FRED Entertainment

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