Scans_Daily

In American comics you've got your Jack Kirby and you've got your Steve Ditko. The number of artists who aren't influenced by them is infinitesimally small. But there has been, over the last thirty years, a slowly growing contingent of superhero artists who use another guy as their touchstone -- hero of FreedomFrench comics Jean Giraud or, to be more precise, Moebius, as he prefers to be known when talking about his SF and fantasy work. He only really came to prominence on this side of the Atlantic around 1978-9, when the English translations of Métal Hurlant began to take off in the States, but within a few years you could see his influence on the likes of Walt Simonson and Art Adams, an influence that has spread down to 2011 in the drawings of Frank Quitely, Geof Darrow, and others -- not least because his style seems to be a natural starting point for, bitte Gott hilf uns, imitators of Rob Liefeld to up their game. And let us not forget his international influence: Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga is noticeably Moebius-like, though mixed with Miyazaki's own genius it's one of the few pieces of such work that can stand toe-to-toe with the Frenchman's best and not be knocked flat to the canvas.

But as much as I love his art, what drives me absolutely mental about Moebius is his taste in stories. While acknowledging that it is just a matter of taste, I can't stand the preciousness of, say, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and that's the sort of thing Moebius returns to again and again with all of his collaborators and in his own writing. It's maybe tilting at windmills in a genre that co-opts everything fantastic and turns it into stew, but I do prefer straightforward story-telling.

This brings me to Silver Surfer: Parable, for which Moebius supplies the art and Stan Lee provided the story. I don't think I'm going against the critical grain to say that Lee's muse had long since wandered away when this was printed in 1989. I can see that you'd have something interesting if this had been made twenty years prior to that (and preferably twenty-five), but Lee's writing had collapsed in a thick dust cloud of ponderousness and self-seriousness by the time this made it to print.

So I'm not going to try very hard to sum up the story here, particularly the second plot arc. It soberly informs us that religious leaders are often interested in their own power and people rely on religion to avoid thinking, which is bad, m'kay? And it does so with a singular lack of finesse. Instead I'll focus on the Surfer and Galactus and the A-Plot, which...

( ...brings a lot of the pretty )

Marshall Rogers and Steve Englehart were in a select group of people that revitalized Batman in the 1970s. The pairing of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams was first and probably more famous, but the artist Rogers and writer Englehart had a highly influential short run on Batman during the mid-70s that more or less defined how the character was written and drawn well into the 21st century.

Englehart and Rogers were something of a dynamic duo themselves, working together on a mid-70s revival of Miracle Man for a while, as well one of DC's earliest direct distribution comics (the one-shot Madam Xanadu) and on early indie comic Coyote for Eclipse. Their longest run together, however, was on a mid-80s revamping of the Silver Surfer.

From his first appearance in 1966 to the printing of this story in 1987 (Silver Surfer vol 3, #1), the Surfer had been trapped on Earth. Englehart had a penchant for cosmic-scale stories and spent issue one of the new series liberating Galactus' ex-herald so he could get down to writing some. After hearing that his ex-boss' new gofer, Nova, has been captured by the Skrulls in an attempt to weaponize the World-Eater by extorting him into eating the Kree Empire, the Surfer uses a temporary escape from Earth to negotiate his permanent release. Nova has been stashed in a facility with plotnecessitium vibranium walls that are primed to blow if damaged. Slow and ponderous as he is, Galactus will only kill Nova if he tries to rescue her. The Surfer is a different matter, though. If he gets Nova back, Galactus promises to stop acting like a spoiled child and will let him go on his way.

This leads to a virtuoso stretch of pencilling from Rogers, whose background before coming into comics was in architectural drawing. His sci-fi buildings always rather looked like real buildings, and for this he basically "plotted out" a Skrull facility for...well, look at it yourself:

( Maybe if I take a run at it? )