My interest in Marvel Comics’ Silver Surfer series seems to have been somewhat sporadic in the first half-year or so of its original run. As I’ve written in earlier posts, I bought the first issue in May, 1968, and though I liked that book a lot (at least, that’s how I remember things), I opted to pass on both the second and third issues (unless, of course, I never saw either of them on the stands, which is quite possible). Issue #4, however, was most likely a no-brainer purchase decision for my eleven-year-old self, what with its absolutely iconic cover (by John and Sal Buscema) depicting the Surfer and the mighty Thor about to come to blows. And considering how spectacularly that book delivered on its cover’s promise, my picking up the following issue when I saw it was probably a given, as well –even though its cover (by John Romita, according to the Grand Comics Database), while good, wasn’t quite in the same exalted class.
A brief appearance by our hero’s long lost love Shalla Bal, such as we have at the bottom of the page, was pretty much de rigueur for Silver Surfer stories by this point.
The Surfer’s benefactor explains that he’s Al B. Harper, a physicist by trade — though he was in the woods indulging his hobby, rock collecting, when he saw the Surfer fell out of the sky.
Harper tells the Surfer that he’d like to apply his expertise to the latter’s problem, but to do the necessary research, he’ll need new equipment — “and that takes money! Which is one thing Al B. Harper just ain’t got!” The Surfer tells the physicist that he, himself, will acquire the needed funds, and heads out to do just that — though not before accepting a loan of some street clothes, offered by Al to help his new alien friend be a bit less conspicuous.
When Stan gave me The Silver Surfer, I assumed this guy was coated with silver. I assumed everybody would assume that, right? Well, Stan wasn’t happy. He said, “It’s not silver, John, it’s a white plastic styrofoam covering” [laughter] It wasn’t my idea!
It’s hard to fathom why Lee would have thought this was the way to go, back in the day — after all, the character was never called the Styrofoam Surfer — but it seems clear that he did (at least by the time he scripted this particular issue), just to go by the dialogue he had characters use to describe the Surfer’s appearance. (For another prime example, see the employment agency guy’s “washing that white gook off your face” remark on the next page.) Whatever the reasons, however, I think we’re probably all glad that Marvel abandoned the notion in later years, and allowed the Surfer to be Silver once again (as evidenced most strikingly by the painted versions produced by illustrators like Alex Ross, whose cover for 1994’s Marvels #3 is shown here).
It’s a measure of how age and experience inevitably changes one’s perspective, I suppose, that when I first read the preceding sequence, at age eleven, I wholeheartedly decried the injustice and callousness with which the Surfer was herein treated by his fellow sentients — just as I’m sure Lee and J. Buscema intended for me to do — whereas at age 61, with a whole career’s worth of workplace experience in my rearview mirror, I find that I now have at least a little sympathy for those nasty ol’ human beings. I mean, it’s only reasonable for a prospective employer to request some kind of I.D. from a job applicant, right? And labor unions serve an important function in our society, so there.
Ah, well. At least I can still see that those guys didn’t all have to be such dicks about it.
Readers have been finding religious symbolism in Stan Lee’s Silver Surfer stories pretty much from the beginning. (Lee himself, of course, while tending to be cagey about his specific intentions, didn’t exactly discourage such speculation.) “– And Who Shall Mourn for Him?” includes a considerable number of situations that seem to allude to themes from Jewish and Christian religious traditions; more, perhaps, than any other Surfer story not directly involving Mephisto (who, after all, is a straight-up take on the Biblical figure of Satan). On this page, for example, it’s easy to see a parallel between how the Surfer, a social outsider, comes to the aid of a beaten man lying in an alley, and Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, where it’s a detested Samaritan — the “other”, for Jesus’ audience of 1st century Jews — who offers succor to a stranger who’s been robbed and beaten and left half-dead by the side of the road.
The beating victim in our present story (who’s never named) tells the Surfer that he’s a former gambler who swore off the practice when he got married. Recently, however, his wife has been seriously ill, and so — desperate for cash to pay her medical bills — earlier this evening, he returned to a gambling den he used to frequent. Unfortunately, as the night wore on, the recidivist gambler found his losses mounting; but then, upon examining the dice he’d been throwing, he realized they’d been weighted; the game was rigged. When he called the men running the house on this, they beat him up, leaving him in the alley where the Surfer has found him.
Um, the Surfer believes that he’s “justly earned” this money? It seemed pretty clear he was using his “power cosmic” to cheat, earlier — but, of course, the house itself was cheating before that, so… two wrongs make a right, I guess? Or — maybe he thinks he “earned” it by coming to the aid of the mistreated gambler? Fifty years later, your guess is as good as mine.
Harper’s musings in the third panel above allude to the unjust discrimination he faces every day as a black man in America, as did his “pushed around” remark back on page 7. This subtlety of approach to the topic of race, reminiscent of Lee’s work in Daredevil #47’s “Brother, Take My Hand!” just a few months earlier, will be maintained throughout the story.
Here, on page 20 — a little past the midway point of our story — the villain of the piece finally makes his entrance. This was my first encounter with the mysterious cosmic entity called only “the Stranger” — and I’m sure my younger self wasn’t alone in that back in 1969, as the character had only appeared a handful of times prior to this.
About the only interesting detail the Stranger doesn’t provide in his monologue here is that Magneto managed to escape back to Earth several issues later, requiring the Stranger to show up in X-Men #18 just long enough to corral the Master of Magnetism once again. But since that event has no real bearing on the events of Silver Surfer #5, it’s easy to forgive the omission.
Similarly, Lee and J. Buscema provide just enough information about the Stranger’s later return to our planet in Tales to Astonish #89-91 (1967)* for us to understand that, since his initial visit here, the enigmatic alien had come to have a decidedly negative view of our species. Fans who’d actually read those issues would know that the Stranger’s scheme at the time involved using the Hulk as a Weapon of Mass Destruction — his intention being for the jade giant to go on a deadly rampage which would obliterate human civilization and leave but a few survivors, who would then build a new, “better” world under the Stranger’s direction. By the end of the three-part tale, however, the bravery demonstrated by the Hulk convinced the Stranger that he’d been a bit too hasty — or, as he put it at the time, “If a brute — such as the Hulk — can be so valorous — perhaps there still is hope for the rest of humanity!” — and he decided to leave the Earth alone. Obviously (and unfortunately, for us puny humans), he’s changed his mind since then.
The Stranger again goes on the offensive, keeping the Surfer occupied and unable to fly to warn his friend about the bomb’s being booby-trapped.
Lee and J. Buscema don’t call attention to the fact that everyone in the mob that first surrounds, and then assaults, Al Harper is white — but they were surely cognizant of it, and must have expected their audience to pick up on it as well. Sadly, the image of a lone black man being battered to the ground by the fists of angry whites is no less chilling today in 2019 than it was in 1969; indeed, it may be even more so.
Following the pattern of religious symbolism we’ve already identified in this story, it’s almost impossible not to see Al Harper’s lonely and heroic sacrifice as paralleling the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus in Christian doctrine; though, of course, the valor and selflessness of Harper’s action need no religious context to be meaningful, or moving.
Convinced now (for the second time) that humanity is not entirely worthless, the Stranger turns away his wrath,in proper godly fashion, and makes his exit. And though the character would return many, many times over the next five decades to bedevil one Marvel hero or another, to the best of my knowledge he would never again try to exterminate the whole human race.
The story’s wrap-up — which, like many another story in Marvel’s late-Sixties comics, feels a bit rushed, as though there were some pacing miscalculations on the long and winding road to page 39 — leaves the perceptive reader with more than a few questions. Wouldn’t the guys who followed Al Harper out of the city contact the proper authorities after they found his body, rather than take it upon themselves to bury the guy on their own? And since we see headstones, does that mean that Harper died in the immediate vicinity of a cemetery, or are we supposed to think that these men loaded a stranger’s body in a car and drove to one? And speaking of cars, isn’t it convenient that at least a couple of the guys were driving around with shovels in their trunks? All that having been said, though, it’s still undeniably poignant — and also vaguely reassuring, after the ugliness of the mob scene a few pages earlier — to see these men demonstrating their basic human decency by giving a nameless “poor Joe” a proper burial.
But that still leaves the Surfer himself, and his tribute of an eternal flame to mark his friend’s grave. That’s great, of course, but what about notifying Al Harper’s other friends? His family? Just because the man lived alone, one can’t assume that he had no loved ones. Did the Surfer fly back to Al’s cabin, check his address book, make a few calls? The story doesn’t say.
I have to be honest here,however, and admit that none of the above troubled me as a reader in January, 1969. My eleven-year-old self thought the ending was very sad, but I didn’t find it frustrating — well, actually, I did, but for a different reason. My frustration stemmed from the last of the important questions that the story leaves unanswered — the last, and probably also the most serious, from a storytelling standpoint: What happened to Al Harper’s anti-barrier device? The Surfer was in the process of using it when he was interrupted by the Stranger on page 24, and it was intact when he flew back to Harper’s cabin at the end of that scene. Presumably it’s still sitting in the cabin — so why doesn’t the Surfer retrieve it and use it to escape Galactus’ barrier? OK, sure, we readers can imagine that maybe he does go back, after the story’s conclusion, and uses the device to try to break free of Earth — tries, and presumably fails, since he’s still trapped on our planet at the beginning of the next issue — but it’s a major flaw in the story’s structure that this isn’t addressed within the pages of the comic itself. The whole first half of the story has been concerned with the Surfer’s attempt to escape his planetary prison with Al Harper’s help, after all.
And it’s not too difficult to imagine a way that the matter could have been addressed within the story. What if Harper had been compelled to cannibalize the device he built for the Surfer to create his “Geiger-scope”? The Surfer would thus be required to make a voluntary sacrifice to help save humankind from the Stranger’s bomb, just as Al Harper must, later on. That would have actually added to the pathos of the story’s conclusion, in my opinion, as well as tying up a huge loose end. It could have made a good story an even better one.
And I do think it’s a good story — a very good one, in fact — in spite of all the time and space I’ve just spent taking it to task. If it had simply been a poor story, or even a mediocre one (like the subject of my last post, for example) it wouldn’t be worth the effort. As it is, however, one has to regret the flaws that mar one of the finer efforts by Stan Lee and John Buscema during their seventeen-issue Silver Surfer run. “– And Who Shall Mourn for Him?” still stands with the aforementioned “Brother, Take My Hand!” as one of the finest examples of Lee’s “serious” writing — a story whose humanistic message of empathy and selflessness doesn’t depend on its religious allusions for its effectiveness, but is nevertheless enhanced by them.
Like all the other issues of Silver Surfer published at the 25-cent double-issue size, issue #5 includes a 10-page “Tales of the Watcher” backup story. The script is credited to Stan Lee (as are all these tales) and the pencilled art to Howard Purcell, who took over the feature from Gene Colan with the previous issue.
It’s not a bad little story, though certainly not anything that would make a reader forget about the comic’s lead feature. But what’s most interesting to me about it, fifty years on, is its relationship to its source material. As has been discussed in previous posts, all of the “Tales of the Watcher” in Silver Surfer were supposedly adaptations of stories that had run earlier in one of Marvel’s anthology titles — or, as a caption on the splash page of issue #2’s “Watcher” story put it: “We are constantly besieged with requests to reprint the most imaginative science-fiction tales of Stan Lee, acclaimed as one of the greatest fantasy writers of our time!** In compliance with your demands, the highly-gifted Gene Colan*** has enthusiastically volunteered to illustrate anew these now-classic works of wonder!” But whereas the “Watcher” stories in both issue #1 and #4 were both very close adaptations of their antecedents, “Run, Roco, Run!” is very different.
According to the Grand Comics Database, “Run, Roco, Run!” is based on “Run, Rocky, Run!” — a tale from Tales to Astonish #26 (Dec., 1961), illustrated by Bob Forgione (the writer is uncredited — though, if the editorial note from Silver Surfer #2 is taken at face value, it would have to have been Stan Lee).
The tale ends with a twist (as so many of Marvel’s “fantasy” tales this era did), and with the crooked protagonist getting his comeuppance — but otherwise, “Run, Rocky, Run!” plays out as an entirely different story from its “adaptation”.
Why, one wonders, with so many old fantasy stories in inventory to choose from, did Stan Lee choose this one — one which ultimately drove him (or Howard Purcell) to come up with a whole new plot? Had Lee always liked the title, but been unsatisfied with the story itself? Alas, fifty years down the road, answers probably aren’t forthcoming. It’ll likely have to remain a minor mystery of “the Marvel Age of Comics”.
Silver Surfer #5 was the third issue I bought of the series. It would also be the last one I’d buy, up until #18 (Sept., 1970) — the only one not illustrated by John Buscema (it was drawn instead by the Surfer’s creator, Jack Kirby), and also the final issue. What had been a sporadic interest on my part up until this time seemingly cratered into non-interest.
Why did I, for all intents and purposes, drop the book after issue #5?
A half century later, I’m really not sure. I don’t have any specific recollection of looking at any of the later issues on the stand and deciding not to buy them. It’s possible, of course, that I never saw certain issues at all, but surely at least some of them made it to my local convenience stores’ spinner racks (and were around long enough for me to encounter them). And it wasn’t the 25-cent price tag — after issue #7, the series went from double to standard size (losing the “Tales of the Watcher” feature in the process), and cost 15 cents, like most other comics.
And in spite of my having been irked by the botching of the major plot thread of Al B. Harper’s barrier-confusing device, I don’t think I actually disliked the lead story in issue #5. I know that, in particular, the scene of the physicist’s sacrifice was moving to me at the time, and it unquestionably made an indelible impression — fifty years on, the Buscemas’ rendering of that scene on page 38 is still the first thing that comes to my mind when I consider this issue.
But I do think it’s probable that even if my eleven-year-old self liked the story, it seemed a bit too much of a downer. And that might have figured into my later decision-making at the spinner rack, even if unconsciously. Given options, I might have decided to spend my coin on a comic book I could reasonably expect would leave me feeling happy, instead of one that might leave me sad. I likely would have made a different calculus just a few years later — but in January, 1969, I simply wasn’t that mature.
And if there were a whole lot of other comic book fans like me at that time — and a lot fewer who were mature enough to appreciate a variety of emotional tones in their entertainment — it might help explain why Silver Surfer ultimately failed, commercially.
The problem here is that the Surfer refers to the device as having “failed” –but we didn’t see any such failure in issue #5. I guess it’s possible that the Surfer has returned to Harper’s cabin and tried to finish the experiment (and has failed in doing so) since the conclusion of #5, but that’s not what the story in #6 seems to be implying, at least not to this reader.
And regardless, I believe that it remains a flaw in “…And Who Shall Mourn for Him?” to resolve this loose end here, rather than in #5, since there’s no indication at the conclusion of the original story that it will be continued into the following issue.
Nevertheless, I would have definitely mentioned this scene in my original post if I’d been cognizant of it, so I’m grateful to have been made aware of it now. Thanks, Antonio!
*Stan Lee’s editorial footnote referencing “Hulk #89 &90” erred in dropping the third part of the story, as well as in citing the title it appeared in as Hulk rather than Tales to Astonish — but since the second solo Hulk series was technically a continuation of ToA, you could call that a case of “reverse” legacy numbering.
**This caption was credited to “the Bullpen”, but I see no reason not to assume that it was written by “one of the greatest fantasy writers of our time” himself, the book’s editor, Stan Lee.
***Gene Colan drew the first three “TotW” strips in Silver Surfer, before being replaced by Howard Purcell in issue #4.
I can remember really liking this story when I first read it in FANTASY MASTERPIECES in the late 1970s. Like DAREDEVIL #47, it’s very much the quintessence of the latter-1960s preachy Stan, when he was no doubt being influenced by his interactions with his audience as he made the rounds of college campuses. I believe I included it in the STAN LEE VISIONARIES hardcover volume we did a whole lot of years ago for this very reason.
Nice article on SS#5, but I’m assuming you never read Surfer #6 in regards to Al Harper’s device?
You got me, Antonio! I assume Lee and/or Buscema realized they’d left a loose end hanging?
In #6, the Surfer returns to Al Harper’s cabin to ponder over the device but then figures out another way to be free of Earth from reading Harper’s science notes.
Thanks, Antonio! I’ve updated the original post and credited you for the tip.