SILVER SURFER

Ask most readers where the Silver Surfer’s look came from and they will credit Jack Kirby’s pencil. In the comics, the credit goes somewhere stranger: when Galactus transformed Norrin Radd into his herald, the silver skin and sky-board he gave him were patterned on an adolescent fantasy plucked from Norrin’s own memories — a gleaming sky-rider the boy had daydreamed about back on Zenn-La. The most iconic body in cosmic Marvel is a child’s daydream, built to order by a god.

The daydream had a lot of escaping to do. Zenn-La was a utopia scrubbed clean of crime, disease, poverty and war — and Norrin found it airless. His mother, Elmar, was just as ill-suited to that stifling perfection, and she took her own life when he was seven years old; Norrin blamed himself for her death, a guilt that shadowed him long after he left home behind. His father, Jartran, was later driven to suicide as well, destroyed by an accusation of stealing another scientist’s ideas.

Norrin grew into a restless scholar obsessed with Zenn-La’s ancient age of adventure — and stifled by a homeworld that had forgotten how to want anything. His chance arrived as a catastrophe: a titanic alien spacecraft pierced Zenn-La’s long-neglected defenses, and Norrin flew out alone to meet it. Inside was Galactus. Norrin offered himself — his service as herald, hunting new worlds, in exchange for Zenn-La’s life. Galactus accepted, and built the herald out of the boy’s own imagination.

Two footnotes round out the boy inside the silver. Norrin was named for Norrin Konn, the scientist who had lifted Zenn-La out of barbarism into utopia in the first place. And Jartran, after his disgrace, fathered another son — Fennan — a half-brother whose existence Norrin never knew for most of his life. The herald left home believing he was an only child of a finished world; both halves of that sentence were wrong.