Stan Lee Vs. Jack Kirby #1 - The Silver Surfer

By the time of the Silver Surfer's first appearance in Fantastic Four #48 (1965), Stan Lee had handed over much of the plotting of the book to Jack Kirby. The same had happened with Steve Ditko on Spider-man, except as of #25, Ditko actually received credit for it, unlike Jack.

According to some accounts, Stan's plot for what would become Fantastic Four #48, 49 & 50 consisted of four words; "have them fight God." When Kirby delivered his pencilled pages for #48, Stan was surprised to see some guy on a flying surfboard. So the Surfer was entirely Kirby's creation.


The question is, then, who was the Surfer? It seems apparent from his first appearance that the Surfer is not familiar with humanity. Our actions and our emotions are entirely alien to him. Even eating food seems completely irrational to him.

Kirby had intended for the Surfer to be a being of pure energy, and thus he just converts matter directly into energy in order to consume it - like Galactus does on a planetary scale. In the bottom left panel, it's clear from Kirby's note that the Surfer is about to do the same thing to Alicia...


But of course, he's moved by Alicia's plight (and her beauty - the Surfer's pretty shallow, I guess!) so he turns against Galactus. Kirby had never intended Galactus and the Surfer to be returning characters, but they proved so popular, that Stan realised they had to come back. So Kirby brought the Surfer back a few times in his remaining years on Fantastic Four, and none of those stories contradict his notion that the Surfer is an alien made of pure energy. If anything, they reinforce the idea.

Then in 1968, Martin Goodman got a better distribution deal, which meant that Marvel could publish more comics - finallly, Stan could give the Silver Surfer his own book, and tell the origin story he'd wanted to tell - without Jack Kirby. This came as a complete surprise to Kirby, who'd been working up his own version of the Surfer's origin for inclusion in Fantastic Four, presumably following the Surfer's and Galactus' appearance in FF #74 to 76.


Stan's take on the Surfer was a lot more prosaic, and almost completely opposed to Kirby's. He's human in all but name, and he lets Galactus transform him into the Surfer in order to spare his home planet, Zenn-La.



The Surfer's book was double sized, which meant it cost twice as much as a regular comic. That, combined with the fact that it just wasn't very good (despite some wonderful John Buscema art) meant that it only lasted 18 issues. Jack Kirby drew the last issue but by then it was too late to save it.

The Surfer occasionally guest-starred in various titles throughout the 1970's, and in 1982, John Byrne wrote a one-off special that tried to make sense of the Surfer's continuity. Then, finally, in 1987, the Surfer got his own series again.

This time, the book lasted much longer, and in #48, Jim Starlin tells a story where the Surfer seeks out Galactus in order to discover whether he altered Norrin Radd's psyche when he became the Surfer. It's one of several stories that tries to reconcile Kirby's more alien Surfer with Stan Lee's vision for the character. And it's partially successful at doing so. Galactus had altered Norrin Radd - made him less capable of feeling emotion - so that he could find Galactus inhabited worlds on which to feed.




It's still not Kirby's original intention though, and that's something we'll sadly never see.


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