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A few words on one of the first graphic novels and why it should be remembered today.

In 1978, just a couple of years after the graphic novel had been brought into being with Richard Corben’s Bloodstar in 1976, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby went back to rework their myth of Galactus and the Silver Surfer which they had originally introduced in Fantastic Four #48 (March, 1966). The story had concerned the capture of a man from another world named Norrin Rad by Galactus, a giant being who lives by consuming the etheric energy of planets, and who allowed Radd’s world to escape this fate if Radd agreed to become his herald. Transformed into the Silver Surfer, he was given cosmic powers which enabled him to travel faster than the speed of light across the universe in order to scout out worlds for Galactus to consume.

In their graphic novel The Silver Surfer, the story is retold without the involvement of the Fantastic Four. As the story opens, the Silver Surfer has discovered earth, and Galactus arrives upon the top of a New York skyscraper in preparation to begin his process of consuming the planet. The Surfer, however, has immediately fallen in love with the beauty of the earth and the stirring nobility of its struggling, suffering inhabitants and decides to rebel against Galactus on its behalf. The two beings fight against the backdrop of New York City until Galactus decides to end the conflict by punishing the Surfer: he is to be eternally condemned to wander the earth. Galactus departs to a base upon the Moon, where he watches the Surfer to see what he will do next.
At first, the Surfer transforms himself into an ordinary human being, but when he is mugged one day in Central Park, he becomes disgusted with humanity and transforms back into his silvery persona. Galactus, meanwhile, has concocted a plan, and creates a beautiful woman named Ardina to lure him back to Galactus’s side. The Surfer does, indeed, fall in love with her while she attempts to convince him of the worthlessness of the human race. It doesn’t work and Ardina ends up being scrapped by Galactus, to the Surfer’s mental agony. However,  Galactus offers to spare the earth if the Surfer will agree to rejoin him once again as his herald. The Surfer submits.
The whole undertaking is a wonderfully grand opera retold as comic book mythology. The great themes of ancient myth have been reworked into this story in a naïve but effectively unpretentious manner: the Surfer’s fall into humanity evokes the Gnostic myth of the fall of the Anthropos, who sees his face reflected in Nature, and falls into matter, where he becomes incarnate as the human soul which, in Gnostic mythology, is to be thought of as a spark of light fallen from heaven. Galactus himself, a gigantic man with huge, V-shaped metal horns protruding from a helmet - like mask recalls the divinities of ancient Sumer, who also wore elaborate headgear in which bull’s horns were depicted with a cosmic mountain between them. The attempt to seduce the Surfer with a female counterpart finds its echo in the Hindu myth of the attempt of the gods to seduce the eternally chaste Shiva, the lord of yoga, by creating Sati, a beautiful woman who succeeds in making him fall in love with her until she is killed and he must suffer the intense and overwhelming agony of human loss. Galactus himself, the destroyer of worlds, evokes the god Shiva, who is the sublime god of destruction in Indian mythology.
This forgotten gem, little read or even heard of nowadays, represents the art of comics at its finest: unpretentious, naïve; its creators, Lee and Kirby, with their frequent misspellings and awkward verbiage, revealing themselves as unlettered and uncultivated men, but for all that, utterly sincere in their love of the medium they helped to create.

The great themes of opera from Monteverdi’s Orphee to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde are those of love and death, and The Silver Surfer is a marvelous reconstituting of these operatic themes newly designed for an age in which the stage has mostly vanished (but has reappeared in film and comics).

Lee and Kirby are here experimenting with the possibilities of the new medium of the graphic novel, and their excitement and sense of wonder leaps off the page at the reader via Jack Kirby’s artistic mastery. Nobody drew comics better than Kirby, who had an amazing feel for the mythic spectacle and cosmic grandeur of comics.
This work deserves to be recognized as one of the first classics of the new medium.