Hitting the Wall VIII: Silver Surfer

One can identify a hero who has lost his moorings by observing a decline in enthusiasm between reactions to comics then and comics now that feature that character. Such a response cued me in to the fate of Marvel Comics' Silver Surfer, a character who once bristled with Silver Age vitality that gave over to rust; in general, instead of evoking a thrill, his appearances after the sixties mostly seem to elicit the "so what?" response that has brought about the demise of many a comics magazine.

His fate belongs with those of various of Marvel's "cosmic" characters - their delving into the surreal and abstract could, in the hands of indifferent or limited talent, altogether detach them from the connections to humanness necessary to allow many readers to relate. The mix of persecution and messianic delusion that once drove this character - the notion that the very people he intended to save intended to hunt him down like a rabid dog - provided the friction that allowed some motion to him. Unfortunately, once stripped of this and his personal sense of tragedy, and directed away from the over-the-top self-pity that served as a hook, the remainder of the Silver Surfer concept - a metallic nude guy on a surf board who can fly through space and who possesses the power to level cities - doesn't seem very interesting.

For the Silver Surfer, "Wow!" gave way to the dreaded sigh of boredom long ago.

A Long Time Lost

The Silver Surfer hasn't really worked, in my opinion, for decades - not since the original Silver Surfer series of the late sixties. By this, I intend no affront to talents like Starlin, Englehart, Thomas, or even Marz, all of whom have, at various times, written stories about this hero. The character maintains a quiet but loyal following that clamors loudly enough for more that Marvel still occasionally dabbles in Silver Surfer-themed material; such loyalty suggests that the later writers attached to the character did find some way to reach readers.

For those of us who see the character's prime beginning and ending in the 1960s, much of what made the character work depended on certain tensions within him in his earliest interpretations. In the beginning, he stood as a contrast between incredible - no, let's say it, ridiculous - power and the fundamental misery of his circumstances.

While logic and storytelling necessity ultimately banished the demons that drove the Silver Surfer, at the same time, the improvement of his circumstances took away just the hooks that would allow readers like myself to relate to him.

The Ethical Bind

Much of what made the earliest interpretations of the Silver Surfer work depended upon the context of moral ambiguity. Whereas DC's superheroes - and, indeed, the classical model of the superhero, as defined by accepted practice since 1938 - moved in situations where right and wrong acted as clear moral polarities, the Surfer, instead, suffered the consequences of a series of moral compromises.

To begin with, as a human being (or close extraterrestrial equivalent thereof), the Silver Surfer first encountered an ethical miasma as philosophically-inclined Norrin Radd, a thoughtful man who recognized that his race had become decadent by banishing want from their culture and therefore losing the fundamental hungers that led to technological, political, and ethical progress.

Yet the fading utopia Norrin Radd inhabited rested on flimsy foundations, as the residents of that world discovered when their planet appeared on Galactus' buffet table. Fortunately for Radd's race, Galactus occasionally indulges in binges of logic and moral reasoning. So, therefore, Norrin Radd encountered another perplexing situation where one can only approach, and not achieve, pure justice: He agreed to serve Galactus as a ransom for his world. Imagine, if you will, a situation from world history, where the rulers of doomed Byzantium bought off invading Asiatic barbarians with huge bribes and thereby extended their own civilization's life a few centuries, but at the cost of financing Hunnish invasions of Europe. Such tangles result from zero-sum situations.

Thus, as the Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd fed other worlds into Galactus' maw in order to spare his home world, supposedly losing his humanity in the process and certainly becoming a homeless wanderer - a kind of phosphorus-white Cain, in space, on a surf board.

Again, once Galactus decided that our own planet, or at least the analog of it that appeared in Marvel Comics, seemed an appealing snack, the Silver Surfer faced a testy ethical problem. He could betray his oath of servitude and sell out humanity, or he could toss both his physical substance and his credibility into the domains of Galactus' wrath. And, once again, he chose the Greater Good for the Greater Number.

This achieved, and Galactus defeated, thanks to the intervention of the Fantastic Four, the Watcher, and the rebellious Surfer, said interstellar bogeyman chose to discipline, rather than destroy, his fallen servant, and he took from him the ability to travel beyond the atmosphere of the earth.

The Outcast Hero Theme

With these elements in place, we have what made Silver Surfer so compelling to readers. We had a figure able to hyper-emote with truly histrionic angst before such became a comics - and ultimately a cultural - cliche. We had a character semi-ruined by a series of Faustian bargains made on his way from then to now. We had a smooth-surfaced flying guy on a surf board that flies. We had a man forever separated from the object of his love - his ex back on the homeworld.

We had a hero hated by the very people he had sworn to protect, "trapped in a world he never made," and a character whose definition resonated with obsessions of the day, including the ever-present messianic delusion and the perception of persecution.

This provided one of two things, depending on the ethos of the reader: moving melodrama or the most sickening kind of theatrical self-pity. Readers of different mindsets tend to interpret the character in one of these two aspects.

Destruction through Redemption

As time passed, however, writers decided to play with the formula. The exiled nomad theme, for instance, can't endure forever, as one would expect such persons to reconcile themselves to their circumstances, destroy themselves in fighting these circumstances, or ultimately overcome them.

Where the sacrificial-lamb aspect remains central to a character, however, one can easily ruin him by a simple act of redemption. And, in several ways, Marvel Comics did undo, in turn, most of the tragic elements of the character.

His house-arrest on earth ultimately gave way and he could span the distances between stars again. His status as a pariah faded, more or less, with his imprisonment on earth, since most of us recognize opening the door as a sufficient condition for improving the circumstances of a prisoner. Furthermore, he returned to meet his love-at-a-distance, even within the pages of the first Silver Surfer series, back when Stan Lee and John Buscema did that book.

Strip away the camp theatrics, the morbid and maudlin self-absorption, the cursedness and homelessness of the character, though, and what remains? An odd-looking gentleman on a flying surf board who wanders through space wears the name "Silver Surfer" these days. More troubling, this character has found his logical place within the storytelling ghetto of "cosmic" heroes, meaning characters that owe much to the space-spanning stories of (centrally) Jim Starlin and (less centrally) Steve Englehart, where the scale of interstellar (and interdimensional) space often overwhelms the human aspects of these figures and therefore denies to many readers the fundamental connection of common referents.

How, after all, should we expect a man who makes die-stamped refrigerator parts all day long to relate to a flying silver man who might spend his time fighting with personified abstract concepts who want to extinguish the sun?

The Limits of Sympathy

Whether the Silver Surfer adapted from his original, morbidly self-absorbed form or not, one could have expected some kind of dead end to hit the character. With talent thinking rationally, someone could (and ultimately did) realize that the reader could only sympathize or empathize so long. Characters focused around personal trauma eventually wear out their welcomes; the ability to commiserate knows finite limits, and readers ultimately tire of the inner demons of a Silver Surfer, a Batman, or a Hulk.

If the original formula had staying power, the original Silver Surfer title might have reached into the 300s before Marvel Comics cancelled their product line in the mid-late nineties and started its titles over (numerically). Yet the first series did not really crack into the seventies, let alone the subsequent decades; miniseries and series that would fail followed.

A tragic character, after all, requires some tragedy; and if serial literature endures, it does so at the expense of drastic changes to the base concepts. If nothing ever really gets better or worse, how can we make a coherent tragedy of it? In renaissance drama, a piece would resolve itself in perhaps five acts, not five hundred. As Aristotle defined it, tragedy depicts stories where characters get what they deserve and comedy depicts stories where characters get better than they deserve, but without clear beginnings and endings, both comedy and tragedy become difficult to attain.

In my own opinion, Marvel would have done better literature by solving the Silver Surfer's personal crises either with a happy ending (comedy) or by some kind of death, probably of a redemptive sort (tragedy). But, as the editorial model required, Norrin Radd continued to ply the spaceways, moving, in the process, beyond those problems that once gave meat to the character.