In most of the Silver Surfer's incarnations, the character has been bereft of ironic content. Norrin Raad is known for being a pop-Christ figure, spouting doleful speeches about man's inhumanity to man, and he demonstrates a level of power that necessitates pitting him against opponents able to match his level of potency. However, for four issues of the 1990s SURFER feature, writer Jim Starlin and artist Ron Lim took the surfboard-riding stalwart in a darker direction.
Issue #39 concludes a plotline in which the Surfer overcomes a suitably cosmic menace-- the much-heralded Thanos, who dies yet another temporary death at the end of the narrative-- and #40 follows up with the Surfer and his allies ruminating on the villain's demise. Unexpectedly, the Surfer receives a summons from an outer-space satellite community, Dynamo City. The authorities of the satellite want the Surfer to testify as to the demise of Thanos. Though the summoner cannot compel the powerful hero to comply, the agent plays on Norrin Radd's curiosity by claiming that Thanos left behind a taped message for the Surfer as part of his last will and testament.
As soon as the sky-rider arrives in Dynamo City, however, he finds that he's been too confident in his great powers. Dynamo City's rulers insist upon a total hegemony of power, and as soon as Norrin enters the satellite, his cosmic powers are drained from his body, making him entirely mortal. Though bemused by this development, Norrin accedes to the authorities' demand for testimony regarding his role in Thanos's death. The court rules the Surfer innocent of Thanos's murder. But the villain's taped message suggests that Thanos has somehow mousetrapped the hero by bringing him to the satellite.
The Surfer finds out why when he tries to leave, for a local policeman informs he cannot depart without paying an "exit tax." Of course the hero has no money of any kind on his person, and he's forced to do what any ordinary shlub in Dynamo City would have to do: get a job in order to pay his debts. Starlin and Lim capture a rare level of ironic humor as the Surfer faces the horror of job placement, trying to explain his talents as a former herald to Galactus. Unable to get regular employment, the Surfer is forced to join Dynamo City's huge community of homeless vagrants. He makes the acquaintance of a scruffy little alien, Zeaklar, who knows the workings of Dynamo City even though he's never been able to escape the poverty level himself. It's through Zeaklar that the Surfer learns that he can make some money by selling his memories to the citizens of Dynamo. The Surfer is disgusted by this prospect, but he badly desires to escape the city, and so he makes a deal to let the jaded Dynamo populace be titillated by his personal experiences. However, the producers of the memory-show take advantage of his lack of business sense and cheat him.
Once more relegated to vagrant status, the Surfer gets the idea that even if the underlings serving the system are corrupt, he may win clemency from the ruler of Dynamo City, "the Great I." Of course any reader who hears that name will rightfully suspect that the hero is setting himself up for a fall, since "Great I" sounds a much more famed ruler of pop-fiction, "the Great Oz." When the Surfer manages to confront the ruler, he finds that there isn't even a clever mountebank behind the curtain of power. Instead, the "Great I" is just a near-brainless creature who does nothing more than process information. There isn't even a particular power behind the throne: just a bunch of self-interested, self-important bureaucrats.
Indeed, even the down-trodden citizens of Dynamo are largely complicit in the corruption. By his continued defiance of the city's mores, the Surfer earns himself a trial, and though he's guilty of all the charges brought against him, the court can't resist tossing in a bunch of false charges as well. This scene is one of the few in which any female characters show up during the four-issue story, but they're just as bad as any of the males in terms of framing the Surfer for phony crimes.
Both the Surfer and Zeaklar are scheduled for execution, and the hero can do nothing about it. Only dumb luck, and the inherent stupidity of the Dynamo hierarchy, saves the two of them, for their means of execution is to hurl condemned prisoners into deep space.
This, of course, turns out to be a case of throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briarpatch, though the Surfer has no inkling that this is what the authorities plan to do. Once he's in space, his cosmic powers return and he saves Zeaklar from extinction. The Dynamo cops send a few robot spaceships after the Surfer, and the hero gets the chance to vent some fury by wiping out all of these mechanical maraudders. However, when the hero considers wreaking vengeance on the satellite-city as a whole, Zeaklar reminds him that to do so will expose thousands of innocents to death. The Surfer decides that he will find some way to avenge his suffering, but since Dynamo City has never appeared again in a Marvel comic, that threat turned hollow.
This story was certainly not the first time Jim Starlin attempted to make satirical points in his various works. However, this is probably his most thoroughgoing attempt to mount a story devoted purely to the satire of a particular social system, implicitly that of commodity-driven capitalism. Starlin is no subtler here than anywhere else, but at least his mythic theme is fully developed, and at no time can the normal thrills of the adventure-genre overthrow the sense that Dynamo City's way of life cannot be undone even by "the Power Cosmic."
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