11/1/2022 0 Comments Silver surfer warped reality![]() In this series, Norrin Radd had been thrown together with a woman from Earth, Dawn Greenwood, who had been pulled from throughout time and space as the person who was most important to him–despite the fact that he had never seen her before. In SILVER SURFER #11, he got his opportunity to do this once again.Ī bit of background is probably necessary here, even for those who are familiar with the Silver Surfer. Since then, he had often spoken about wanting to try to do more issues build around a structural conceit, both to see if he could pull them off and to make something more immediately memorable than a typical issue of a given comic. Many years earlier, Dan had written the REN & STIMPY: MASTERS OF TIME AND SPACE Special, which was done in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and was both super-clever on a formal structure level and very fumy despite its complexity. #Silver surfer warped reality seriesAnd because we were building this series just for ourselves, without a whole lot of concern for how well it might perform (though it always maintained itself well throughout the run), that also gave us the latitude to try some experimental storytelling. So SILVER SURFER was a series we did entirely for ourselves, and we pulled from all sorts of different influences throughout the run of it: Hayao Miyazaki films (Dawn is deliberately styled in the mold of a Miyazaki heroine), British Sci-Fi (Not just DOCTOR WHO, but RED DWARF and HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY and others), Jack Kirby comics, and everything else under the sun. Davies writings about what made his iteration of the show work, as laid out in his book THE WRITER’S TALE. And sure, we took inspiration from DOCTOR WHO, but more from showrunner Russell T. Every issue was about the developing relationship between Norrin Radd, the Silver Surfer, and Dawn Greenwood, the human woman he found himself in contact with. But what SILVER SURFER really was is a romance comic cleverly disguised as a super hero adventure story. And there’s some truth to that, certainly. Many pundits, both for and against the series pointed out its similarity to DOCTOR WHO, casting the Surfer as an alien with a human companion with which he travels the cosmos. ![]() The other thing is that, while on the surface it seemed to be a super hero book, SILVER SURFER wasn’t really that at all. That’s a rarity in this day and age, and one of the things that helped separate SILVER SURFER from the pack. #Silver surfer warped reality plusAs the series ran for fifteen issues, then was rebooted with a new #1 and ran another 14 issues, plus a preview story in MARVEL POINT ONE #1, that’s a span of just under thirty releases by the same creative team. Every single issue was by Slott and Allred. (The other, for the record, is the Mark Waid & Mike Wieringo FANTASTIC FOUR, which we will no doubt cover here in the days to come.) This book was a total labor of love, and I used all of the authority at my command to stack the deck for it a little bit: there were no fill-ins throughout its run. I should probably start out by saying that this run of SILVER SURFER, produced by Dan Slott and Mike Allred, is one of my two favorite runs out of everything I’ve ever worked on. This issue of SILVER SURFER does something similar. This particular issue came to mind again as a topic through conversation about the upcoming issue of Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo’s NIGHTWING series in which the entire issue will comprise one long twenty-page panel. Which will be exactly what it sounds link: behind-the-scenes analysis of individual issues that are ones that I consider to have been the absolute best single issues of my thirty-plus year editorial output. ![]() Nonetheless, this will inaugurate a new category here: PERSONAL BEST. Given that it won the Eisner Award for Best Single Issue in 2016, though, I feel as though there’s a little bit of justification for it. It’s somehow a little bit too self-aggrandizing for me to talk about any of the comics I’ve edited over the years as a PERFECT GAME, the category that I might have featured this issue under. ![]()
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