I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read.

In the late nineteen-eighties, getting the first issue of new comic book series starring the Silver Surfer felt monumental. There was perhaps no character in the mighty Marvel Comics canon who felt more significant at the time. It had been a couple decades since the publisher had attempted an ongoing series featuring the reflective character who cruises through space on a surfboard, and that relatively short-lived series stood as the exemplar of Marvel maven Stan Lee’s attempts to reach older audiences with headier material. In the years since, though the Surfer certainly make his fair share of spinner rack appearances in other titles, there was a sene that proper stories centering on the tragic poetry of his existence were reserved for those moments when Lee wanted another crack at writing the Great American Novel one panel at a time. So a true new Silver Surfer title crafted by other hands was a big deal.

Of course, the hands crafting the title came into with their own storied history. Writer Steve Englehart and artist Marshall Rogers first collaborated when working for the distinguished competition, where they notably had a run on Detective Comics that completely redefined Batman with a vision that endures to this day. They were a uniquely simpatico team that fans adored. Their Silver Surfer was sure to be seismic.

Englehart and Rogers demonstrate from the very first issue of Silver Surfer that they are going to go big. But they are also committed to upending the mythos around the character. In modern times, when creators routinely ignore the inconveniences of continuity to tell stories based on whatever snappy hook they pitched for a title, such narrative rejiggering happens all the time. It was rarer back then, and the team is admirably committed to grounding their changes in previously established story elements. In the slice of the Marvel saga where they begin, Silver Surfer is still bound by the barrier that Galactus imposed on him as punishment way back in the Fantastic Four story that introduced those towering figures. The first issue follows Silver Surfer as he finds a way to elide the powerful boundary, then goes one step further by having Galactus rescind the prohibition.

In the second issue, the canon is jostled further. Part of the Silver Surfer’s story is that he pines moodily for Shalla-Bal, the true love he left behind on the planet Zenn-La when he sacrificed his humanity to save his home world from Galactus’s ravenous destruction. It’s a significant enough aspect of the Silver Surfer’s personality that it was used just a few years earlier to establish the aching romanticism of the Richard Gere character in the Hollywood flick Breathless. Finally freed to return to Zenn-La, the Silver Surfer’s reunion with his beloved doesn’t quite hew to his expectations.

Once again, the turn of events isn’t a hazily justified device to get Englehart and Rogers where they want to go. The situation is a logical extension of a preceding, one-shot Silver Surfer issue by Lee and artist John Byrne. Both Shalla-Bal and the Silver Surfer have changed in ways that take them far from the point where they were a romantic couple. In the rendering, it makes more sense that they remain apart. It really feels like it happens not because of the whims of the creators, but because it is the correct way for the story to proceed.

Obviously, the whims of the creators are served well by these circumstances, too. In his earlier Marvel work, especially when writing The Avengers, Englehart clearly reveled in playing around with the more cosmic corners of the Marvel Universe. It quickly becomes clear that he and Rogers are determined to send the Surfer’s board slicing across the universe to encounter every last star-spanning character they can find into their back issue long boxes. Every story burbles with the pure joy of a writer and artist playing with the toys they love most. I can attest that the joy transferred to at least one reader of Silver Surfer.

Previous entries in this series (and there are a LOT of them) can be found by clicking on the “My Misspent Youth” tag.