George Perez takes a long run on Silver Surfer. But don’t get too excited. This is Perez the writer, not the artist. Perez isn’t a bad writer, but he’s a GREAT artist. Instead, Tom Grindberg and Scot Eaton draw it.
I’m chunking two years’ of comics here because they essentially tell one long story.
Okay, let’s get into it.
The book starts with an alien trying to get help from some 616 characters (Beta Ray Bill, Quasar, and the Norse Gods), but failing to reach all of them except for Silver Surfer.
Contact with this alien group (is it from another dimension—that’s never clear) begins the adventure. It involves a “winter is coming” kind of storyline about these guys…
…Blackbody. It’s not just one guy, but it has a singular consciousness. At least I think it does. This is a 1996 storyline, after all, and Marvel editorial is all but checked out so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Uatu is very worried about Blackbody destroying the 616 reality, so he starts sharing the adventure with Surfer. I think it’s like when NBC said it was going to cancel the show Community and everyone got upset and started lobbying the network.
In his battle with Blackbody, Silver Surfer is cut into pieces and stuffed into a tube.
I like that. I always like heroes in tubes (see tag at the bottom of this post!).
Then his pieces are sold for scrap, and then we get stories about each person who bought a piece of Surfer. The series at this point has become a kind of “Weird Worlds” comic involving aliens we get to know only briefly and who are never seen again. If Sci-Fi vignettes are your thing, you’ll love this. Surfer is really inessential for a lot of this. Silver Surfer’s buttocks are sold to a pleasure planet, by the way.
Okay, George. That’s f-in hilarious. Your entire run is justified based on this event alone.
While stuff is being done to his body, Surfer’s mind is elsewhere. He’s eventually able to “Silver Surfer-ize” all of the aliens with parts of his body.
Again, hilarious.
The twelve Surfer-things are called Skyriders, and they mobilize to attack Blackbody, who responds by personifying Silver Surfer’s board into the “black surfer.”
In the end, justice prevails and the denizens of this universe (again, not sure if it is in the same dimension as the 616) are freed from the threat of Blackbody, and, of course, Silver Surfer is an intact being once again.
Issues #122-124 give Perez story credit, but with #123 he’s joined by other writers so I’m covering those in another post and don’t relate to the Blackbody story. So although they are part of Perez’s run, they’re not part of this bigger post.