About a decade ago, we had a serious conversation about whether or not the Silver Surfer has a willy. The answer, you will recall, was “Up to Fantastic Four #70, no; after Silver Surfer issue #1, yes.
In Stan Lee’s inferior reworking of Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer, the Christ-like herald of Galactus is revealed to be an alien hippy named Norrin Radd, who sacrificed his humanity in to order save his planet from the space-god’s wrath. The exiled super-hero spends page after page pining for Shalla Bal, his one true love who had to remain on his home planet of Zenn-La.
The forthcoming and extremely promising Fantastic Four movie appears to have swapped the characters, so that Shalla Bal is the exiled Surfer and Norrin Radd the boy she left behind. It is far from obvious that this switcheroo would significantly affect the story. There is a minor subplot when Ben Grimm erroneously comes to the conclusion that the Surfer is hitting on his girlfriend Alicia; much, much later Dan Slott wrote a limited series in which the Surfer had a dalliance with a human woman named Dawn. Neither plot is central to the original Galactus saga. If you are adapting 1950s and 1960s comic books, there is always going to be a dearth of interesting female characters in the source material, and a bit of judicious gender swapping is a perfectly sensible idea.
But I must admit that when I heard about the Silver Surferette, my first thought was “Oh dear. That is really a bit you know, obvious.”
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Neither plot is central to the original Galactus saga.
ReplyDelete…Nor is either plot precluded by the Surfer being Shalla! Surely hippy aliens are allowed to swing both ways. (Whether Disney film characters are allowed to swing both ways may, of course, become a more vexed question in coming years if our worst fears are realised, but the route Agatha went is, for the time being, encouraging. And for various not-unproblematic-but-contingently-useful reasons, )
In any event, the real issue here is clearly this Surfer having hair. This is pretty nonsensical within the watsonian view of what the silver coating is meant to be for; and it looks very silly. As Karen Gillan and Tilda Swinton can attest, cinematic Marvel has allowed its otherworldly women to be bald in the past, so insofar as I care about this film at all — and make no mistake I do not care very much; I am thinking about all this because I like your writing and I enjoy engaging with it, not because I'd be moved to ponder a new Marvel trailer at length without that prompter — I am very disappointed indeed.
(Woops, snipped out half of my parenthetical there. I was saying that for various well-studied, unfortunate, but, in this case, convenient, reasons mainstream media are somewhat more willing to foreground lesbians than male homosexuals.)
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