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A Comic Book On Sale 55 Years Ago Today, November 19, 1968



SILVER SURFER was a special book for everybody who worked on it during its launch, and sadly it disappointed just about everybody involved with it. The first one thus struck was Surfer creator Jack Kirby, who had been building up to a storyline that would reveal the character’s origin in FANTASTIC FOUR when he learned that Stan Lee would be doing his own version of such a character in a new book dedicated to the hero—one that Kirby would have no involvement in. The artist, rather, was John Buscema, a world-class draftsman who learned the dramatics of comic book storytelling by following Kirby’s example. Ever since he’d returned to the field following a stint in advertising, Buscema had been instructed by Lee to draw like Kirby, his storytelling approach, his dramatic style. And Buscema was a huge fan of Kirby’s work as a result. But he also wanted to so something that was all his own. His opportunity came in this fourth issue of SILVER SURFER, in which the Sky-Rider of the Spaceways would lock horns with the Thunder God Thor in the latter’s home realm of Asgard. John hated drawing cityscapes, but he was raised on the fantasy artwork of cartoonists such as PRINCE VALIANT’s Hal Foster, and so he saw this as an opportunity to produce a comic book story more in that idiom. John maintained a certain detachment about the work, often claiming that he didn’t care about super heroes at all, but in this instance, he threw himself into it. And the result was amazing, a terrific looking book all around. Everybody was agog when John brought it into the Marvel offices after he’d completed it. Everybody, that is, except editor Stan Lee. Once inside Stan’s office, Lee began to go through the job with Buscema, criticizing his approach for how much it deviated from the typical Marvel style. he reportedly savaged the job, and John left the meeting demoralized. He wandered down the hall to where John Romita was set up with a desk, and asked Romita just how to do comics. From that point on, John never again gave so much of himself to any particular job, though there were certainly many that he did exemplary work on. The punch line, of course, came a decade later, when the story was selected to be included in the Simon & Schuster Marvel collection MARVEL’S GREATEST SUPERHERO BATTLES. Called upon to write up an introduction to the story, Stan rung up John Buscema and proceeded to tell him how, looking back on this job, it was the best thing that John had ever done. Incredulous, John replied to Stan that he had hated it when John had first brought it in, and Stan had no memory of these events at all. But it broke John. SILVER SURFER also broke Stan, though it was later than this issue. At the time, Stan had begun to receive accolades from college-age readers, who likened him to a modern day Homer, spinning myths of the day. Stan liked the fact that his work in what had been considered a juvenile medium was being taken so seriously, and so he set out to produce a comic book that would tackle loftier issues than just the super-villain rampage of the day. No, this book would have something to say about the human condition. And it would feature the Silver Surfer, a character that Stan had fallen in love with in his initial appearances. In order to help separate it from the pack, and to give himself a larger canvas to tell more complex stories across, Stan decided to release the series in the larger 25 cent Annual format. This would also make it less likely that the youngest readers, who would likely be bored by its pontificating, would buy it. That part worked, though almost too well. SILVER SURFER struggled in sales from the get-go, and even reducing it to the size of a regular Marvel book and bringing in popular guest-stars from across the Marvel Universe didn’t halt its decay. In desperation, Lee shanghaied Kirby in to plot and draw what became the last issue, which was intended to set up a new direction for the character. But it was too little, too late. The most personal work that Lee had ever done failed to connect with an audience. For years thereafter, Lee forbade any other writers from using the Silver Surfer without his expressed sign-off.

Stan Lee la pire fraude de la pop culture?