writing – I guess you can’t write him without lines like “the great thrum of cosmic awareness surges through me” but I kind of wish you could. A pair of lovers seem underwritten, and the Surfer’s intervention when some goons attack them seems a beat later than it should be. But the structure is flawless, the ideas strong, the dialogue surprisingly deft and occasionally intriguing, and there is plenty of potential and imagination in the story.

And for once it’s all helped by some decent art. The cover is overwrought and with silly perspective, and the intro info page is lifeless, but the insides are pretty good. Segovia occasionally overcrowds or overcrops an image, leaving a clumsy or uninformative composition, and he is inclined to overdo the anatomy a little, and there is the odd stiff human face, but he gets the Surfer dead right in dignity, strangeness and, in a couple of very striking action panels, power, and makes the most of the extraordinary final page. I also like the way he shows Cybermancer’s unusual abilities, and there are all sorts of good details – inker Olazaba deserves some credit for that, as he handles the different surfaces and textures and atmospheres with intelligence and care, and Wil Quintana’s largely naturalistic colours come with some well judged grace notes.

This is more or less what I have been missing at Marvel and DC: it’s not world-shaking, it’s not one of the best comics I’ve read, but it’s a superhero comic produced with intelligence and ideas and considerable skill, getting nearly everything right. The kind of solid 8/10 comic I’ve seen far too little of, and would happily read more of.

(I received Peter’s review after writing my own, so thought I would run mine too…)

I’ve read plenty of excellent Marvel comics lately (almost all written by Millar, Bendis and Brubaker) and a whole bunch of totally fucking dreadful ones. All that makes it easy to forget that there is stuff in between, including some that are not liable to be up for awards, but are actually pretty good mainline superhero comics. This is one of those.

First up, Pak gives us plenty of what makes the Surfer who he is – not that I am his biggest fan, since I got quickly sick of the Stan Lee whininess, but it’s surely a writer’s first duty on an established character to grasp what makes them distinct and special. Pak shows us his alien cosmic consciousness in more substantial, even shocking ways, than the usual vague hippy-bullshit awe, establishing the Surfer as someone who takes responsibility on the large scale, because he understands that scale in a way almost no one else can. We get a Galactus scene – much as the idea of Galactus as necessary to cosmic balance is rather tired by now, at least Pak uses it in a daring way. He shows the Surfer as part of the same world as gods and monsters, heroes and villains, while clearly distinguishing him from the likes of the Hulk and Spider-Man. We see how he looks at the world, some of how and what he understands and doesn’t, a sense of his compassion and anger. We get some action, always a good idea in a superhero comic, however cosmic in nature. We get an antagonist big enough to be credible (the High Evolutionary – he’s on the cover, so this is not a spoiler), and who Pak uses in a way that fits with his established history, and that has a major effect on our hero, leading to a surprising, even shocking final page, one that genuinely sets up the possibility of the most major change to the character since his first story. He also throws in a promising and ambiguous character called Cybermancer, who I know nothing about, but she could be interesting.

I didn’t love everything about the writing – I guess you can’t write him without lines like “the great thrum of cosmic awareness surges through me” but I kind of wish you could. A pair of lovers seem underwritten, and the Surfer’s intervention when some goons attack them seems a beat later than it should be. But the structure is flawless, the ideas strong, the dialogue surprisingly deft and occasionally intriguing, and there is plenty of potential and imagination in the story.

And for once it’s all helped by some decent art. The cover is overwrought and with silly perspective, and the intro info page is lifeless, but the insides are pretty good. Segovia occasionally overcrowds or overcrops an image, leaving a clumsy or uninformative composition, and he is inclined to overdo the anatomy a little, and there is the odd stiff human face, but he gets the Surfer dead right in dignity, strangeness and, in a couple of very striking action panels, power, and makes the most of the extraordinary final page. I also like the way he shows Cybermancer’s unusual abilities, and there are all sorts of good details – inker Olazaba deserves some credit for that, as he handles the different surfaces and textures and atmospheres with intelligence and care, and Wil Quintana’s largely naturalistic colours come with some well judged grace notes.

This is more or less what I have been missing at Marvel and DC: it’s not world-shaking, it’s not one of the best comics I’ve read, but it’s a superhero comic produced with intelligence and ideas and considerable skill, getting nearly everything right. The kind of solid 8/10 comic I’ve seen far too little of, and would happily read more of.

– Martin Skidmore