I don’t want to try to boil a character down TOO much to the simplest description of the character, as it feels a bit reductive to do so (I say that as I specifically AM being reductive, but you know what I mean, there’s reductive, and there’s being so reductive that you lose all sense of nuance), but generally speaking, at the heart of the Silver Surfer is the idea of viewing humanity through the eyes of an alien. You know, using science fiction as a way to make commentary on humanity, by looking at it all through Silver Surfer’s outside perspective. It’s obviously evolved a bit from Silver Surfer’s first comic book series, but it is that basic concept. “What is…racism?” That sort of thing. I talked to Greg Pak about it at the start of this series, and he noted:
I’m just trying to find the human touch in every scene, the subtleties of humor and wonder and sadness that permeate every interaction and decision we make in this flawed world. I love Norrin and I love putting him in incongruous scenes of normalcy — where he’s aware of his alien-ness, but also makes it normal? There’s subtle, humanistic humor in those moments, and we’re making the most of them.
Well, it’s so notable that he pointed out the “human” touch, as that is very much what we end up getting in Death of the Silver Surfer #5, and it transforms the character of the Silver Surfer completely.
Image via Marvel
Death of the Silver Surfer #5 is from writer Greg Pak, pencilers Sumit Kumar and Tiago Palma, inkers Jonas Trindade, Palma and Kumar, colorist Frank D’Armata, and letterer Joe Sabino, and it brings this storyline to an end, but sets up a whole new era for the SIlver Surffer…just not the Silver Surfer we knew coming into the series.
What has happened in the series to this point?
A lot of this series has been about the idea of “othering” aliens, and how doing so can allow others to cultivate power. It’s a powerful concept, and one that Pak uses to great effect throughout this series, even as the co-lead of the series, Kelly Koh, realizes how WRONG she has been to be caught up in that sort of thing.
As I pointed out in a recent piece about how Kelly Koh became the new SIlver Surfer, Koh was an agent for the Bureau of Alien Neutralisation (BAN), an anti-alien group (that Greg Pak had introduced in the Planet Hulk: Worldbreaker miniseries) that had been purchased by Eaglestar International’s CEO, Dennis Harmon. who planned to use anti-alien hatred to turn aliens into scapegoats in his quest for power. That quest already seemed to hit paydirt when Harmon got a hold of the Blood of Galactus, which is deadly and dangerous on its own, and which Harmon was using to create a horde of attackers to attack Earth so that he could blame the attack on aliens.
However, on the way to Earth, the horde attacked the space station Kelly’s mother was staying on, and Kelly rushed to her mother’s side too late to save her, but as her mother died, Norrin gives Kelly the Power Cosmic, and so she becomes the new Silver Surfer to help avenge her mother’s death. As soon as she gained the powers, though, Kelly realized something very important about her role as an agent of BAN.
What lesson has Kelly learned?
She sees in the mind of an alien that she had “neutralized” earlier in the series what it was like from the perspective of the alien (a nice little twist on what I was saying earlier about seeing humanity through the eyes of an alien, which was a classic Silver Surfer trope), and it forces Kelly to realize her role in BAN was evil, and she quits, and joins SIlver Surfer (and the Fantastic Four) in fighting against her evil boss, Harmon.
In the end, Silver Surfer sacrifices himself to save everyone, but it was one of those deaths that barely need to be explained away, to be frank, as you could easily argue he was just transported somewhere else instead of being destroyed, so he could come back at any moment. However, for the sake of the story, let’s say that he is actually dead, and he has transferred his Power Cosmic to Kelly before he died.
She, of course, turns on Harmon, destroying him (it turns out to be a sort of Doom-bot-esque robot deal filling in for Harmon), but then also sort of turns on the Fantastic Four, using her powers to put together a new place for the aliens and other people of the space station, insisting that no one can bother them again, but she leaves it at that for now.
When the Fantastic Four implore her to use her powers as Norrin Radd would, Kelly brings up the central conceit of her character. If the Silver Surfer has always been about viewing humanity through the lens of an alien, what do you do now that it is a HUMAN viewing humanity with the POWER of a powerful alien? That is a WHOLE other story, and it is one that is rife for stories. Norrin Radd trusted Kelly Koh enough to give her his powers, but did he make the RIGHT call? CAN Kelly be trusted with these new powers? How will she use them? She is a true rogue figure, and it will be fascinating to see where she goes next with these abilities. We never really had to worry about the SIlver Surfer becoming a villain (even with that brief “Savage Silver Surfer” period), but can we truly say the same for Kelly Koh? She sure seemed to learn a lot about justice in this series, but she is now a human with the Power Cosmic, do we even know what that DOES to a person’s mind?
This series has a fine ending, but the “new beginning” is even stronger.
Source: Marvel