Author: admin

Always looking for material for this column, I thought, why not go to one of the big bookstore events on Friday, July 20 for the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in J. K. Rowling’s series? The biggest bash in New York City was the one at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square, where Jim Dale, who performs the audio book versions of the Harry Potter series, would start doing readings at 10:30 PM. There would even be live owls in the store!

When the previous book in the series was released, I was in San Diego for the 2005 Comic-Con International. Despite the fact that I was at a Borders bookstore within easy walking distance of the Convention Center, I had no trouble getting into the store, and only a reasonable wait in line to pick up a copy of the book (see “Comics in Context” #97). This wasn’t bad, considering that among the hundred thousand people attending the Con, there was surely a huge number of Potter fans.

So I got to Union Square’s Barnes & Noble at 10:30 on Friday night and saw a long line stretching out the doors, which I followed to the end of the block, around the corner, down the block, around another corner, and midway down that side of the block, reaching the bookstore’s delivery entrance. It was obvious that these people weren’t being let in because the store was filled to legal capacity. That meant that none of these people would probably get in until the pre-release festivities were over at midnight, and a woman in line told me that everyone in line had already reserved a copy of the book. (I dfon’t recall seeing any small children in line. The people in line were mostly twentysomethings, who had presumably grown up reading the series and remained loyal to these “children’s books” which appeal to all ages.)

I had decided not to go to this year’s San Diego Con and had felt relieved that I would not be braving the lines to the dreaded Hall H, site of the con’s movie panels. Now, I realized, the Hall H experience had come to New York. Would I wait outside for at last 90 minutes, probably longer, not to get in until the show was over? Not this time. I headed home.

Besides, I had already had an experience appropriate for the release of Deathly Hallows. On the website of the book’s British publisher, Bloomsbury, there had been a webcast from the Natural History Museum in London, which is my favorite building in the city and whose Romanesque architecture makes it a good substitute for Harry’s school Hogwarts.
The audience counted down to midnight (London time), and then Rowling read the first chapter of the new book aloud. She did it rather well, too, much better than the reading I heard her do at Radio City Music Hall last year (see “Comics in Context” #148). You can hear her Natural History Museum reading, too. She did it in the Museum’s Great Hall; I wonder what it would’ve been like seeing the Museum’s famous Diplodocus statue looming in the background, as if playing the role of one of the Potter series’ mythical beasts.

The first chapter made for a suspenseful set piece, and made me thankful that I had refused to read any spoilers or reviews that had come out before the book’s official release. I realized that I was glad I hadn’t even known what the first chapter was about before hearing Rowling read it aloud. I wanted to be completely surprised about the direction the book would take from each chapter to the next. (And those of you who have not yet read Deathly Hallows and want to be similarly surprised should stop reading this week’s column now. In another paragraph I’m going to start discussing the plot, including the ending.)

The New York Times, including its Public Editor, has been defending its decision to run Michiko Kakutani’s review of Hallows on Thursday, two days before the official release. The Times claims that the review did not give anything important away; I read the review after finishing the book, and it’s true that Kakutani concentrates on Rowling’s style rather than the specific contents. But, as film critic Nathan Lee observed in a Times Op-Ed about the controversy, every review by necessity gives away something, and Kakutani did state in her review that “at least half a dozen characters we have come to know die in these pages, and many others are wounded or tortured.” (Rowling had publicly stated that two major characters would die, but I immediately realized that that quota would be filled and exceeded just by killing off the principal villains, including Voldemort. In fact, I’m rather surprised that Lucius Malfoy survives in the book. Perhaps since he had fallen from Voldemort’s favor, Rowling didn’t want to kick him when he was down.)

Moreover, it seems to me that by printing its review two days early, the Times was effectively giving its approval to the booksellers and Internet posters who had violated the official release date. The Times‘ tin ear as to the repercussions of its decision is demonstrated by the responses to the Public Editor’s defense, as you can read online.

Journeying into Manhattan on Saturday, I sighted a fellow subway passenger holding a copy of Deathly Hallows. At a midtown Barnes & Noble, I simply walked up to the sales counter, where the cashier handed me a copy of Hallows from what must have been a considerable stack. It was a beautifully sunny day, so I headed over to Central Park, where I found two appropriate locations to start reading the book: first by the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, and then by the statue of Alice in Wonderland. Yes, this was far better than waiting outside Barnes & Noble past midnight and then taking the subway home around 1 or 2 A.M Saturday morning.

Why should I write about Deathly Hallows in a column titled “Comics in Context”? First, I suspect that many, perhaps most of you are Potter readers and don’t mind. Second, one of my primary subjects in “Comics in Context” is the superhero genre, which is a form of the larger genre which the literary critic Northrop Frye called “romance,” meaning an adventure story involving heroes and villains who are larger than life. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga appears to have succeeded Star Wars as the dominant, most influential “romance” in popular culture.

Where should I start in tackling a critique of Deathly Hallows? I decided to focus on the declaration by Time Magazine’s Lev Grossman (Thurs., July 12, 2007) that “If you want to know who dies in Harry Potter, the answer is easy: God.” He continued, “Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn’t. Rowling has more in common with celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens than she has with [J.R.R.] Tolkien and [C.S.] Lewis”.

I couldn’t recall any examples of prayer or religious services in the Harry Potter books, but I didn’t find Grossman’s pronouncement entirely convincing. Does the absence of references to religion on the printed page necessarily mean that the author and her hero don’t believe in God? What if Rowling thought that religious faith was too private a matter to insert openly into a children’s adventure saga? What if she thought it unwise to enunciate specific religious beliefs in her books when her audience consists of children and adults of many faiths, as well as agnostics and atheists? Besides, to be vulgar about it, although Rowling establishes the existence of lavatories in her fictional world (notably Moaning Myrtle’s hangout, the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets), she doesn’t depict her characters relieving themselves, though we may assume that they do. The Beat points out “the pervasiveness of Christian holidays” like Christmas and Easter in the Potter books; so maybe many of Rowling’s characters are praying and attending church when we’re not looking.

In this same piece, the Beat includes a quotation from Rowling, who was asked by the Vancouver Sun (Oct. 26, 2000) whether she was a Christian. “‘Yes, I am,’ she says. “˜. . .Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.’” Rowling told another interviewer (CBCNewsWorld: Hot Type, July 13, 2000), “I do believe in God.” but “Magic in the sense in which it happens in my books. . . .I don’t believe in that. . .. This is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I’ve written book seven. But then maybe you won’t need to even say it ’cause you’ll have found it out anyway. You’ll have read it.” Grossman even reported in a previous article, “Interestingly, although Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland, the books are free of references to God. On this point, Rowling is cagey. “˜Um. I don’t think they’re that secular,’ she says, choosing her words slowly” (Time, July 17, 2005). (For all three quotations, see here.)

Intrigued, I did further research and discovered that there has been considerable analysis of Christian imagery and themes in the Harry Potter books, notably the work of scholar John Granger, the author of several books on the series. (Granger maintains his own website, and is interviewed here.)

In her aforementioned blog entry, the Beat, who describes herself as “some kind of Zen Buddhist agnostic,” raises the question as to whether she would be “clubbed over the head” with Christianity in Deathly Hallows, but predicts that Rowling will take a more subtle approach.

That proved to be correct. In the previous books the subtext of Christian imagery and themes that Granger has found completely escaped Grossman’s notice, and, it seems, that of most reviewers. Why would Rowling change her approach in the final book?

Furthermore, the Beat makes a fine point in asserting that Rowling “understands that what many take as Christian symbols – blood, chalices, trees, etc etc – are actually universal symbols, many of them adopted from pagan faiths by the early Christian missionaries. “ I don’t know if Rowling has actually said so. But the Beat is right that many of these symbols are not restricted to Christianity.

For example, one of the Christian symbols that Granger finds is Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix. Due to its ability to die and resurrect itself, early Christian writers used the phoenix as a symbol of Christ. But the phoenix dates back to ancient Egyptian mythology, and also appears in ancient Greek mythology, Chinese mythology, and Russian folklore. The idea of a bird, a creature of the air, that can thus transcend death, appears to be an archetype that turns up in various cultures.

(And is Jean Grey, the Phoenix of the superhero genre, a Christ figure? Well, she is well known for returning from the dead. And she did give her life to save the universe in Uncanny X-Men #137, although, significantly, that was not the ending that Chris Claremont and John Byrne intended for the “Dark Phoenix Saga.” I should ask them if their Phoenix was a Christ figure, but I expect they will look at me as if I have three heads and say no. But that doesn’t mean that she can’t be interpreted as such.)

C. S. Lewis intended his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (see “Comics in Context” #99) to embody Christian themes. In it, Aslan the lion is the Christ figure who undergoes literal death and resurrection. So if the Harry Potter series has Christian themes, then one might expect Harry to die and return to life in the final, climactic book. And indeed he does, although Rowling carefully leaves it up to the reader to decide whether Harry’s death and resurrection are literal or figurative, as we shall see.

But death and resurrection is not uniquely a Christian motif. Osiris died and returned to life So did Dionysus. It is part of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” monomyth. Symbolic deaths and resurrections are everywhere in the romance (adventure) genre. Batman is left to die in an inescapable death trap; Batman escapes and triumphs over the villain. Virtually every two-part episode of the 1960s Batman TV show thus included symbolic death and resurrection.

So if we are to detect Rowling’s Christianity in Deathly Hallows, we must look carefully. Is there a particular interpretation that she puts on archetypal symbols and the phases of Campbell’s monomyth that may specifically reflect her religious views?

In Deathly Hallows we meet Xenophilius Lovegood, the father of Harry’s friend Luna. Both Lovegoods believe in all manner of things that are unlikely to be real. But on important matters, they tend to be correct.

Xenophilius inevitably clashes with Hermione, who takes a wholly rational approach to the world, even to magic, and, it would seem, to literature as well.

In his will Professor Dumbledore left Hermione his copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of children’s stories–the counterpart of Grimm’s fairy tales for the wizards’ community, it seems–for young wizards and witches, “in the hope that she will find it entertaining and instructive” (p. 126). Significantly, rationalist Hermione had never heard of these fantasy tales (pp. 134-135).

Later, Xenophilius instructs Hermione to read one of the book’s stories, “The Tale of the Three Brothers,” aloud. Xenophilius then informs Hermione, Harry and Ron that the three magical objects in the story–the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Invisibility Cloak–are real, and that they are known as the Deathly Hallows.

“”˜But there’s no mention of the words “Deathly Hallows” in the story,’ said Hermione.

“”˜Well, of course not,’ said Xenophilius. . . . “˜That is a children’s tale, told to amuse rather than to instruct. Those of us who understand these matters, however, recognize that the ancient story refers to three objects, or Hallows, which, if united, will make the possessor master of Death’” (pp. 409-410).

I suspect that here Rowling may be stating that though her Harry Potter books are “children’s tales,” primarily “told to amuse rather than to instruct,” that “those of us who understand these matters” recognize that they have deeper meanings, beneath the surface. Remember that Dumbledore wanted Hermione to regard Beedle’s book as simultaneously “entertaining” and “instructive.” Dumbledore wanted Hermione to discover those deeper meanings, and Rowling is thus encouraging those of her readers who are capable of literary analysis to do the same. And “The Tale of the Three Brothers” is about how to become “vanquisher” of death.

Notice that Xenophilius is also saying that “The Tale of the Three Brothers” is about the Deathly Hallows even though it never uses that name. Grossman contends that the Potter books are atheistic works because Rowling never mentions God in them. Through Xenophilius, Rowling indicates that her books can deal with subjects without explicitly mentioning them by name.

Hermione objects to the idea that there can be any truth within this children’s fable, whereupon Xenophilius scolds her, “You are, I gather, not unintelligent, but painfully limited. Narrow. Close-minded” (p. 410). That is because Hermione only believes in what can be proved by scientific methods.

Soon afterwards, Hermione and Xenophilius get into an argument about the existence of the Resurrection Stone. She refuses to believe that any magic object exists that can raise the dead. “Well, how can that be real?” she demands.

Xenophilius replies, “Prove that it is not.”

This infuriates Hermione, who explodes, “you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

“”˜Yes, you could,’ said Xenophilius. “˜I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little’” (pgs. 411-412). And as it turns out, the Resurrection Stone–and resurrection–do exist in the world of Deathly Hallows.

However comedic this quarrel between Hermione and Xenophilius may be, it also makes a serious point. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard acknowledged that there was no proof that there is a God, but took a “leap of faith” to believe that God exists. I am also reminded of the philosopher Blaise Pascal’s “wager”: not knowing whether or not God exists, Pascal chose to act as if God does exist, since if he’s right, he’d go to heaven.

At least in his or her work, the fantasy writer is open to the idea that there may be a reality that cannot be detected by scientific means. The religious person believes in beings and things whose existence science cannot prove, such as God, heaven, and an afterlife. Xenophilius’s position–if you can’t prove something doesn’t exist, then it’s real–is a comic justification of faith.

Is there a hereafter in the Potter books? There are ghosts, such as Nearly Headless Nick. Though ghosts in fiction traditionally frighten the living, the notion of ghosts is actually reassuring, since their existence indicates there is a life after death. So it makes sense that the ghosts at Hogwarts are friendly spirits.

Just because an author uses ghosts in her stories doesn’t mean that she believes that ghosts exist or that there is an afterlife: the author may simply be working within a long literary tradition of the ghost story.

Rowling has an unusual take on ghosts in the Potter books: their existence (and that of souls) proves nothing about whether or not there is a hereafter. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the book, but not the movie), following the death of his godfather Sirius Black, Harry seeks out Nearly Headless Nick to find out if it’s possible for Sirius to return from the grave. Nick informs Harry that only wizards can return as ghosts, but that Sirius will not, because he “will have. . . gone on.” Nick does not explain what that means because he does not know. “I was afraid of death,” he tells Harry; “I chose to remain behind. . . .I know nothing of the secrets of death” (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 861). Rowling has said, significantly, that “there are some people who would not come back as ghosts because they are unafraid, or less afraid, of death”. This may suggest that Rowling considers it important to overcome a fear of death. Voldemort is driven by a fear of death, leading to his vain attempt at immortality by concealing portions of his soul in the various “horcruxes” which figure so prominently in Deathly Hallows‘ plot. (So would this make suicide bombers even more cold-blooded than the Harry Potter saga’s master villain?)

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, what appear to be the souls of Voldemort’s victims, including Harry’s parents James and Lily, emerge from Voldemort’s wand. But the book informs us that these are “spirit echoes,” not the actual spirits of the deceased.

The deceased headmasters of Hogwarts, including Dumbledore following his demise, appear in portraits in the headmaster’s office and can converse with the living. But Rowling has stated that “they are not as fully realized as ghosts. . . .the idea is that the previous headmasters and headmistresses leave behind a faint imprint of themselves. They leave their aura, almost, in the office and they can give some counsel to the present occupant, but it is not like being a ghost”. In a flashback via the Pensieve, the portrait of the deceased Dumbledore seems to me very much like the real Dumbledore as he discusses strategy with Snape, and not like a “faint imprint,” but I will bow to the author’s interpretation.

Thus through most of the saga, Rowling emphasizes the finality of death. Even so, there are hints in the books before Hallows that there is indeed a hereafter.

In Phoenix, Luna Lovegood tells Harry that she is confident she will “see” her deceased mother again (Phoenix p. 863). When Harry voices doubt, Luna reminds him that they heard voices behind a mysterious veil in an archway in the Ministry of Magic, a veil that seemingly separates the world of the living from the realm of the dead. The implication is that they heard the voices of the dead. At the time (Phoenix, p. 774) Hermione declared vehemently that she didn’t hear any voices from behind the veil. Here may be another case of a Lovegood, as a visionary, being aware of a reality that the rational Hermione denies.

Moreover, as early as the first book in the series, Dumbledore, that font of wisdom, declared, “After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 297).

In “The Tale of the Three Brothers,” one of the brothers used the Resurrection Stone to resurrect the woman he loved. According to the tale, “Yet she was sad and cold, separated from him as by a veil” (Hallows p. 409); Rowling may well have chosen that last word as an allusion to the mysterious veil in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

The tale continues, “Though she had returned to the material world, she did not truly belong there and suffered” (Hallows, p. 409). Shortly afterwards, Harry speculates about using the Resurrection Stone to resurrect his parents and others, but then realizes, “But according to Beedle the Bard, they wouldn’t want to come back, would they?” (Hallows, p. 416).

This reminds me of another hero of the “romance” genre, who has undergone literal death and resurrection not once but twice: Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the end of the fifth season, Buffy heroically sacrificed her life to save her sister and the world, and in the sixth season Buffy’s friends performed a spell that brought her back to life. But it turned out that initially Buffy did not want to be back in “the material world”: by resurrecting her, her friends had forcibly torn her soul out of a spiritual realm that Buffy called “heaven,” where she had achieved a transcendent bliss; it was actually painful for her to readjust to life on Earth. Whedon is known to be a Harry Potter fan (see “Comics in Context” #97-98); in this instance we find him and Rowling thinking alike, although Whedon is an atheist who only uses the afterlife as a fictional device.

Not only does the Resurrection Stone prove to be real, but it causes Harry’s parents, his godfather Sirius Black, and his ally Remus Lupin, all deceased, to appear and accompany him as he goes to what Joseph Campbell would call Harry’s “supreme ordeal”: his death at the hands of Voldemort. The omniscient narrator observes, “he was about to join them. He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him” (p. 698). The narrator says that these figures “resembled most closely” the Tom Riddle (the young Voldemort) who manifested in the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and who “had been memory made nearly solid” (p. 699). But the books have established that that version of Riddle was actually a portion of the real Voldemort’s soul, placed into his younger self’s diary. The narrator states that these figures were “Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts” (p. 699): I read this as indicating that these are the actual spirits of James and Lily Potter, Sirius and Lupin, though they have not taken on new physical bodies.

Here I am reminded of how the spirits of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and the redeemed Anakin Skywalker appear to the triumphant Luke at the close of Return of the Jedi. In Luke’s case the danger has passed. It’s a comforting idea that one’s parental figures would appear to him to ease his passage into death.

Though Rowling’s narrator treats these four spirits as real, I wonder if Rowling is providing an alternate way of reading this sequence for the agnostics in her audience. Sirius’s spirit informs Harry, “We are part of you. . .Invisible to anyone else” (p. 700). That could suggest that the four spirits are actually figments of Harry’s imagination, or “memories made nearly solid.” Or Sirius could just be speaking metaphorically of the spirits’ personal connection to Harry as being “part of you,” and assuring him that his enemies will not see them. The passage can be read either way.

Shortly thereafter Voldemort unleashes a Killing Curse at Harry, seemingly murdering him. Then, in chapter 35, Harry awakens within “unformed nothingness” (p. 706) that takes the form of an idealized version of King’s Cross, the real life London train station from which Harry travels to Hogwarts. If Rowling is intentionally putting Christian symbols into her work, then the name “King’s Cross” is blatantly one of them. As a train station, it is a place of transition; Joseph Campbell would call it one of the thresholds of his monomyth.

In this seemingly astral version of King’s Cross, Harry encounters Dumbledore, who readily admits to being dead, but who repeatedly states that Harry is not dead. Dumbledore also explains why, by the rules of magic, Voldemort’s attempt to murder Harry failed.

So Harry is not literally dead, but he is figuratively dead. Perhaps it is more precise to say that he is in a state between life and death, and that may be literally true, since Dumbledore says that Harry has the choice of whether to “go back” or to go “on.” (Again, Rowling is not defining what the hereafter is like.) Harry is in a place in which the living (himself) may interact with the dead (Dumbledore).

It is part of the pattern of the Harry Potter novels that Harry has an conversation with Dumbledore, reflecting on that book’s adventure, at the end of each (except for the sixth, in which Dumbledore dies). In Chapter 35 of Hallows this part of the pattern reasserts itself, even though this time Dumbledore is dead. In Hallows this encounter is what Campbell called “atonement with the father,” a reconciliation between the protagonist and a father figure. This may be especially necessary in Hallows since in this book Harry has learned disturbing things about Dumbledore’s past and even come to have doubts about Dumbledore’s true intentions towards him; in Chapter 35 Dumbledore confesses to his failings but reassures Harry about his good intentions towards him.

According to the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction’s description of Campbell’s monomyth, for the hero to undergo a transformation in this phase, “the person as he or she has been must be “˜killed’ so that the new self can come into being. Sometime this killing is literal. . . “. Scholar Lynne Milum, in describing Campbell’s Atonement, notes that “While he assists the hero through his journey, the father figure is mindful that the budding hero is destined to replace him.”. In their encounter in Chapter 35, Dumbledore acknowledges to Harry that “I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man” (p. 713) and that Harry has succeeded where Dumbledore failed, in becoming the “true master of death” (p. 720).

The next step in Campbell’s monomyth is the hero’s “Apotheosis.” The Maricopa Center website explains that “When someone dies a physical death, or dies to the self to live in spirit, he or she moves beyond the pairs of opposites to a state of divine knowledge, love, compassion and bliss. . . .the person is in heaven and beyond all strife. A more mundane way of looking at this step is that it is a period of rest, peace and fulfillment before the hero begins the return.” This fits Chapter 35, in which Harry receives considerable knowledge from the now rather godlike Dumbledore about what has been happening.

At this point in the monomyth, the hero receives the “Ultimate Boon.” With regard to this, Milum states that “Most prevalent is the recurring theme of Immortality. The hero achieves illumination that there is an indestructible life beyond the physical body. This Immortality is timeless and experienced in the here and now.” Well, certainly Harry has learned by meeting Dumbledore’s spirit that there is life beyond physical death.

Moreover, the “Ultimate Boon” is that, in Dumbledore’s words, Harry has become “the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die,” which Voldemort does not (pp. 720-721).

In Chapter 35 Rowling returns to the theme of the deeper meanings of children’s stories, or, perhaps, of fiction in general. Dumbledore exclaims that Voldemort’s “knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry!. . .Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing!” (p. 709).

In some cases, the next phase of the monomyth is the “Refusal of the Return.” Dumbledore tells Harry that the latter has a “choice” whether to “go back” or not. Since Harry has pictured this transitional realm as King’s Cross, he could “board a train” to go to the true hereafter. This is a nice parallel: Harry crossed a threshold in the first book by taking the train from King’s cross to Hogwarts, starting a new phase of his life, and he can make the transition to the next world by taking another train from this other King’s Cross. Harry is tempted: “it was warm and light and peaceful here, and he knew that he was heading back to pain and the fear of more loss” (p. 722). But, as Dumbledore puts it, it is “a worthy goal” to save others from Voldemort, and Harry decides to cross the threshold back to the land of the living.

The chapter concludes with my favorite passage in the entire book. Harry asks Dumbledore, “Is this real? Or has this been happening in my head?” Dumbledore replies, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (p. 723).

Here Rowling offers different ways of interpreting chapter 35. It may be that Harry has imagined this conversation with Dumbledore. This reminds me of Ratatouille (see last week’s column), in which the protagonist, Remy, imagines that the ghost of Auguste Gusteau, the deceased master chef whom he idolizes, appears to him and gives him advice. Thus the archetypal mentor figure of Campbell’s monomyth is presented as an aspect of the protagonist’s own psyche. Gusteau’s “ghost” is actually Remy’s own wisdom, emerging from his subconscious to provide him with counsel. It may be that in Chapter 35 that Harry is dreaming, and that he imagines Dumbledore providing him with answers that Harry’s subconscious mind has worked out on its own. Dumbledore’s final words therefore mean that even though Harry is imagining all this, the information that he has gained in this “dream” is still true.

On the other hand, one could also read this final exchange in Chapter 35 quite differently. Dumbledore is pointing out that of course Harry is having this vision inside his head, but that Dumbledore’s spirit, and their conversation, and the knowledge Dumbledore imparts in their talk, are all real. (Of course, you could say that we all experience reality “in our heads” since we rely on our senses conveying information to our brains.)

So Rowling gives us the option of thinking that Harry actually did communicate with the spirit of Dumbledore, and that there is life after death, or that Harry hallucinated it all, and that there might not be. In either case, the information that Harry gains in this experience is both “real” and correct.

So Harry crosses the return threshold, in Campbell’s phrase, in order to become the leading figure of the forces of good in “The Battle of Hogwarts,” in which the entire school battles Voldemort’s forces of evil. Here I found myself thinking of the finale of season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like Harry, Buffy had been regarded with suspicion by many of her classmates. But in the final episode of the third season, Buffy leads her high school graduating class in combat against that season’s leading villain, the Mayor. Voldemort is a sorcerer with serpentine features who is accompanied by a large snake; the Mayor, in that climactic episode, transforms into a colossal serpent. I’m not saying that Rowling is imitating Whedon, but that in dealing with mythic archetypes, great creative minds can often think alike.

It looks as if Rowling studies Campbell as closely as George Lucas does. But what makes Harry’s figurative death and resurrection specifically Christian? I believe that it’s the fact that Harry goes voluntarily to what he believes will be his death at Voldemort’s hands, in order to save the lives of others, or like Christ going to his crucifixion without resistance, in order to redeem humanity. For me, a key moment comes when Voldemort insists on parading Harry’s supposed corpse before the Hogwarts community. Rowling’s narrator notes that “it must be subjected to humiliation to prove Voldemort’s victory” (p. 726). Christ, too, was mocked and humiliated by his tormentors, through means such as the crown of thorns. As the Beat observed, Rowling is an admirer of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and its Christ figure, Aslan the lion, in order to save a life, willingly surrenders himself to the evil White Witch, and allows himself to be humiliated (though such means of the shearing of his mane) and killed, before rising from the dead to destroy the white witch. Harry is clearly treading in Aslan’s–and Christ’s–path.

Much earlier in Hallows, Harry, Hermione and Ron invade both the Ministry of Magic and the Gringotts bank; they are also captured and brought to Malfoy Manor. In each case Harry finds himself underground (below Atrium level at the MInistry, in a subterranean vault at Gringotts, and in the Malfoys’ basement). In Campbell’s terms, these are all descents into the underworld, or into the “belly of the beast” (and in Gringotts’ case, there is a literal beast: a dragon). When Harry and company escape from the Ministry and the Malfoys, they bring prisoners to freedom with them. I suspect that these are allusions to the “Harrowing of Hell,” whereby Christ, immediately after his death, descended into hell and freed souls of the just that had been imprisoned there. Even in his descent into Gringotts, Harry and company free a captive: the dragon whom the goblins kept chained underground.

I have still more to say about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but this week’s column is running long, and this is a busy summer, with more topics waiting in the wings. I hope to return to Hallows in the future to address, among other questions, just why did so many people expect that Harry would die–and stay dead? I’m glad to see that J. K. Rowling has a far more positive outlook.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

In my childhood it was a special event when an animated feature film, almost always from the Disney studio, turned up in movie theaters. Nowadays, there are so many animated feature films these days that I wait to catch many of them when they reach cable TV.

That’s where I recently saw Ice Age: The Meltdown, 2006’s sequel to Fox’s previous animated film about a mammoth, a sabertooth tiger, and other animals of the Pleistocene period, and it was just as well that I had waited. I don’t care for computer-animated animals or humans that look more plastic than organic, as the Ice Age animals do to me, and it seems less forgivable in the second Ice Age film (and, for that matter, the third Shrek), considering the successes other computer animated films (like The Incredibles) have made in this regard.

I wonder if the premise of this second Ice Age, that the glaciers are melting, was inspired by the contemporary concerns with global warming. Yet considering that the end of the Ice Age made possible the worldwide growth of human civilization, why is the “meltdown” a bad thing?

One of the Ice Age movies’ most popular characters is Scrat the squirrel who is in continual, vain pursuit of an elusive acorn. This squirrel’s treading in the Sisyphean path of Wile E. Coyote’s pursuit of the Roadrunner, but falls far short of the comedic invention and brilliant staging and timing of Chuck Jones’s Roadrunner cartoons. However, I did like Scrat’s brief visit to a hereafter especially designed for him in Meltdown.

For me Ice Age: The Meltdown is an animated movie in which the celebrity voices pull me out of the story, preventing me from sufficiently suspending disbelief. That’s because the characters are too thinly conceived, so the familiar personalities of the celebrity voice actors overwhelm them.

In contrast, I quite liked another 2006 animated film I caught on cable, DreamWorks Animation’s Over the Hedge, based on the newspaper comic strip of the same name. In large part this was specifically due to the voice casting: the voices may have been recognizable, but they were suited to the characters. This was especially important with the two lead roles. Bruce Willis’s typical screen persona fit the role of R.J., the trickster raccoon, who is something of a rascal but in the end loyal to his comrades. Similarly, Garry Shandling’s familiar comedy persona as a neurotic worrywart fit the part of Verne the cautious turtle.

Regular readers know that I like to compare adaptations to their source material, whether it’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” (over the last two weeks) or the Disney Tarzan musical to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Tarzan novel (see “Comics in Context” #133).

Several weeks ago I took a look at writer/illustrator William Joyce’s 1990 children’s book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, the source for this year’s Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons (see “Comics in Context” #174). The eccentric, futuristic family is taken from the book, but It turns out that the movie’s entire time travel plot was the moviemakers’ invention. Director Brad Anderson and the screenwriters wove their story around Joyce’s book, while leaving Joyce’s material essentially intact. This is an approach that I admire, since it simultaneously shows respectful fidelity to the original author’s work while still allowing the adapters considerable creativity.

On the other hand, finally reading the late New Yorker cartoonist William Steig’s 1990 picture book Shrek! revealed how very different it is from the trilogy of DreamWorks Animation movies that are very loosely based upon it.

Though supposedly ugly, the movie version of the ogre Shrek, when he isn’t scowling, looks like he could be turned into a cuddly doll that parents can buy for children (as indeed they can). I think he looks more visually appealing in the movies than the human characters do, who look like animated waxworks. In the first film Princess Fiona, the seemingly human leading lady, is revealed to transform into a green-skinned ogre like Shrek. But as an ogre she seems pleasantly plump, with facial features that are sweet and endearing rather than ugly: she thus becomes a cuddly doll, as well.

In the book, however, Shrek is repellent in physical appearance, in behavior, and even in smell. Shrek is utterly antisocial, enjoys frightening people, and revels in his own repulsiveness. Steig’s story is a parody of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Unable to stand him any longer, Shrek’s parents kick him out, and he overcomes one opponent after another (by breathing fire at them, for example), until finally he reaches the princess, who never takes human form in Steig’s book. She is an ogre as repulsive in looks and behavior as he is. In other words, they are perfect for each other. Steig’s description of their meeting reads like sexual foreplay (“Shrek snapped at her nose. She nipped at his ear. They clawed their way into each other’s arms. Like fire and smoke, these two belonged together.”) In Steig’s parody of the hero’s wedding that concludes both a typical fairy tale and the typical Campbellian hero’s journey, he informs us, “And they lived horribly ever after, scaring the socks off all who who fell afoul of them.”

The appeal of Steig’s Shrek is like that of Sesame Street‘s Oscar the Grouch or the Bizarro World in 1960s Superman comics. Through Shrek the reader can vicariously experience the release of not having to obey the rules, of not having to conform to standards of proper behavior, of letting one’s aggression loose, and being bad and not only getting away with it, but being rewarded. In short, Steig’s version of Shrek is a far stronger, more interesting, and more memorable character than the considerably watered-down Shrek of the movies. (See some examples from Steig’s Shrek! for yourself at http://www.williamsteig.com/shrek-int.htm).

The Shrek movies and Steig’s Shrek! book both turn the traditional fairy tale upside down by making ogres the hero and heroine. The difference is that Steig’s ogres act like ogres. The movies turn Shrek into a conventionally lovable children’s hero, with a heart of gold beneath his bad temper, who risks his life to save the humans’ kingdom, and who by this year’s Shrek the Third has mellowed into dullness. The first Shrek movie, especially, seemed to be preaching racial tolerance, presenting ogres Shrek and Fiona as a sort of racial minority in the human world. Shrek may have green skin and these odd knobs on his head, the movie seemed to be saying, but he’s really a sweet, loving, and even heroic individual, Just Like Us. Steig’s point, on the other hand, was that his ogres aren’t Just Like Us, or stand-ins for minority groups, but rather, are like the nasty sides of our personalities that we don’t dare show in public. The Shrek movies sentimentalize the title character and his wife; the book Shrek! gleefully acknowledges the side of children–and adults–that would love to breathe fire at people who get in our way. Steig’s Shrek! gives its readers a harmless means of vicariously releasing that negative energy, and seeing the title character get rewarded for it. Indeed, in the book Shrek’s marriage to the ogre princess signals to the reader that he or she is not alone in having this shadow side: other people do, too.

Steig’s Shrek even has a certain admirable integrity, in that he is true to himself, however nasty and gross that self may be. Steig also takes care that Shrek does not become truly evil. Steig’s Shrek even reminds me of Marvel’s own bad-tempered, green-skinned “ogre,” the Hulk, who nonetheless comes off as preferable in comparison to his adversaries.

If Steig’s Shrek! follows a satiric version of Campbell’s hero’s journey, Shrek the Third founders by getting Campbell’s monomyth wrong. Early in the film we see Shrek trying to fulfill the role of a prince in Fiona’s royal family and clumsily failing at it. Steig’s Shrek, of course, would set all the regal costumes he was supposed to wear on fire with his breath and take pleasure in scaring all the courtiers away. But the movie Shrek fits into conventional society, and I have different expectations for this version of the character. So I assumed that this was a set-up, and that in the course of the film, Shrek would learn to adapt to his new role as prince. With great power must come great responsibility, right?

Princess Fiona’s father, the king, who has been transformed from a human into a frog, is on his deathbed. Yes, that’s right, he is about to croak. The king’s dying wish is that Shrek become his successor. Shrek declines, in a clear case of what Campbell calls “refusing the call,” which will leads to disaster. (For example, Luke Skywalker initially refuses to go with Ben Kenobi, and insists on staying with his uncle and aunt, and then the Storm Troopers kill his relatives.) It also seems downright cruel to refuse the king’s dying wish. Instead, Shrek promises the dying king that he will find someone else to become the new monarch. I thought, okay, the film will be about how the movies’ socialized Shrek matures and learns to accept the responsibility that his father figure, the king, sought to give him. It is necessary that the son must in time assume the role of the father (as in, say, Disney’s Bambi).

But no. The movie Shrek really does find someone else to take over the throne: the youth who becomes King Arthur.

This isn’t how Campbell’s monomyth works! Luke Skywalker doesn’t go into space looking for someone else to become a Jedi Knight instead of himself. Harry Potter doesn’t try to talk Ron into becoming Voldemort’s archenemy so Harry can go back and live under the stairs at the Dursleys. Whereas Steig presented a mock heroic version of the monomyth, Shrek the Third proclaiming that ambition and taking responsibility are better left to Somebody Else. This does not make for a gripping plot or an inspiring protagonist.

Arthur manages to quell the threat posed by most of the movie’s villains by sympathizing with their being treated as outcasts and persuading them to accept themselves. Any child watching this movie will surely realize that if he tried this tactic with schoolyard bullies, he would be beaten to a pulp. So much for this Arthur’s leadership abilities.

At the end of the movie, Shrek and Fiona have moved back to Shrek’s cottage in the woods, abandoning their thrones, the kingdom of humans, and, it seems, any role in that society, But this isn’t the movie Shrek reverting to Steig’s antisocial version. Earlier in the movie, Shrek balked at the idea of becoming a father, and even had a nightmare about having a baby that vomits at hurricane force (enabling the filmmakers to put in the sort of gross bodily functions joke that seems inescapable in non-Pixar animated films these days). But by the film’s end, without explanation, Shrek has changed his mind, and has a trio of babies (his equivalent of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, I guess). In the book, Steig’s Shrek has a nightmare about babies, but this is part of Steig’s assault on sentimentality. The book’s Shrek has no tolerance for cuteness and doesn’t change his mind about babies; the movie Shrek dives right into a sea of sentimentality. Becoming a father is accepting responsibility, of course, but Shrek doesn’t seem to have any goal beyond that. It’s not even clear how he will support this new family. It’s as if he has combined parenthood with retirement; he’s a slacker with kids.

In the July 28, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, film critic David Denby points out that contemporary romantic comedy movies are dominated by male slacker heroes who are “absolutely free of the desire to make an impression on the world and still [get] the girl.” Shrek the Third shows that the 21st century slacker hero has moved into animation, as well. Denby refers to these stories as “slacker-striver romances,” in which it’s the woman who has the real career. Yet Fiona gives up her “career” as princess to join Shrek in slacker parenthood.

So there’s Shrek the Third‘s message for kids: ambition is for other people.
When the call to adventure comes, refuse it. The movie Shrek is neither a true hero nor Steig’s distinctive antihero, but now merely a boring, unfunny disappointment. I think when the inevitable fourth Shrek movie comes out, I may wait to see it a year later on cable.

On the other hand, the great new Disney/Pixar film, Ratatouille, is about an unlikely protagonist–a rat named Remy–with an even unlikelier dream–to become a great chef–which he both pursues and triumphantly achieves.

As has been widely reported, Ratatouille‘s initial director was Jan Pinkava, who came up with the original story, but Pixar ended up reassigning the project to Brad Bird, writer-director of The Iron Giant (1999) and Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) (See “Comics in Context” #62). It was Pinkava who apparently set the story’s principal themes: Ratatouille producer Brad Lewis told The Hollywood Reporter (Thurs. June 28, 2007) that “The story was boiling over with themes dealing with prejudice, family, following your passion, art and criticism.” before Bird took over. Nonetheless, Ratatouille in its finished form clearly fits thematically with Bird’s other animated feature films: Bird is Ratatouille‘s auteur.

First, although Remy is specifically a chef, he represents any kind of creative artist. Bird acknowledged in an interview with Time Out Chicago that he was not himself a gourmet: “No, not at all. I am becoming more appreciative of good food every year, but I didn’t know that much about it going into this project and had to learn a lot”. On the website “The House Next Door,” Ryland Walker Knight argues that Remy as chef is specifically a metaphor for the filmmaker, even more specifically the director of an animated film. Knight points out that Remy thinks in visual images: “when he tastes something, the world disappears and a discothèque flurry of colors swirls around his head. He also imagines Chef Gusteau floating around his head as his own Jiminy Cricket, a figment of his imagination acting as guide and conscience.” Moreover, Remy directs his human ally, Linguini, in cooking by hiding beneath Linguini’s chef’s hat and pulling on his hair, as if they were the strings of a marionette, or, Knight says, “as would an animator bend characters to his or her will”. (I suppose that this could also be a less than complimentary visual metaphor for the way that an auteur director supervises the rest of the moviemaking team in implementing his creative vision.)

But Ratatouille settles the matter when one of its characters, the critic Anton Ego, asserts that “Not everyone can be a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere.” In his June 29, 2007 review, New York Times critic A. O. Scott observes that this is the “moral” of the film. Though in this weekly column I have repeatedly disagreed with Scott’s reviews, I agree with his declaration that Ratatouille is “one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film”.

Looking back to Bird’s The Iron Giant, I recall that it had an artist character, too: Dean, who builds sculptures out of scrap metal, and who becomes a father figure to the boy protagonist.

The title characters of The Incredibles are a family of superheroes who are forced by the government to stop using their super-powers and live conventional lives. They can represent any people with talents who are prevented from employing those talents, and who are thus not allowed to fulfill their true potential. Bob Parr, a. k. a. Mr. Incredible, is compelled to work at a mind-numbing job in an insurance company. Isn’t this the artist’s nightmare: to be trapped in an unfulfilling office job, without any outlet for his creative imagination? In The Incredibles a conventional lifestyle is depicted as a dreary desk job. In Ratatouille the conventional life that Remy wants to escape is literally eating garbage alongside the other rats, whose taste buds are nowhere nearly as refined as his.

There is an actual artist in The Incredibles: Edna “E” Mode, the woman who designs costumes for superheroes. Bird voiced the character himself, perhaps suggesting a degree of identification with her. Edna comes across as a critic as much as she does as an artist, continually dispensing her sardonic opinions. So her true counterpart in Ratatouille may be the fearsome critic Anton Ego, who ultimately becomes the title character’s ally.

The Incredibles draws on a standard motif of the superhero genre: the individuals who seem outwardly ordinary but who secretly possess superhuman abilities. In The Iron Giant there is an even greater disparity between the role that the title character’s unknown builders designated for him and the role that the Iron Giant aspires to achieve. The Iron Giant is a colossal metal robot that bonds in friendship with the young boy Hogarth: in effect, the Iron Giant behaves in a “human” manner, often seeming like a child himself. Furthermore, the film reveals that the Iron Giant was built and programmed to be a war machine. But through his relationship with Hogarth, the Iron Giant rejects this programming. Instead, he follows a goal that Hogarth set for him, to use his enormous powers for good. Hogarth told the Giant about the comic book superhero Superman, and towards the film’s end the Giant becomes a superhero himself, uttering the name “Superman” as he saves a small New England town from a nuclear missile. (Iron Giant fans would enjoy taking a look at this picture over at the John Byrne Forum) The Iron Giant rejects the destiny for which he was created, and instead chooses his own.

Similarly, in Ratatouille Remy might seem to be condemned by his very nature: he was born a rat. This film provides such a vivid, extreme metaphor for the dilemma of the creative individual whose opinions differ from the community around him. Remy’s community of rats, including his own father and brother, all literally eat garbage. Remy is the only one in his community who has more discerning taste and realizes that he can do better. And yet he is pressured by his family to follow the conventional behavior of the rat world, and not to act any differently. There is even social pressure in Remy to walk on all fours like the other rats, whereas he prefers to stand on his hind legs, to keep his forepaws clean enough to handle food hygienically. Bird told The Los Angeles Times (June 28, 2007), “Because our lead character is a rat who wants to move into the human world, let’s show him make that choice to be on two legs and let’s make him being on two legs something he has to hide from his dad and let’s show it as something that changes over the course of the film”.

In the Time Out Chicago interview Bird described Dean, the sculptor in The Iron Giant, as a “beatnik.” (The film is set in the 1950s.) Dean is a nonconformist who seems to be something of an outsider in the small New England town that is the film’s setting. Remy is a nonconformist in the world of rats. But just as the people of that New England town assume on sight that the Iron Giant is a menace (as indeed he was designed to be), Remy is doomed by his outward appearance to be rejected by (most) humans. In one key scene in the film, Remy’s father shows him dead rats displayed in an exterminator’s window: this is how the human race treats their kind. Like The Iron Giant, Ratatouille asks if one can transcend the role that the world has assigned him. I just wrote a short piece about existentialism for a client, and now I see this existentialist theme–freeing oneself from restrictive tradition, taking control of one’s own life, creating one’s own identity–in Ratatouille.

Remy’s inner self does not match his outer self, or rather it does not match the conventional assumptions that are made about that outer self. People assume, correctly, that rats are unclean and eat garbage. That is true about the rats in Ratatouille as well, but Remy, though he looks like the other rats, does not conform to those expectations.

Remy fits the recurring archetype of the figure whose outward appearance disguises his inner virtues and talents. Clark Kent fits that mold, of course. Consider, too, Luke Skywalker’s reactions on first meeting Yoda, who initially seems like an eccentric, grotesque little troll. Or look at detective series like Columbo, in which the title character’s somewhat slovenly appearance and servile manner masks his high intelligence and steely will, or USA Network’s current series Monk, whose title character, beneath his obsessive compulsive phobias, is a brilliant detective.

So Ratatouille is also about the limitations of judging by external appearances. In other words, it’s about prejudice. While working on this essay I found myself about to write that as a rat, Remy inspires “fear and hatred” from humans, and realized I was echoing a familiar description of mutants from Marvel’s X-Men, a series that is famously about bigotry. It’s as if Remy, with his own “special powers,” his sensitive sense of taste and his genius at cooking, is a mutant rat.

Through its metaphor of the creatively gifted rat, Ratatouille suggests that innovation in the arts may come from persons or areas of culture that are not held in high regard by the mainstream. Certainly there is a long history of members of the cultural establishment rejecting not only innovative artwork but also the innovators themselves as outsiders who aren’t like Us.

For example, think of how long comics were generally regarded in America to be a gutter medium, and those adults who perceived them as art were considered wrongheaded and downright strange. (We are all Remy.) Now, in the early 21st century, comics increasingly receive respect from mainstream culture. Ratatouille has received extraordinary critical acclaim, and yet in the Time Out Chicago interview, Bird observes the continuing prejudice against the animation medium: “People see it as a childish sort of hieroglyphics. They connect it with the comics on the funny pages, as something that’s only meant to be silly and can’t ever represent anything deep or serious.”

In Jungian psychology, the “shadow” can not only represent dark, fearsome psychological forces but also creativity. So it makes psychological sense that an artistic innovator, an outsider, should take the form of a rat in the fable that is Ratatouille.

I will have much more to say about Ratatouille in the near future, but right now it is time for me to turn to my new recurring feature.

ATROCITY OF THE WEEK

Actually, there are several. First, there is the posting of photographs of the entire text of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows days before its official release date. I do not understand how people rationalize violating copyright laws and steal intellectual property. Do they somehow think that because it’s possible for them to steal it, then it’s not really stealing? In the case of these photographs, I wonder at the obsessive lengths to which someone would go to demonstrate to the world that he or she is an asshole.

Then on Thursday, July 19, two days before the release date, The New York Times published critic Michiko Kakutani’s review of the book, giving away elements of the plot. (I refuse to link to this.) This should give the Times‘s Public Editor, its in-house ombudsman, plenty to write about. And how would the Times feel if some mole smuggled Times articles to The Washington Post before the times published them?

But the atrocity which I choose to treat at length is the cover to DC’s Showcase: Batgirl book of reprint stories about the version of Batgirl, alias Barbara Gordon, who was created in 1966. The cover shows Batgirl casually, perhaps obliviously, putting on makeup (even though she has her mask on) while in the background Batman and Robin are fighting for their lives against crooks. Presumably people at DC thought this was charmingly funny, while themselves being oblivious to the idea that female readers might find this cover insultingly misogynistic.

One line of defense for the cover is that it not only refers to an actual Batman story of the 1960s, but that it reflects the attitude towards women in superhero comics during that unenlightened period long, long ago.

I was a boy during that time, long, long ago, and I remember the story in question: it was “Batgirl’s Costume Cut-Ups” in Detective Comics #371 (January 1968), whose cover showed Batgirl declining to help Batman and Robin in a fight against bad guys because, she tells them, she has a “bigger” problem: “a run in my tights”. Should you read the story, you’ll find that Batgirl is actually slyly diverting the criminals’ attention to her shapely legs, or, as one of the crooks, apparently fond of slang that was outdated even then, puts it, her great “gams.” Batman and Robin are then able to kayo the distracted malefactors.

I was one of the regular contributors to editor Julie Schwartz’s letter columns back then, and I distinctly recall writing a letter about how bad this story was. Today I suspect that it was Schwartz’s attempt at doing a humorous story for a change of pace, but the joke still fell flat. This story is stupid now and it was stupid then.

It was also an anomaly. In her other 1960s appearances Schwartz’s new Batgirl characteristically dove right into fighting criminals. In the comics of the mid-1960s, Batgirl’s willingness to engage in direct physical combat was bold and daring. (William Dozier, producer of the 1960s Batman TV show, is said to have forbidden the TV Batgirl from punching people with her fists because he considered it “unladylike.” Instead, she executed dance-like kicks, drawing on actress Yvonne Craig’s Ballet Russes background.) Marvel’s superheroines of the time-Invisible Girl, Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Marvel Girl–didn’t engage in fisticuffs. In the early Fantastic Four stories Sue Storm’s original power, invisibility, basically enabled her to hide.

For their period, Julie Schwartz’s Silver Age stories are actually surprisingly enlightened about women. Think of how Hawkman and Hawkgirl acted as equal partners, as spouses, as Thanagarian policemen, and as superheroes. Remember how Zatanna bravely traversed the world in search of her lost father. Consider how Schwartz and his collaborators presented several of the leading ladies of his series as career women: Iris West (The Flash) was a reporter (who did not snoop into secret identities), Jean Loring (The Atom) was a lawyer (who was perfectly sane, contrary to her depiction in Identity Crisis), and Carol Ferris (Green Lantern) ran a fictional counterpart to Boeing! Sue Dibny (The Elongated Man) was so intelligent and spirited a leading lady that her rape and murder in Identity Crisis seemed a cruel betrayal of the spirit of the classics of DC’s Silver Age. And I am of two minds about the fate that Alan Moore meted out to Barbara Gordon in Batman: The Killing Joke.

There was a lot of nonsense going on in Mort Weisinger’s Lois Lane stories in the Silver Age, but Schwartz and his writers John Broome and Gardner Fox shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. Rather than fixate on that run in Batgirl’s tights like that dopey crook, DC could easily have found cover art for Showcase: Batgirl that would have captured the character’s true, empowered spirit.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS

In last week’s column I was singing the praises of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now you can read Ken Plume’s interview with another member of the MST3K team, Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo and the erudite Professor Bobo, and who partnered with Mike Nelson in the RiffTrax demolition of the first Fantastic Four movie. While you’re at it, go read Ken’s earlier interview with Murphy’s MST3K colleague Trace Beaulieu, the original voice of Crow T. Robot and the living embodiment of the show’s archvillain Dr. Clayton Forrester.

The July 23-Aug. 5, 2007 issue of TV Guide proclaims that “TV Guide hits Comic-Con International, the premier gathering of all things sci-fi and fantasy” (p. 29). Funny, I thought Comic-Con was primarily about, you know, comics (and what about WorldCon?). Well, this year I’m not going to Comic-Con, so you will be spared six to eight weeks of reports. Longtime readers will recall my past attempts to find the Marvel booth at the con. The Beat reports that this year Marvel will finally have a big booth in San Diego. And I still won’t see it. But I have plenty to write about here instead, as you will soon learn.

But if you do attend this year’s Comic-Con, and are not crushed to death by the crowds, please stop by the Comic Art Conference Session #9, “Superheroes, Villains and Vixens: A Discussion of the Top Pop-Culture Icons of 20th-Century America,” whose panelists include Gina Misiroglu, co-editor on The Supervillain Book (Visible Ink Press), to which I contributed. It’s in Room 30AB on Saturday at 10:30 AM.

One of this year’s special guests at Comic-Con, deservedly so, is Roy Thomas, one of the most important writers and editors in Marvel’s history. Mark Evanier will interview Roy during the “Spotlight on Roy Thomas” at 4:30 PM Saturday afternoon in Room 2. I understand that during the convention Roy will be doing a signing of The Marvel Vault (Perseus Books), the book on which he and I collaborated. Those of you with sufficiently large travel budgets should have Roy sign the Vault for you in San Diego, and then have me sign your copy at next April’s New York Comic-Con!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Every summer I watch a good deal of the Wimbledon tennis championships, which this year were particularly plagued by rain, forcing continual delays. Repeatedly ESPN2 would show the sky overhead, as ominous clouds moved into view. And this year I found myself thinking, oh, look, it’s Galactus. The version from the new movie Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, that is.

Why, this is the worst extraterrestrial threat to Wimbledon since the giant alien blancmange from Monty Python’s Flying Circus .

Last weekend I visited the Brooklyn Museum and stopped by my favorite painting in its collection, Albert Bierstadt’s “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie” (1866). Take a look for yourself. If the moviemakers were going to cast a cloud as Galactus, why couldn’t they have made it look as threatening as this thunderhead?

But as I explained last week would have preferred that the movie had given us the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Galactus, that awe-inspiring god of wrath, rather than a puff of smoke with no dialogue, character or point of view.

In their greatest multi-part story, the “Galactus trilogy” (Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #48-50, 1966), Lee and Kirby presented three godlike beings: Galactus, the benevolent but normally passive Uatu the Watcher, and the Silver Surfer, a science-fictional version of an angel, who becomes a self-sacrificing Christ figure. Last week I dealt with the first two, and this week I address the problems in the movie’s treatment of the third.

One problem is that the film attempts but fails to resolve satisfactorily the contradiction between the conception of the Silver Surfer’s personality in Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy,” and the conception of the Surfer that Stan Lee evolved in the character’s series later in the 1960s.

In the trilogy the Surfer initially seems utterly alien, devoid of empathy for the lives of ordinary mortals, and of any other emotions. The Surfer does not question the morality of Galactus’s intended destruction of the human race, nor does the Surfer feel any guilt upon his own role as Galactus’s accomplice. The Surfer seems to share his master’s opinion that humans are lesser beings than themselves, with no more value than ants. “Earth is but a twinkling dot. . .a paltry pebble. . .in the vastness of space,” the Surfer says. How could its inhabitants have any significance?

By an incredible coincidence, which nonetheless fits the logic of a fable, the Surfer crash-lands into the home of Alicia Masters, the blind sculptress who was the girlfriend of Ben Grimm, the Fantastic Four’s Thing. It is the literally blind, metaphorically angelic Alicia who figuratively opens the Surfer’s eyes to the value of humanity. She argues on behalf of the human race’s worthiness to exist. But it is Alicia herself who is her own strongest argument. She treats the Surfer with kindness and concern when he falls into her home; he is impressed by her bravery in standing up to him. “Never have I heard such words. . .sensed such courage. . . or known this strange feeling. . .this new emotion!” the Surfer exclaims in wonder. ” There is a word some races use. . .that I have never understood. . .until now! At last. . .I know beauty!” The context indicates that he does not simply mean Alicia’s physical beauty; it is her personality that he finds beautiful. And in their meeting, Alicia is the spokeswoman and representative for the entire human race. In recognizing Alicia’s beauty, the Surfer perceives the “beauty” of humanity.

Earlier Alicia had shown pity to the Surfer: “Your face!” she exclaims as she touches his visage; “Never have I sensed such unimaginable loneliness in a living being!” Perhaps when the Surfer was talking about Earth’s insignificance in the universe, consciously or not he was voicing his own sense of the meaninglessness of his existence. But now, through his interaction with Alicia, the Surfer discovers his empathy for the human race: “never have I felt this new sensation. . .this thing some call. . .pity!” Stan Lee’s line may strike you as purple and corny, but it captures the Surfer’s struggle to comprehend this new emotion awakening within him. Alicia not only opens the Surfer’s eyes to humanity’s worth, but also to his own capacity for emotion and even nobility. “Then you are not just a soulless monster!” she tells him. “You too have emotions! I knew it! I felt it from the first!” Earlier the Surfer told her that the concept of “nobility” was meaningless to him, but you can read it in the poetic quality of the language that Stan Lee gives him. By the end of Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #49, the Surfer is acting on that nobility, willing to challenge his master on behalf of a race of mortals who to him are represented by that one blind young woman.

It is significant that it is Alicia who converts the Surfer to the side of humanity, not, for example, Fantastic Four leader Reed Richards. She is a woman, who in this story represents traditional “feminine” values, including compassion, mercy, and the life force. Moreover, whereas the Fantastic Four are warriors, Alicia is an artist. How fitting that an artist should open the eyes of this alien warrior to the concept of beauty.

Except for the final issue, Stan Lee collaborated with artist John Buscema, not Jack Kirby, on The Silver Surfer comics series of the late 1960s. In it Lee radically altered the Surfer’s backstory. He revealed that the Surfer was once a mortal humanoid named Norrin Radd who lived on the paradise-like planet of Zenn-La, where he was passionately in love with a woman named Shalla Bal. In order to save his homeworld from Galactus, Norrin Radd agreed to become his herald, and to lead him to other worlds to devour; Galactus therefore transformed him into the Silver Surfer.

The Surfer of the Galactus trilogy has never before experienced “pity.” The Norrin Radd of Silver Surfer Vol. 1 #1 feels “pity” and empathy for his fellow Zenn-Lavians that he gave up his world in order to save them. The Surfer of Fantastic Four #49 had not known what “beauty” is, but Norrin Radd of Silver Surfer #1 idealizes the gorgeous Shalla Bal. The Silver Surfer whom readers meet in Fantastic Four #48 seems devoid of emotion, and yet Norrin Radd in Silver Surfer #1 is a man of intense emotion, still longing for his lost love.

In the Galactus trilogy the Surfer learns to aspire towards the virtues of humanity: he recognizes that the human race possess qualities that are missing from his own existence. The Surfer proves willing to sacrifice his own life in order to save the lives of this race of mortals he has learned to admire. In contrast, in Lee and Buscema’s Silver Surfer series, the Surfer seems morally superior to humanity, and is continually bemoaning the sins and failings of the human race. In the Galactus trilogy humanity, as represented by Alicia, is the Surfer’s teacher; in the Lee-Buscema Silver Surfer series, the Surfer is a moral paragon who has much to teach humanity.

How can these two approaches to the Silver Surfer be reconciled? At Marvel it was finally established that “over time Galactus subtly altered the Surfer’s mind, submerging Radd’s emotions and repressing past memories“ which were reawakened by Alicia.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer puts the Surfer in the same position he occupies in the Galactus trilogy (as Galactus’s herald who ultimately rebels), but allows him to retain his past memories: at one point he identifies himself as Norrin Radd and says that he had to serve Galactus to save his own planet. Can we imagine the idealistic, highly sensitive Silver Surfer of the Lee-Buscema series waiting until the last third of the movie to decide that planetwide genocide is a bad thing? Could that version of the Surfer live with himself after helping Galactus destroy a long series of planets, as the movie informs us he did?

These questions are especially important in that in the movie, rebelling against Galactus turns out to be no big deal. After all, the onscreen Galactus is just a cloud, and the Surfer manages to blow him up relatively easily and still succeed in surviving, apparently unharmed.

But let’s say that the filmmakers regarded the Surfer as having so little conscience that he was willing to help destroy other planets as long as his native world was spared. So what brings about the Surfer’s decision to rebel against Galactus?

In the movie the Surfer never encounters Alicia. That’s unfortunate, since it would have given Alicia (and Kerry Washington, the actress who plays her) a bigger, more significant role in the movie, and it is important in the Galactus trilogy that it is an ordinary person, not a superhero, who convinces the Surfer to spare the human race. Instead, the Surfer principally talks with Susan Storm, the Invisible Girl, a good alternate choice for representing traditionally “feminine” values.

But there is no equivalent in the film to the persuasion scenes between Alicia and the Surfer in the comics. I hope that you can tell from my description of them, and the quotations I’ve excerpted, that Lee’s dialogue for these scenes has the potential for great dramatic power. They would have provided insight into the complexity of the Surfer’s personality and made clear why he switches sides. Furthermore, Alicia’s embodiment of the finest attributes of humanity and the awakening of the Surfer’s conscience could have been both moving and inspiring. Their scenes together could have been the heart of the film.

But this was not to be. Although the filmmakers cast Laurence Fishburne as the voice of the Silver Surfer, they give him surprisingly little dialogue. In the comics Alicia can sense the Surfer’s nobility from the elevated language that Stan Lee gives him; I doubt that audiences can detect any such nobility in the sparsity of the movie Surfer’s dialogue. Lee was aiming at Shakespearean effects when he write for the Surfer; if only the screenwriters had similar ambitions.

Indeed, the Lee-Kirby Surfer suffers a tragic fate. In the comics Galactus is far more difficult to overcome than a storm cloud. I see that Jack Kirby explicitly referred to the Surfer as a “fallen angel”. In the Galactus trilogy the Surfer is like an angel rebelling against God. But in this case, Lucifer’s counterpart, the Surfer is in the right. Unlike the Biblical Lucifer, the Surfer is humanity’s friend and defender, and Galactus, in the role of God, is out to destroy humanity. Despite his best efforts, the Surfer cannot defeat Galactus, just as Lucifer had no chance of overthrowing God.

God punished Lucifer’s revolt by casting him from heaven into hell. Galactus punishes the Silver Surfer’s revolt by casting him from the heavens onto the Earth. Galactus removes the Surfer’s ability to travel through outer space. Lee and Kirby later altered this idea: the Surfer could still fly through outer space, but Galactus had erected an energy barrier around the Earth, attuned to the Surfer’s powers, imprisoning the Surfer there. For the Surfer, a creature of the heavens, this was like crippling a bird’s wings.

Moreover, the Surfer’s fate can be interpreted as an intriguing variation on the position of Christ in the Gospels. In Christianity, God the Father and God the Son were in accord: the Son willingly lived on Earth as a man among other men, and willingly acceded to his crucifixion and death to redeem humanity. In the Galactus trilogy, the Surfer’s confinement to Earth, to live among humans, is presented as a terrible punishment. Indeed, the Surfer becomes more obviously a Christ figure in the Lee-Buscema series: a literally unearthly figure of spiritual purity, who seeks to do good, but meets with incomprehension, fear, and even hatred from much (but not all) of mankind.

Does Rise of the Silver Surfer depict the Silver Surfer as a tragic figure? No. Does the film explore the Biblical analogies underlying Galactus and the Surfer? No, again.

The filmmakers also miss the point when they have the Surfer defeat the Galactus cloud. It is significant that Lee and Kirby did not allow the Surfer to overcome Galactus. Rather, Lee and Kirby’s point was that it was humanity itself which ultimately had to stand up to Galactus, the god of wrath, and to force him to acknowledge its right to exist. The Surfer provides aid, but the human race must win its own battles. In the Galactus trilogy, the Surfer battles heroically but finally falls before Galactus. It is Reed Richards, armed with Galactus’s own weapon, the Ultimate Nullifier, who finally compels Galactus to leave Earth.

Here is yet another problem with the Fantastic Four films. Pandering to American culture’s anti-intellectualism, these movies continually mock Reed Richards, a. k. a. Mr. Fantastic, the scientific genius who leads the team, as a nerd and a dork. In Rise of the Silver Surfer Reed finally asserts himself and tells off a general who has been pushing him around. But I cannot see the movies’ version of Reed summoning up enough of a sense of authority to successfully confront Lee and Kirby’s nearly omnipotent Galactus. Lee and Kirby might have Ben Grimm kid Reed from time to time, but they portrayed Richards’ towering intellect as worthy of admiration. Lee and Kirby depicted Reed Richards as a great leader and hero, never a fool, and at the climax of the Galactus trilogy, Richards effectively becomes humanity’s representative and leader, forcing their most formidable enemy to back down. A human being stares at God, and this time God blinks.

As the Watcher, who can be interpreted as the benign aspect of God, tells Galactus, these “children”–the humans–have earned their right to live on this planet. The Galactus trilogy is a parable about humanity rising from “children” who live in fear to adults who take charge of their own lives. But in Rise of the Silver Surfer, it’s the Surfer who confronts Galactus, not any of us humans, and so the point is lost.

Last week I stated that Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer adapts three classic storylines from the comics. The third is the serial that runs from Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #56 through #60 (1966-1967), in which Doctor Doom steals the powers of the Silver Surfer. I’m particularly fond of this saga since Fantastic Four #58 was the first Fantastic Four comic I ever read. This storyline would have made a fine sequel to Rise of the Silver Surfer, but, no, the filmmakers cram it into Rise and bungle yet another classic Lee-Kirby story.

As in the Galactus trilogy, this storyline includes a memorable persuasion scene. Remember that the Lee-Kirby version of the Surfer was entirely alien, without knowledge or experience of the ways of humanity. He was an innocent, who, among other things, did not comprehend the concept of deceit. Hence, upon arriving at Doctor Doom’s castle, he naively believes Doom’s spiel about being a benefactor of humanity, or at least gives Doom the benefit of the doubt. Lee and Kirby have fun with the scene, as Doom goes over the top: he wouldn’t deceive any of us, but the unearthly Surfer has no experience of lying. But the scene soon turns very serious: Doom grants the surfer a telescopic view of outer space, and while the Surfer is rapt with joy at the sight of his lost paradise, Doom attacks him from behind, using his technology to forcibly absorb the alien’s cosmic energies. (Now that I’m writing about it, I realize this is like a metaphorical rape scene.)

If Galactus is God, and the Surfer is either Christ or a fallen angel, then Doctor Doom is metaphorically the Devil, who deceives and conquers the innocent Surfer. (Stan Lee would continue this theme, making it more explicit, when he introduced the Surfer’s literally demonic archfoe Mephisto in Silver Surfer Vol. 1 #3 in 1968.)

The metaphorical premise of the rest of this storyline becomes: What if the Devil became all-powerful? What if Evil proved to be unstoppable? Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #58, my first issue, demonstrates that the Fantastic Four cannot defeat Doctor Doom, whose power now overwhelms theirs; the following issues show Doom wreaking havoc across the entire world, whose nations are likewise helpless to stop him. Ultimately it is Reed Richards, through his great intellect, who brings about Doom’s defeat by finding a way to turn the power of Galactus (that energy barrier enveloping Earth) against him.

In Rise there is no such dramatic persuasion scene: Doom does not trick the Surfer out of his power. In fact, in Rise the Surfer has no cosmic powers: the powers are said to be in his surfboard. All that Doctor Doom needs to do to steal those powers is hop on board. Thus the filmmakers diminish the Surfer. In the comics, by stealing his powers, Doctor Doom usurped the power of a god, while reducing the Surfer to the level of a helpless mortal. In the movie, the Surfer never had any innate godlike abilities to begin with. Presumably FF mailman Willie Lumpkin could have become cosmically powered if he stepped onto that cosmic surfboard. (Hey, now there’s a cameo role for Stan Lee that I wouldn’t mind seeing as a DVD special feature!)

The movie also fails to establish that the FF could not defeat a cosmically-powered Doom through physical force. The running gag in which Johnny Storm temporarily absorbs his teammates’ powers finally pays off dramatically when he uses those extra powers to battle and defeat the cosmic Doctor Doom. (I get it: Johnny and Doom are both using someone else’s powers.) In effect, Johnny becomes like the Super-Skrull, the Lee-Kirby villain who possessed all the same powers as the FF. But that still shouldn’t be sufficient to stop someone with the full powers of the Silver Surfer circa FF Vol. 1 #48-60. Thus the movie muffs the idea of Evil as omnipotent and invincible.

If you want to see that idea done right, watch for the final two episodes of the third series of the new Doctor Who, currently being telecast in the U.S. on the Sci-Fi Channel. Executive producer/writer Russell T. Davies’ epic, suspenseful, and thrilling series finales for Doctor Who should be required viewing for every director and screenwriter of superhero movies (See Ken Plume’s interview with Davies here.)

The worst problem with the film’s Doom storyline is Doom himself. With the possible exception of Darkseid, Doctor Doom is the greatest villain of the superhero genre, and yet in these two FF movies he comes across as a lightweight. Early on in Rise we see, through deep shadows, that Doom’s face is scarred, as is in the comics, but soon his face gets fixed. At least Doom is apparently no longer made of organic metal, as he was in the first film, but the scarred face, symbolizing his soul, is essential to the character. Since he has no scars, it doesn’t make sense for him to war that metal mask later in the film. Moreover, though the movie states Doom is from Latveria (So why doesn’t he have an Eastern European accent?), it doesn’t establish that he is its monarch, dwelling in a medieval castle: hence, Doom’s suit of armor and medieval costume make no sense, either. Actor Julian McMahon is simply miscast: his voice isn’t resonant enough for Doom, and he doesn’t project the character’s genius, obsessiveness, regality, charisma, and sheer menace.

How hard can it be to cast, write and direct a major supervillain correctly in the movies? There are so many examples of successful performances of megavillains: Ian McKellen’s Magneto; Christopher Lee’s Dracula, Saruman, and Count Dooku; Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld; and Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter; and Peter Cushing’s Baron Von Frankenstein and Grand Moff Tarkin, to name just a few. There are those of us who think that Darth Vader was partly inspired by Lee and Kirby’s Doctor Doom. Would that the Fantastic Four movies would use Darth Vader as an inspiration for how to play Doctor Doom!

First, the Daredevil (2003) movie squeezed Frank Miller’s long “Elektra Saga” into a single film and drained it of intelligence and passion. Then X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) botched Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” (see “Comics in Context” #134–135). Now Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer screws up Lee and Kirby’s towering achievement, the Galactus trilogy. Why does this keep happening? It’s understandable that filmmakers are drawn to some of the greatest storylines in Marvel Comics history, but the resulting screen adaptations show no sign that anyone involved truly comprehended what made them work in the comics.

I like to think that there are directors, screenwriters and producers out there, or people who will someday become directors, screenwriters, or producers, who know the original comics and are disappointed at how poorly the movies adapted them. Warner Brothers started its first series of Superman movies in 1978 and its first string of Batman films in 1989: both series degenerated into camp by the third installment. Now, in the first years of the new century, Warners has begun its Batman and Superman film series anew, in the hands of filmmakers who are intent on treating the material with understanding and respect and avoiding the mistakes of the past.

Perhaps in fifteen or twenty years there will be new series of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and X-Men movies for a new generation. Maybe there will be a new film adaptation of the Galactus trilogy, either in live action or animation, that will be faithful to Lee and Kirby’s masterpiece. Possibly two decades hence we will listen to the commentary track on that film’s DVD (or whatever format is current then), in which the director and writers explain how disappointed they were with Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and how they were determined to get the Galactus trilogy right this time.

It’ll be a long wait, but I’d like to think this would happen. Hey, did any of us back in the 1960s think that there would ever be a live action movie of the Galactus trilogy, even a bad one?

As you may recall, I didn’t like the 2005 Fantastic Four movie, either (see “Comics in Context” #93). But I finally found a good reason for finally acquiring the FF DVD (besdides the superb documentary about Jack Kirby on the new “Extended Edition”).

One was that I realized that watching the FF movie by itself is like eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the jelly. The Fantastic Four movie is incomplete unless you are simultaneously listening to the RiffTrax audio commentary track that is designed to go with it.

Like Quick Stop editor Ken Plume and other individuals of discerning taste, I was a devoted fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (www.mst3kinfo.com/), the award-winning television series which ran on the Comedy Channel, Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel in succession from 1988 to 1999. (Reruns continued on the Sci-Fi Channel into 2004, and many episodes are now available on DVD.)

MST3K specialized in transforming cinematic sow’s ears into postmodernist silk purses. Upon the foundation of an utterly godawful movie, usually an obscure, low budget genre film, MST3K‘s stable of writers built a dazzling structure of witty commentary, clever allusions to high and popular culture, jazz-like comedy riffs, and an appealingly ironic worldview. Thus the MST3K writer/performers converted the detritus of moviemaking into a dependably entertaining, and very often brilliant satire on American pop culture.

In recent years MST3K head writer and longtime performer Michael J. Nelson has resurrected the show’s comedic sensibility through RiffTrax (http://www.rifftrax.com/). These are MP3 commentary tracks, written and performed by Nelson and often some of his former MST3K cohorts, mocking various movies. For an inexpensive fee, you can download a RiffTrax MP3 from the site, and then play it on your computer or iPod or whatever while watching a DVD of the film that is RiffTrax’s chosen victim. When the MP3 and the DVD are properly synchronized, the comments by Nelson and his colleagues will pop up in between lines of dialogue in the film that is under attack.

Since this format doesn’t require obtaining the rights to the film being skewered, Nelson and company have been able to move upward to a better, bigger budget class of bad movies to heckle.

Sometimes RiffTrax selects a target that is actually a good movie, like The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), but still imposes a perspective on it that turns it humorous: it had not occurred to me before listening to the Rings RiffTrax MP3 that Galadriel looks like an attendee at a Lilith Fair, or that the Balrog resembles Rowlf the Muppet if he had been set on fire.

But RiffTrax, like MST3K, is at its best when its target is eminently deserving of being riffed to shreds. I have recently had the privilege of watching Fantastic Four with the appropriate RiffTrax commentary, and now I cannot imagine wanting to experience the film any other way.

It’s like the way many individual issues of comic books these days provide unsatisfactory reading experiences because they’re ultimately meant to be collected and read in trade paperback form. Now I realize that the Fantastic Four movie wasn’t finished until Nelson and his colleague Kevin Murphy had recorded their commentary. If you listen to the FF RiffTrax MP3 without watching them, you won’t appreciate the jokes. If you watch the FF movie without the RiffTrax MP3, you probably won’t appreciate the movie. Put them together, and the magic happens.

Except for a reference to Marvel’s What If. . .? comic, the FF commentary doesn’t indicate knowledge of the FF comics, which is a bit surprising since the full crew of MST3K writers were renowned for their seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. Still, all that Nelson and Murphy need for this film are their well-trained eyes for absurdity. I needed their commentary to keep reminding me that Doctor Doom’s fearsome mask starts out in the movie as (believe it or not) a humanitarian award! (So charity isn’t pretty?) My favorite bit in the entire track is the comment on the cameo performance as FF mailman Willie Lumpkin by a certain familiar figure. But what I am most grateful for is that Nelson and Murphy share my feeling that the FF movie makes Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, utterly obnoxious, and they never let up on him. “Is Johnny really supposed to be the most loathsome character in all of fiction?” Murphy wonders aloud at one point.

You can find out more about RiffTrax from Ken Plume’s Quick Stop interview with Michael J. Nelson, which includes the tale of Ken’s legendary bet with Avi Arad about the first FF movie, and one of Quick Stop’s holiday shopping columns. And Nelson, Murphy and MST3K veteran Bill Corbett (interviewed by Ken here) are also joining forces as the “Film Crew” to heckle various movies on DVDs released by Shout Factory. I won’t be attending this year’s San Diego Con, but if you go, you can see them there at 5:45 PM on Saturday.

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to listening to the RiffTrax for the Daredevil flick and the first X-Men movie. And I hope there’ll be a RiffTrax treatment of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to help us while away the years until a movie does the Galactus trilogy right.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

I really wanted to like the new movie Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. After watching the trailer, with its spectacular sequence of the Human Torch pursuing the Silver Surfer over the Manhattan skyline, I had hopes that this movie might be superior to the disappointingly humdrum previous FF film (see “Comics in Context” #93). Though I still cannot long look at the movies’ version of the Thing without thinking, “This looks like a guy in a monster suit,” the CGI Silver Surfer looks better, more convincing, and more eerily alien than I would have imagined.

The early part of the new movie gave me further reason to hope. The depiction of the F. F. as hot new celebrities fit the team’s co-creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s early work on the Fantastic Four comics. In the opening of Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #1 (1961) the general public does not recognize various team members, but by the start of the second issue the people of New York City treat their new superheroes as stars. The movie F.F.’s misadventures on a commercial air flight weren’t as funny as the filmmakers doubtless had hoped, but again they fit the style of Lee and Kirby’s early issues. In the 1960s Stan Lee, with or without Kirby, loved to bring his new superheroes down to Earth by having them cope with the mundane frustrations of every day life. In Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #9, Lee and Kirby had the FF, suffering from financial trouble, hitchhike cross-country; traveling coach in the new movie is a step up for them! I did wonder why the movie FF didn’t just take the Fantasti-Car, but it turned out that team leader Reed Richards hadn’t finished inventing it yet, and its debut onscreen is one of Rise‘s brighter moments. Similarly, there is a running plot device in which Johnny Storm accidentally and temporarily switches powers with his teammates, usually to comedic effect. That’s a clever idea, with some good funny payoffs, that Lee and Kirby could well have done in the comics had they thought of it first.

But as I continued watching Rise of the Silver Surfer, my hopes for the film faded. To judge from the reviews I’ve read, fewer film critics appear to have read any of Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four, including their monumental “Galactus trilogy,” than I would have thought. Indeed, the old argument that comics should know their place, which is to be stupid, has reared its head once more in some reviews of Rise. Justin Chang in Variety contends that “At a time when tortured superheroes like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman would benefit from some serious psychotherapy, it’s almost refreshing to see a comic book caper as blithe, weightless and cheerfully dumb as Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.” (June 14, 2007). Kevin Maher of Britain’s The Times Online doesn’t regard that dumbness as a virtue: “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is everything you’d expect from a movie that began in the pages of a 1960s comic book ““ garish, giddy, emotionally simplistic, boldly idiotic and mercifully short”. Here is yet another reason to doubt the idea that the classics of the comic book medium have become part of mainstream English-speaking culture.

One critic who has read and appreciated Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” is online reviewer James Berardinelli, who wrote that “For non comic book fans over the age of 13, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is a tedious, incoherent bore. For comic book fans of any age, it is an atrocity – the cinematic desecration of one of the most storied and beloved of Marvel comic book epics”.

Exactly, except for one thing: Rise actually poorly adapts three of the greatest Lee-Kirby stories, not one.

The film does the least damage to the lead story of Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965), “Bedlam at the Baxter Building,” better known as the wedding of FF teammates Reed Richards and Sue Storm. It is impossible to adapt this story into a live action FF film for legal reasons. Lee and Kirby’s “Bedlam” story is an unusual sort of wedding party; it is actually a celebration of the imaginative richness of the Marvel Universe that they, along with others such as Steve Ditko, had jointly created within (at that point) only four years. Seeking vengeance on his longtime rival Reed Richards, Doctor Doom uses a machine to compel what amounts to an army of super-villains to attack the Fantastic Four on Reed and Sue’s wedding day; almost all of New York City’s superheroes turn out to resist the invasion. Hence the story turns into a fast-paced series of battle scenes, with surprises for the readers every few panels, as yet another hero or villain from a different Marvel series makes his appearance. Even “girls’ comics” heroines Patsy Walker and Hedy Wolfe turn up as FF fans. In a time when “universe-wide” crossovers involving DC or Marvel’s major heroes and villains have become constant events, it may be difficult for readers to appreciate the impact that “Bedlam” would have had on comics fans in the 1960s, when a company’s characters had never appeared en masse before. Indeed, part of that impact came from the fact that “Bedlam” really was a special, one-time-only event: it wasn’t a multi-part story, and Lee and Kirby did not repeat this stunt of cramming every hero and villain into a single tale.

The Marvel Universe–the interconnectiveness of its various series–is one of Marvel’s strengths. But Marvel has licensed the movie rights to different characters to different Hollywood studios, making it impossible to portray “the Marvel Universe” onscreen. Maybe now that Marvel is producing its own movies, there can be crossovers between the series for which it currently controls the film rights, like Iron Man and Avengers. But right now, you can’t expect Spider-Man, who works for Sony Pictures, to appear in one of Fox’s Fantastic Four movies.

Of course, even apart from the expense, one couldn’t put all the characters from “Bedlam” into a single movie: moviegoers who weren’t staunch Marvel Comics fans wouldn’t know who they were. Moreover, if any other superheroes were in the wedding scene at the beginning of Rise, the film would have to explain why they didn’t help the FF combat the Silver Surfer. Still, wouldn’t it have been great if Fox had persuaded a few of the actors from the X-Men movies and Daredevil film (which were also from Fox) to make cameo appearances at the second wedding scene at the film’s end, even if their characters’ superhero identities were not acknowledged onscreen?

Rise‘s only special guest cameo is by Stan Lee, who once again gets thrown out of Reed and Sue’s wedding, just as he and Jack Kirby were at the end of he wedding story in Fantastic Four Annual #3. This is a wonderful touch by the filmmakers. Stan Lee is such an entertaining showman on stage at conventions (see “Comics in Context” #168, 170–171) that it has been a shame that most of his Hitchcockian cameos in Marvel-based movies have been silent. But they’re getting better. I liked Stan’s cameo in Spider-Man 3, talking to Peter Parker, and his cameos in the FF movies (including playing his own character, Willie Lumpkin, in the first) are by far the cleverest of his cameo roles.

That final page from “Bedlam,” with Reed and Sue being pronounced man and wife, and Stan and Jack getting the boot, is on display “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” the show I co-curated at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org). At the exhibit’s opening reception, Stan Lee, delighted to see this page again, told the guests that his cameo in Rise recreated that concluding scene, but swore us to secrecy in order to keep the gag secret until the movie opened. Indeed, for comics aficionados, that may be the high point of an otherwise disappointing film. James Berardinelli pointedly asked, “What does it say about a major motion picture when the Stan Lee cameo is the highlight? (That was the only time when I smiled.)”

So, no, Rise doesn’t do FF Annual #3 right, but I understand why the filmmakers can’t. They incorporate the idea that a menace interrupts the wedding, and Stan Lee’s cameo, as nods to comics aficionados who know the original story. I can easily cut the filmmakers some slack on this.

But not on their evisceration of Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” (Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #48-50), the greatest multi-issue story in their entire body of work as collaborators with each other, and therefore one of the greatest storylines in the history of comics. (Their greatest single issue story was “This Man, This Monster” in the very next issue, Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #51).

First, the Galactus trilogy is a story about the end of the world. Of course, there seems to be no end of mediocre superhero or spy or science fiction tales about a threat to all humanity or even to the existence of the planet. But so often these threats are what Alfred Hitchcock called MacGuffins, merely plot devices designed to send the hero into action. In contrast, the Galactus trilogy makes the end of the world a thematic focus.

It starts with the people of New York City panicking at what they perceive as omens in the sky: flames and gigantic boulders. Lee and Kirby concoct science-fictional excuses for these apparitions, but they are obviously meant to evoke Biblical signs of an approaching apocalypse. I went to a Catholic grade school, and I can recall the nuns warning us naive students that the end of the world could come at any time, and that it would be preceded by signs in the heavens. (As a result, sighting unusual meteorological phenomena would shake me up back then.) The early Christians likewise believed that the end of the world could come at any time, quite possibly within their lifetimes, and today there are still those who believe that the “Rapture” may be imminent. In the Galactus trilogy Lee and Kirby depict the end of the world, not at some distant point in the future, but suddenly, unexpectedly, in the here and now.

The end of the world is a recurring theme in Kirby’s work. Consider Lee and Kirby’s forecast of Ragnarok, the twilight of the Norse gods, which can be postponed but not permanently, in Tales of Asgard in Thor #127 (1966). Possibly alluding to Ragnarok, Kirby’s The New Gods begins with the apocalypse that destroyed the “old gods,” and gave rise to the “new gods” and their two worlds, one of which is named Apokolips; in the course of his “Fourth World” series Kirby predicts that his hero Orion will have his final confrontation with his evil father Darkseid on the “plain of Armagetto,” a reference to Armageddon. In Kirby’s Eternals, the Celestials, called the “space gods” descend to Earth, where one of them, Arishem the Judge, is to spend the next fifty years weighing whether or not to destroy humanity. Kirby’s Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, is postapocalyptic fiction, set in a future in which human civilization has been destroyed, and most humans have reverted to the condition of animals, having lost the use of language.

For that matter the theme of the world’s end has been part of the superhero genre since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster presented the destruction of Krypton in Superman’s origin.

The final book of the Bible is the Book of Revelation, also known as Apocalypse, the saga of the end of the world, filled with fantastical events, supernatural beings (such as the Four Horsemen) and monsters. Works of fantasy, science fiction and the superhero genre dealing with the world’s end are thus following in the tradition of the Bible’s own book of fantastic literature.

I see that The Last Man (1826), by Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, is considered one of the earliest works of “apocalyptic fiction”: in it a plague wipes out all of humanity except for the title character, who proves to be immune.

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) conjures a vision of the near destruction of human civilization by extraterrestrial invaders. This apocalypse is averted only by the Martins’ susceptibility to microscopic disease germs, whose presence Wells’s narrator attributes to God’s providence. (Compare this to how Lee and Kirby’s Godlike Watcher guides the Human Torch to the “Ultimate Nullifier” device that, despite its tiny size, proves powerful enough to threaten the mighty Galactus.)

Wells’s novel is considered to be an example of “invasion literature,” in which a nation is invaded by another. Such conquests happen in real life, but Wells’ War ups the ante by depicting events that could lead to the extinction of the entire human race.

Once the atomic bomb gave humanity the capacity to render itself extinct, it is no wonder that apocalyptic fiction took on new relevance; thus, for example, the Cold War produced films in which the world verges towards nuclear war, as in Fail-Safe and Doctor Strangelove (both 1964).

Similarly, in the current period of terrorist threats, in which we are all too aware that someday someone might set off an atomic weapon in New York City or another major city, it makes sense that people would turn to apocalyptic fiction to voice their fears.

It strikes me that even Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), with its warnings of “tipping points” past which ecological damage cannot be reversed or stopped, and its nightmarish forecasts of major cities being submerged beneath rising seas, is an example of what one might term apocalyptic nonfiction.

But in those films the human race is responsible for its own potential destruction. The Galactus trilogy, like War of the Worlds, removes the responsibility for apocalypse from humanity. They instead posit more frightening scenarios: forces from outside will destroy the human race, and there is nothing that we can do to stop them. In the realm of supernatural fantasy, H P. Lovecraft creates a similar effect with his monstrous “gods” lurking in another reality, waiting to burst through the dimensional barriers to overwhelm our world.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer gets some of the sense of approaching apocalypse. Reed Richards and the U. S. government learn that
each planet that the Silver Surfer has visited has been obliterated. (Just how they know this is a mystery, assuming that the Surfer and Galactus can travel faster than light through hyperspace, as in the comics. We cannot see planets in other solar systems as they are now, since light takes years to travel from there to Earth.) I was especially impressed by the gaping hole that the movie Surfer creates in London’s Thames River bank, an ominous sign of approaching Armageddon, indeed. (And how odd, considering that the FF are based in New York City, that London has a much stronger presence in their new film than New York.)

However, Lee and Kirby made a point of repeatedly showing the general public’s reaction to the growing signs of approaching doom in the Galactus trilogy. This is very important for conveying a sense of the planet in what are potentially its final hours. Now when I think of the panel of Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #49 in which ordinary citizens look up in bewildered fear at Galactus building his doomsday machine atop the Baxter Building, I remember how I and many New Yorkers looked up at the smoking towers on September 11, 2001, wondering what disaster might come next.

In Rise of the Silver Surfer we don’t see enough of the general population’s reaction to the approaching apocalypse; even the Fantastic Four seem to take it no more or less seriously than they would any other threat. The movie does not sufficiently dramatize the notion that this time the FF are really up against the ultimate threat, Doomsday itself.

Another example of apocalyptic invasion fiction is the hugely popular movie Independence Day, a sort of update of The War of the Worlds in which aliens lay waste to much of civilization, but are finally bested by a computer virus, rather than a disease-carrying virus, narrowly avoiding the end of humankind. This movie came out in 1996, long afer the Cold War and before the 9/11 attacks. It was a time when Americans felt safe from war, so why wwere so many moviegoers eager to fantasize about the annihilation of human civilization?

I suspect that the end of the world subconsciously servbes as a metaphor for one’s own death. After all, when you die, as far as you’re concerned, the world comes to an end. And this is a fate you are helpless to prevent.

This brings us to the being who is responsible for bringing about what threatens to be the end of the world in the Galactus trilogy: Galactus himself. It has been frequenly reported that Galactus resulted from Stan Lee’s direction to Jack Kirby to have the Fantastic Four “fight God” (for example, here & here).

The perennials question faced by the religious are, if God exists, why does He permit us to suffer? Beneath his science fiction trappings, Galactus is Lee and Kirby’s possible answer to the question: Galactus represents God as utterly insensitive to the fate of human beings. As Galactus tells the Fantastic Four, to a superior being like himself, they and other humans are comparable to ants. Galactus rhetorically asks, would you hesitate to step on an anthill? Galactus has decreed that all life on Earth, including humankind, must be destroyed, just as God has decreed that all human beings must inevitably die.

Lee and Kirby make Galactus more grotesquely horrifying by making him into a god that actually feeds on humanity. Galactus does so indirectly, by draining the “life energies” of a planet, but the effect is the same: we must perish to satisfy his never-ending hunger. Galactus is a god who demands human sacrifices.

A brilliant creation, Galactus has many aspects. You can regard him as an image of God as mankind’s enemy. But he is also like a fairy tale giant or ogre, who towers above the humans that he devours for his dinner (just as we tower above the ants). Children surely subconsciously associate giants with adults, who tower over them. Thus Galactus is also God as the ultimate cruel parent. Notice that in Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #50, Galactus tells the Watcher that allowing a human to possess the Ultimate Nullifier is like giving a dangerous weapon to a child, whereupon the Watcher observes that this world belongs to these “children.”

Galactus is also Lee and Kirby’s greatest portrayal of the dark side of Friedrich Nietzche’s ubermensch, the superior being who considers himself above human morality, and “beyond good and evil.” Galactus repeatedly and explicitly states in the trilogy that he is not bound by concepts of good and evil.

The superhero archetype represents a taming of the ubermensch figure: the superhero utilizes his superior abilities on behalf of his fellow man. The superhero typically risks his life to save the masses; Galactus will destroy the masses rather than risk his own death.

The ubermensch connection suggests that Galactus might also be a authoritarian ruler blown up to cosmic proportions. Uncaring about the lives or wishes or morality of “lesser” beings, Galactus follows only his own will. He simultaneously regards himself as a superior being far worthier of existence than these human “ants,” and as a victim of his own physical needs, rationalizing genocide in order to temporarily satisfy his endless hunger. It’s appropriate that Lee and Kirby later pitted Galactus against another of their creations, Ego the Living Planet (in Thor #160-162,1969), whose name indicates that, like Galactus, he represents the dangers of egocentrism linked to absolute power. They are two of a kind. The fact that Jack Kirby felt that Galactus should have a “herald,” namely the Silver Surfer, suggests that Kirby thought of Galactus as a kind of monarch.

Though I doubt that Lee and Kirby consciously intended it, you could also regard Galactus as the ultimate ecological threat, laying waste to planets, destroying their biospheres; or as a cosmic imperialist, caring nothing for the “natives” of the worlds he exploits for their resources. He is even like a cosmic vampire, driven by “hunger” to drain the life forces of entire biospheres, addicted to their energies.

But if Galactus regards himself as so superior in kind to the mere mortals of Earth, why does he bother talking to the Fantastic Four? Why does he bother justifying his actions to them? To use Galactus’s own analogy, do we talk to the ants? Methinks the Devourer of Worlds doth protest too much. Whether or not Lee and Kirby intended it, I get the feeling from Galactus’s dialogue in the trilogy that he is a conscious or unconscious hypocrite. He seems to feel obliged to justify his behavior to the Fantastic Four, and perhaps to himself.

The key sign of Galactus’s hypocrisy comes at the end of the trilogy in Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #50, in which he is thwarted for the first time in his long existence. Galactus declares that he bears no malice towards his opponents, but then literally strikes down the Silver Surfer, his herald who betrayed him, with energy beams from his eyes, stripping him of his ability to travel through outer space. Despite Galactus’s denial, this comes across as a brutal act of vengeance.

It makes sense that when Lee and Kirby eventually gave Galactus an origin story (Thor #168-169, 1969), they revealed that he was once a humanoid mortal himself, who “died” in the (what else?) apocalyptic destruction of a previous universe, to be “reborn” in our own as the godlike Devourer of Worlds, a figure of death on a cosmic scale. It is then no wonder that Galactus had to devise rationalizations for his mass slaughters of beings who resemble what he once was.

What an extraordinary creation Galactus is! But Lee and Kirby were able to depict the many sides of Galactus by portraying him as a being who could communicate with the Fantastic Four and the Slver Surfer. Through the dialogue that Stan Lee gave him, Galactus showed the readers his personality and philosophy, his views of himself, of his servant, the Silver Surfer, and of his potential human victims. But as film critic James Berardinelli points out, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer “turns one of the most ominous and dangerous of all villains into an interplanetary storm cloud.”

That might still have worked, if, say, a stentorian voice had issued from the cloud (like the God of the Old Testament speaking from the burning bush), giving the Surfer orders and threatening the world. The Beat suggests that “the image of a vast purple glove coming out of the cloud would have been 10 to the 12th power times cooler than anything else in the movie. But that would also have taken imagination, and there is very little of that on display here”. Nope, this is just a humongous cloud, with no voice, no sign of intelligence (despite the Surfer claiming that it threatened to destroy his homeworld), and no apparent personality. It’s as if the big, dark cloud you see just before a thunderstorm had an agent and got itself a movie deal. Claypool Comics editor/writer/editor Richard Howell suggested to me that the movie Galactus is actually a big puff of smoke from Jack Kirby’s cigar. More likely it’s just a lot of hot air. Maybe the next Fantastic Four movie will depict the Frightful Four as a rock, a table lamp, a #2 pencil, and a turnip.

One of the Beat’s readers e-mailed a comment that stated that the filmmakers intend to reveal what their Galactus really looks like in the projected Silver Surfer spinoff film. If that’s true, then, sorry, it’s still too late. I have no sympathy for doing the Galactus trilogy without giving Galactus a speaking part.

There are actually three “gods” in the Galactus trilogy. The second is Uatu the Watcher, who represents a much more benign vision of God, as well as a different answer to the question of why there is suffering. Uatu is fond of the Fantastic Four and of the people of Earth, but he is bound by an oath of non-interference in human affairs, and merely observes from his post on the moon.

In the Galactus trilogy Uatu intervenes in indirect ways to defend humankind from the threat of Galactus and the end of their world. Uatu never challenges Galactus directly, but initially attempts to hide Earth from Galactus’s herald, the Silver Surfer (through creating the aforementioned “omens” in the sky), and later guides the Human Torch to the key to defeating Galactus, the Ultimate Nullifier.

Uatu is like a God who cares about the human race and watches over them, but for his own reasons does not intervene in their lives Uatu’s aid is confined to helping those who help themselves: he guides the Torch to the Ultimate Nullifier, but it is Johnny who must bring it back to Earth and Reed who must determine how to use it against Galactus. (Similarly, in the comics story of Reed and Sue’s wedding, the Watcher enables Reed to find the machine that ends the threat posed by the army of super-villains, but it is Reed who must figure out how to use it.) Significantly, in Stan Lee and Larry Lieber’s story of the origin of the alien race of Watchers (Tales of Suspense #53, 1964), when the Watchers directly participated in the development of one world’s civilization, they inadvertently brought about the planet’s devastation by nuclear war (another apocalypse). Uatu thus is a Godlike being who does not interfere in human affairs because he is well aware that he is not infallible. That is an intriguing answer to the question of why God does not make His presence more clearly felt in the world.

On the second page of Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #49 Uatu and Galactus confront each other atop the FF’s headquarters, the Baxter Building. It is as if Uatu and Galactus each represent a different aspect of God, one benign and the other destructive, each looking at the other as if in a mirror. Like a futuristic war god, Galactus is garbed in armor and wears an immense helmet which conceals most of his humanoid features. (John Byrne would later establish that every race sees Galactus in its own image, and that he is not truly humanoid.) Uatu, whose garb resembles a Roman toga, does not seem warlike whatsoever, and his features are unmasked and open. Uatu is like a benevolent, paternal God, who informs Galactus that these “children”–the human race–have earned the right to life on their world. Uatu’s non-interference in the world of humans also means that he allows them freedom to govern their own lives.

Uatu’s importance to the Galactus trilogy is generally underrated, but he plays an essential role in it. Uatu does not turn up in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer at all. Perhaps the filmmakers felt that putting three godlike beings in the movie would overshadow the Fantastic Four themselves.
But the FF certainly hold their own as major players in the Galactus trilogy comics.

Moreover, the concept of humans–even super-powered humans–finding themselves in the middle of a conflict between good and evil “gods” is a recurring motif in Jack Kirby’s body of work, whether those “gods” are Thor and Loki, or Uatu and Galactus, or the New Gods of New Genesis and the gods of Apokolips, or the Eternals and the Deviants.

The third “god” in the Galactus trilogy is the Silver Surfer himself. He enters as a science-fictional version of an angel: a shining, literally unearthly figure, who flies through the air, not on wings but on the cosmic “surfboard” that Kirby gave him, which some film reviewers found laughable but which is nonetheless a powerful, iconic image. Like an angel, he is the servant of his God, who in this case is Galactus. At the trilogy’s beginning the Surfer is also an angel of death: he locates a world for his master to consume, and then signals him to come to destroy it. The movie gets this right, masking clear that the Surfer is a harbinger of the end of the world.

By the end of the Galactus trilogy, the Surfer has evolved from angel of death into a Christ figure, seeking to bring salvation to humanity, opposing Galactus, a “god” of wrath. In the comics as the Surfer and Galactus duel with bolts of cosmic energies, they also battle with words, making their clash of philosophies clear. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer cannot come close to tapping the dramatic power of this confrontation in the comics. In the Lee-Kirby trilogy the Surfer passionately argues on behalf of humanity’s worthiness to survive as he wages battle against his former master. How can the movie Surfer inspire and even move us with speeches about his newfound love of the human race when he has no adversary to debate–only a cloud?

Furthermore, the movie stumbles into a dangerous trap: Stan Lee’s and Jack Kirby’s differing interpretations of the Silver Surfer as a character, as we shall investigate next week.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson