I love the Silver Surfer. (Silver Surfer Vol. 2 #1)

Well, it's official. I've bought into all the Silver Surfer hype. I blame it partially on Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (expect a review sometime next week after I see it again, but I'll give you a hint; I LOVED it). I also lay some blame on Silver Surfer: Requiem, which could be the greatest Marvel Knights title...ever. And I also blame it on the fact that I just unlocked said Silver Surfer in the video game Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, something that took a lot of work and time. Whatever it is that's the driving force between it all, I just can not get enough Norrin Radd. Besides the two aforementioned medias covering the Surfer, we also got the newest arc of Ultimate Fantastic Four (of which I have every single issue), a slew of back comics I have, and the Fantastic Four Animated show from the early 90s. So I'm sure I'll have my Silver Surfer fix canceled out by the end of the weekend. But this will be a hell of a wild ride until then!

Let's start it off with a nice, with a review of Silver Surfer Vol. 2! That's right, the whole series!


Gotcha! For some reason, this series is only one issue long. I don't quite get why. I mean, it's not like they canceled it on bad sales, unless this gem didn't sell at all, which...for a first issue to bomb enough to close a whole line, well...yeah. So it had to be some deal where Marvel just didn't want to get another series going. So this might as well have been a one shot.

It starts out pretty weird. The Silver Surfer is basically a crashed out, emo drunk who doesn't care about his powers, his board, his friends; anything. he just wants to get off earth. The next couple pages recap what happened so far; the whole story, how Norrin decided to become Galactus's lackey to save his homeworld; how he's stuck on Earth since he rebelled against his master, and the whole story about how he's had adventures on Earth but he really wants to go back to the stars. We get it, he's annoyed to have to live on our planets. Yeesh.

However, the Surfer gets what drunks call a moment of clarity. He realizes, hey, I'm a man, and I can fly on a surfboard! Why should I be an emo! So he tries to fly through the barrier Galactus set up for him. The whole sequences goes like this; you know when you're a kid, and you have a nightmare about a monster that lives in your basement? But when you grow up, you realize that it was just a heater? Well, the Surfer tries to pull one of them. He flies as fast as he can towards the planet arrest fence that Galactus has set up, but it doesn't matter. He smashes into it anyway, and falls back to earth all...sullen like.

Luckily, his Earth friends (who he basically trashed earlier in the issue) have found a way to let him go back to space. As the classic The Who song "I'm Free" blares in the backround, Norrin smashes through the barrier. He can't go back, but hey, who needs to go to earth when you can go to ANY OTHER PLANET?! So he flies around and then decides, hey, I haven't seen my mom in a while, and he flies his silver self back to his home planet.

When he gets there, though...it's messed up. The whole world is barren, and the only people still around are savages who live in little camps. Turns out the big G man (no, not Lawrence Taylor) decided "Hey, if Surfer wants to revolt, then I can eat his planet". Apparently, everyone blames the Surfer for this, and they beat the hell out of him pretty much unmercifully. He pulls a Black Bolt and knocks out everyone while shouting. We then get the whole backstory on what I said a few sentences ago.

Then Surfer finds out something REALLY bad! His chick is in Mephisto's realm, and there's only one guy bad enough to get her back! So Norrin goes and has a feild day on some hell monsters before he...well, gets eaten by a living plant. He blasts his way out a few pages later (which even impresses Mephisto). After exchanging some words, he fights the freakin' DEVIL! How crazy is that?! Think about it; this is a one issue long series, and it features a fight between the DEVIL OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE and a souped up Silver Surfer!

Okay, so the fight is a cop out. It's just a shoving match. Surfer manages to punk out Mephisto, and he grabs his girlfriend and blasts himself through not only Hell, but the barrier that Galactus set up for him. Proving, once and for all, that it's not the size of the cosmic power. It's the magic you do with it. He gets back to the ole' planet he grew up one, and everyone likes him. They really like him! But he deices, hey, why stay with my queen and the people that accept me?! Let's ride again! And BAM! Que credits, the Surfer would be buried for a while only to come out a job some people (until his 3rd series came around, anyway). You know what the weirdest part of the comic is? The Surfer gets out of Galactus' barrier with a little shot of his power. Now, you're telling me he NEVER TRIED THAT?! Uh...seems like it would be the first think I would try. Crazy ass...surfers.

This was a hell of a series! If only it wasn't a one shot...