Silver Surfer: The Best Defense #1 – Searching for a Friend At the End of the World

Unfortunately, this is a comic that has no idea what it wants to be about. It spends about half the issue (far, far too long) following the misadventures of the unnamed young Centurian and spending entirely too much time diving into the also-unnamed planet’s barter system, run by the unnamed warlord. A possibility exists that leaving everything in the story unnamed except for the Silver Surfer himself, Galactus, and the Roxxon Corporation is supposed to mean that everything else is supposed to be symbolic of… something, but it could just as easily be lazy writing. Latour gives no clues as to his intention here, if he has any at all. I’d say it’s open to interpretation, except I don’t know what exactly the reader is meant to be interpreting.

There’s an attempt at philosophy in detailing the Surfer’s brief journey in judging the inhabitants of the planet worthy of salvation or not. And it’s a good idea on paper, but in practice, simply too much time is spent focusing on the boy and the barter system and the thieves and the warlord… and good lord, why was Roxxon part of the equation at all? It feels more like a name-drop than any salient piece of the story. I believe Latour was trying to give us a microcosm of life on the planet, but there were any number of other storytelling methods that would have been more efficient.

There are too many vaguely-defined ideas at play. The big cosmic crisis is called a train? Given the context and scale, what does that even mean? The picture sure is pretty, though:

In space, no one can hear you scream, “Funny, that doesn’t LOOK like a train.”

Similarly, Latour’s art tries to have it both ways, too. It’s maddeningly uneven. Scenes in space are lush, vibrant, and bursting with color – think Mike del Mundo crossed with a Kirbyesque design sense – but the planetside scenes are all pencils, and sloppy-looking ones at that (I’ll concede those scenes’ colors pop quite well, though). I assume Latour is trying to create a juxtaposition between the grandeur of space versus the grime and grit of the planet’s life, but the gap between the two styles is just too great to be anything but jarring. Then there’s his take on the Silver Surfer: I get the feeling Latour just really doesn’t know how to draw reflective surfaces, because our man Norrin is a hot mess of way-too-heavily-inked linework:

Inking should not be done with a Sharpie marker.

And ultimately, all it amounts to is maneuvering the Surfer to a place where he sends his board into a void so that it can rescue Namor. It’s a slog to get through, and by the end, the reader isn’t even really rewarded with anything meaningful or new. Silver Surfer is a morally gray character, is he? And he struggles with the choices he’s had to make as the herald of Galactus? …You don’t say. I’m pretty sure that was on his resume from his very first appearance.

Sometimes creators misfire. It happens. Jason Latour is plenty talented; I’ve read enough by him – both as a writer and artist – to know this for a fact. I don’t want to come off like I’m running him down, even though this has unfortunately been a pretty merciless review. But for whatever the reason, he just seems to have been utterly out of his depth with this issue. And that may not even be his fault – it may have been a case where an editor gave him an assignment, and he did the best he could. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the end result.