Page 45 Review by Stephen
"Poor, pathetic creatures! So riddled with fear... with gnawing distrust!
“What monumental irony... that they who rule a planet -- should be so insecure!"
Bumper all-in-one hardcover treatment for the Marvel Comic that most stands the test of time from its early period, given that man's inhumanity to man is apparently the least mortal thing about us.
John Buscema is on mighty form here, with phenomenally evocative body language as the Silver Surfer, exiled to Earth after escaping his role as Galactus's first herald, finds the human race busy destroying its own planet and each other... then biting the shiny alien hand which reaches out to feed it.
It is a bit wordy since the Surfer pronounces judgement on anyone and everyone around him, but it's not as if he's wrong.
Also, no matter how many snazzy tricks they might have for representing silver, no other artist has achieved the effect so successfully, so fluidly over form. Nor have they matched Buscema's definitive depiction of this individual in anguish, his fingers spread wide over his forehead or entire arms covering his eyes in sorry (and, I’d suggest, vicarious shame) after each successive rejection or military abomination. John’s expressiveness was right up there with Will Eisner’s, and I’m not exaggerating when I declare Buscema in terms of physique to be a svelte successor to Michelangelo, without all the gargantuan distortion which plagued the maestro’s paintings, though none of his sculpture.
Mephisto, Marvel's version of the devil, really does have it in for our silver soul. He's nothing if not persistent and positively revels in adding yet more sadistic torture on top of that heaped on him by us.
Thor, Loki, The Stranger, Spider-Man, The Human Torch, The Inhumans, and The Abomination are all in evidence here too.
Full colour throughout (it's sometimes difficult to find interior art online), this collects SILVER SURFER (1968) #1-7 (A STORIES) and #8-18 and material from FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5 and NOT BRAND ECHH #13.
