An Ecstatic Silver Surfer is Kind of Disturbing

Geez, Surfer, excuse yourself to the bathroom if you're going to do that. This is looking like one of those movies where the old college buddy comes to visit and annoys his friend's wife because he's still a slob or a bum or whatever. Which makes the Surfer Owen Wilson in this scenario? I'm not sure which of them should be more offended.

The comics have not arrived, so in the meantime I'm going through the back issues I bought in 2018, trying to figure out what's worth keeping. Which brings us to this story, from Marvel Fanfare #51, looking at how Steve Englehart's run on Silver Surfer could have begun, paired with John Buscema rather than Marshall Rogers.

In the run we actually got, the Surfer slips past the barrier Galactus had trapped him behind by. . . hitching a ride with the Fantastic Four, rather than trying to fly through himself. Either Galactus is an idiot for leaving that kind of a loophole, or he thinks the Surfer is. Given how long it took the Surfer to escape, probably the latter.

In this story, Surfer doesn't make it off-planet. Yes, I know it looks like he's in deep space in the panel above, but the story says he can't get more than 600 miles off the Earth's surface. I wonder if there was a space shuttle with Bruce Willis out there somewhere during this fight. If so, it probably got blown up, as the Surfer gets attacked by the Kree, because the Supreme Intelligence is sure he'll stop them from killing the "Great Terror". Which happens to be a cheerful young boy who wants to be Joe Montana. I guess the Kree were Bengals' fans. Sounds about right. Oh yeah, and he's half-sentient tree because his mother's is former Avenger (and future Guardians of the Galaxy) Mantis.

After the Kree attempts to kill the Surfer through a combination of sapping his energy, antimatter blasters, and mediocre smack talk come up craps, the Supreme Intelligence ups the ante by siccing Thor foe Mangog on him. Even if the Surfer was at full power, he'd be in trouble, unless he was willing to lay waste to the Earth to win. So he pulls the old "let my enemy absorb my power" trick, and the purity of his soul drives out Mangog's thirst for vengeance. Since vengeance is literally all Mangog is supposed to be - he's the desire for revenge of a billion billion beings, if I remember right from my dad's Thor comics - he basically falls apart. And then it looks like the Surfer was going to settle into domestic bliss with Mantis and her son, which I'm sure will just thrill the homeowner's association.

I'm not sure whether it's the coloring or if Buscema needs a heavier line, but his Mangog spends a lot of time in this issue looking like a barely defined yellow mass with pincers.