More Top Picks Best High Lumen Edc Flashlights With Charger
player ready...It’s Mailbag Time, loyal readers, so let’s dive in:
Q–Tension runs high aboard the nuclear submarine that is the setting for the current hit movie “Crimson Tide.” So high that, naturally, a fight breaks out between two crew members. The audience gets a big laugh, however, when Denzel Washington discovers that the cause of the brawl was an argument over comic books–specifically, the merits of Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer versus the Silver Surfer of Moebius. What I want to know is: Did Moebius ever actually draw the Surfer? Or did the scriptwriters just throw in his name because they consider him a “hip” artist?
A–Yours is not the only query the Captain has fielded on this issue, Dude, mostly to the effect of: huh?
Here’s the explanation: The Silver Surfer, Marvel’s philosophical Sentinel of the Spaceways, was created and drawn first by Jack “King” Kirby in “Fantastic Four” 48 (1966). Kirby loved drawing the Surfer and pencilled most of his subsequent appearances until the Wielder of the Power Cosmic got his own series, and several other artists got a crack at him.
In 1988, Marvel patriarch Stan Lee wrote a special two-part Surfer story that was out of continuity — that is to say, it had nothing to do with the rest of the Marvel Universe and stood completely on its own. The artist: a famous French cartoonist named Jean Giraud, who goes by the nom de comics “Moebius.”
Hence, the argument between our two sub-mariners.
So, you ask, who does draw the best Silver Surfer? Well, call the Captain an ethnocentric Frankophobe if you will, but my vote has to go to the Surfer’s creator, not some Gallic Jacque-come-lately.
Q–When I was a youngster (I’m 42 now), I remember some cowboy comics but can’t recall the name of the heroes. They were not spinoffs of movies or TV series. Seems theywere Marvel Comics and some may have had a Red Ryder type bent to them. Can you recall these heroes of the late ’50s and early to mid-’60s? Are there any cowboy comic heroes now?–Cordova Cowboy
A–Pahdon me, Mr. Pohdnuh Suh, but cowboy heroes were as thick as fleas on a cayuse at Marvel Comics in those golden days. Kid Colt, Rawhide Kid and Ringo Kid shot the guns out of the hands of hundreds of owlhoots, bushwackers and other assorted varmints while miraculously never doing any permanent harm to anybody.
Marvel also had two masked Western heroes: Two-Gun Kid (secretly Matt Hawke, cowardly schoolteacher) and Ghost Rider, who used a glow-in-the-dark costume and horse to terrify superstitious (not to mention clueless) outlaws. When Marvel introduced the new motorcycle-riding, flame-skulled Ghost Rider in 1973, the Western GR was retroactively named “Night Rider.”
The Western genre ran out of steam in the mid-’60s and remains mostly out of favor. DC mixes horror with Westerns (check out “Jonah Hex: Riders of the Worm and Such”), and Topps is experimenting with the Lone Ranger and Zorro.
———-
Captain Comics, who could never tell the difference between Kid Colt and Rawhide Kid except by hair color, can be reached at 495 Union Ave., Memphis, Tenn., 38103 or on the ‘net at [email protected]. Please include a telephone number. Identities–even secret ones–will be verified.