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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