"I preserve life... I never wish to take it." Silver Surfer: Rebirth review

Silver Surfer: Rebirth was a 5-issue mini-series published this year by Marvel Comics. It's written by Ron Marz and penciled by Ron Lim (with inks by Don Ho). Marz was the regular writer of Silver Surfer for many years, inheriting the book from Jim Starlin and writing from issues #42 to #102. Lim had already been the Silver Surfer artist when Marz came aboard, having started with issue #15 under scribe Steve Englehart. He stuck with the series for most of Marz's run, leaving with issue #92.

Silver Surfer: Rebirth is, then, a nostalgia book. These two haven't worked together on the Silver Surfer character since 1994. Heck, these days it's somewhat rare to see Ron Marz writing comics at all. Ron Lim has never fully disappeared from comics but for much of the last decade he's been drawing variant covers for Marvel with precious few interiors.

Like other nostalgia-fueled endeavours, Silver Surfer: Rebirth revisits popular elements from the creators' previous collaborations. The key figures of the story are the Silver Surfer and Thanos, with the villain being Tyrant, a foe Marz and Lim created together. There are also appearances by familiar characters from the Marz-Lim era - namely Jack of Hearts, Legacy and Nebula (in her cybernetic form).

Beyond this, the story revolves around the Reality Gem. A big part of the comics circa 1991-94 was that Adam Warlock broke up the Infinity Gauntlet, giving the Reality Gem to Thanos for safekeeping (a development which didn't come to light until the 1993 crossover Infinity Crusade). The story concerns Tyrant stealing the Reality Gem and using it to make changes to reality. This creates an excuse to bring in characters from throughout the Surfer's history (like Legacy's father Captain Mar-Vell) but not be too worried about messing with established continuity (as when Thanos murders Nebula) since all will be set back to normal by the story's conclusion.

If the story doesn't "matter" (as comics fans like to moan), then why bother with it at all? I would suggest one reason is to enjoy the rare sight of a full-length mini-series illustrated by Ron Lim. Speaking as someone who has been a Limaniac for more than 32 years (and has met and collaborated with him) I was excited by a sequence during the series in which the Surfer faces his alternate selves, created by the Reality Gem. Lim's Silver Surfer was always very distinctive with a glistening appearance that other Surfer artists hadn't tried. But now I've learned that Lim is fully capable of rendering a Kirby-esque Surfer, Buscema-esque Surfer, Allred-esque Surfer and Moebius-esque Surfer. That's pretty cool! The finale also includes a sequence where reality alters so that the Surfer and Thanos become abstract, allowing Lim to play with visuals in a way I've never seem him indulge himself before.

Another good reason is Thanos. The general principle around Thanos is that if you're not Jim Starlin, you shouldn't be writing Thanos. So far as I can tell the only writers whose Thanos interpretations have been endorsed by Starlin are Keith Giffen's and Ron Marz's. The simple fact is that post-Infinity Gauntlet it is very hard to write Thanos in a traditional adversarial role. If Thanos shows up to rob a bank or launch another self-thwarted attack on the Avengers then, well, that writer doesn't know how to write Thanos and didn't read Infinity Gauntlet very closely.

Truly, post-Infinity Gauntlet Thanos works best as an anti-hero - someone who has realized it's futile to keep trying to conquer the universe and is more interested in exploration, discovery - and preventing some other nimrod from pulling off the sort of shenanigans he used to attempt. Marz started writing Thanos parallel to Starlin's Infinity Gauntlett; he gets the character.

That said, these days the most famous interpretation of Thanos is the cinematic version and Marz delivers a number of fun references to that Thanos. When Nebula declares that if she can't have Thanos' love then she'll kill him, Thanos retorts "this is an unhealthy relationship" as he snaps her neck. The comic book Thanos and Nebula have never had much of a dynamic, but the references to that of their film counterparts' won't be lost on readers. Nor will they miss the significance of Tyrant claiming his "triumph is inevitable" to which Thanos responds, "No... I am inevitable."

Silver Surfer: Rebirth is best enjoyed by existing fans of the Marz-Lim work (and perhaps fans of Jim Starlin's Thanos), but I think it's a little more ambitious than most nostalgia projects, mostly down to Lim's unusual divergence from his typical style. It's a solid, fun piece of super hero work.