Silver Surfer: Black is a passion project for Donny Cates, and it shows. It’s the culmination of boyhood dreams, professional ambition, meticulous plotting, expansive imagination, and hours spent writing, refining, writing again.
Issue one of Silver Surfer: Black is a cosmic blend of Donny Cates’s soul and Marvel corporate. Each an invincible force gleaming with incomprehensible power like the Surfer himself.
In order to write something this plotted, you have to really love comics. I’m not sure enough people know that Editorial at Marvel really does love comics. Sure, their names are credited in the issue, but…
Since Marvel’s Editorial team so relentlessly and effortlessly interweaves story arcs, characters, and universes, I’ll leave it to them to catch you up on the cosmos before we get into Silver Surfer: Black.
To save his planet, Norrin Radd surrendered his freedom to become herald to the world-devouring Galactus. Coated with galactic glaze, given a surfboard obeying his mental commands and granted the power cosmic, he now soars the universe as a shining sentinel of the spaceways! The galaxy was in chaos after Thanos, the mad titan, was killed. The cosmos’ greatest warriors gathered to hear the reading of his last will and testament — only to be attacked by Thanos’ Black Order! In the ensuing battle, the Black Order opened a black hole and cast several heroes — including the Silver Surfer — into the abyss. Now, drowning and unmoored in an endless void, the surfer is lost…
Silver Surfer Black, issue one preface
Reading experience
For us, Silver Surfer: Black is a comics zeitgeist moment. A tribute to the past and beginnings of the Marvel Universe, publisher in a time when the future of comics never seemed so bright, from self-published webcomics to global movie domination. This comic is a spectacle worthy of the infinite variant covers it has spawned. It’s the most poetic and vulnerable comic I’ve ever read.
For Marvel, it’s a boon. A comic that can increase their dominant market share just a bit more, get readers to buy into new universes. To fully understand this departure from reality in your hands, I’d say you need to know your Guardians of the Galaxy — and Donny Cates’ entire magnum opus. (I took Marvel Editorial up on their advice and acquainted myself with Guardians of the Galaxy — Annual #1 and Guardians of the Galaxy #1, both released in 2019.)
Cates’s writing is poetic and ambitious. (My favorite line: “Celestial tides crash upon me, starless and infinite.” My favorite words: “felled,” “cull,” “unmoored,” “bedlam.”) The story reads as if it is fresh off the lips of an omniscient being shouldering the trauma of millions, rather than a guy in Austin, Texas.
The framing of the story is equally poetic. Cates’s Silver Surfer begins by saying he is known as Death, and ends by affirming “I am not death. I am a blazing light in the abyss — and though drowning in the shadows — overwhelmed and suffocated by the dark —I ignite. I shine.”
How’s the art in SILVER SURFER BLACK?
There is, of course, another poetic element to this story. The dynamism between the words and art shows just how far back Cates and Tradd Moore go, from former classmates at Savannah College of Art and Design to the top of the most world-renowned comic book company.
The history here — between Cates and Moore, Cates and Stan Lee, and Lee and Kirby’s surfer plus the Surfer of 2000s movies & modern angst — is something to behold. And it is a visual spectacle to behold, indeed — with a texture, weight, arrangement, and palate unlike anything else currently published.
The fluid expressions of Moore’s lines, Stewart’s colors, and Cowles’s letters are perfect for this epic. It’s hard to imagine the fabric of reality tearing apart into something timeless and infinite, but these guys can.
My favorite visual moments:
- Silver Surfer crying as he relives the worst period of his life. The tear fades into a speed trail.
- The black hole pages have psychedelic borders made of earthy tones. If there were a shirt with these patterns on it, I’d buy.
- The physical and atmospheric deformities caused by the torrent of motion and time in the black hole.
- The revelation of the Surfer’s black, iridescent hand is absolutely iconic.
Contains Spoilers: What happens in SILVER SURFER BLACK issue one?
Norrin Radd — the Silver Surfer, Sentinel of the Spaceways, the Herald of Galactus unchained — goes by many names, including death. Throughout, he grapples with his complicity in decimating people and planets by Galactus’s side. He feels remorse over his “cold stare” and “stone inaction.” He sheds a silver tear.
After this recap, we see Norrin fall into an endless wormhole with the other Guardians of the Galaxy. He implores Beta Ray Bill to summon Stormbreaker and create a chasm black hole. (If you don’t take my word for it, then consult an interdimensional galactic physicist or Donny Cates.) After this disruption, the Silver Surfer tears through the abyss, his speed and power cosmic eventually breaching the fabric long enough for his fellow heroes to escape.
After they are safe, he collapses. Saving pantheons of heroes absolves his guilt only partially. Now he must ponder his guilt indefinitely as he careens through something beyond spacetime. He floats and falls for years, hurting, healing.
Suddenly, he senses that there is a planet eons away where evil forces are killing the innocent. He answers the call and is confronted with three giant sentries guarding some phallic metal thing. They engage in a battle, against the Surfer’s wishes and pleas for help.
Instead of killing the sentries, he restores light to this dark, barren world. The hand he used to birth that infant star becomes black and iridescent.
Is the black hole part of him now? It seems so. It seems the blackness might consume him.
The sentries are revealed to be “goddesses of some abandoned pantheon.” They must have been under some spell, because their faces are revealed when they were concealed before, and their faces are beautiful.
He investigates the mysterious metal structure, now opened. In a Marvel-Cates checkmate moment, Knull awaits the Surfer inside. (It is implied that the Surfer was catapulted to the beginning of time, and now he stands before the father of Symbiotes, Knull.)
9/10 Rating
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