It’s a Skaar/Silver Surfer team up!  And the best part is that the art is by one of the best cosmic artists of the early ’90s: Ron Lim!

Issue #7 was technically part one of this arc, but only because Silver Surfer arrived at the end of the issue.  It’s here that the Surfer story really starts.

Skaar has managed to enslave Surfer with an “obedience disc” and sets about not freezing the slaves but instead seeking to kill every murderer on his planet.  Freeing the slaves is just a downstream result.

Caeira, Skaar’s mother, speaks to him psychically and tries to get him to stop.  Silver Surfer can hear her voice, too.  She even disguises herself as Hulk in an (unsuccessful) effort to curb her son’s bloodlust, and when she can’t do it, she (as Hulk) teams up with her son.

Skaar and “Hulk” make his way through various threats to finally reach Axeman Bone, kick him off the throne (but not kill him?) and turn over leadership to Princess Okama.

When Caeira reveals her true self, Skaar tells her that letting Axeman Bone live was a mistake.  

After this, Galactus appears and eats Sakaar, killing everyone–including the innocents Skaar vowed to protect.  Skaar sees that if he hadn’t been so consumed with rage, he could have listened to Silver Surfer and evacuated the planet before Galactus’ arrival.

Apparently, this entire story was a mind game orchestrated by Caiera, who reveals at the end that everyone is still alive and Axeman Bone is still the king of Sakaar.  But Galactus really has arrived, and Skaar manages to save his planet but only by intensifying Galactus’ hunger for other planets.  Skaar has failed to learn the lesson of how to be a hero, and Caeira tosses him through a portal.

There’s an awful lot going on in this story, and it’s hard to feel connected to it–especially once the major plotline is shown to have been a fake.  It has its moments, but Silver Surfer isn’t used very well and overall it just didn’t work that well for me.  Great art, though.

The portal, of course, leads to Earth where Greg Pak can write the Skaar-version of World War Hulk.