Writer: Fred Van Lente
Artists: Cory Hamscher, Lee Louridge(c)
Publisher: Marvel
Ooooo. No.
A self-help guru dupes the Silver Surfer. I realize that Fred Van Lente was just looking for something new to say about the Surfer, but the experiment failed big time.
The comedy is supposed to arise from the Surfer's naiveté combined with Dr. Betty's awful advice. The problem is that the comedy isn't. These scenes are just painful. The Surfer becoming a Snoop Dogg talking street-wise Hip-Hop dude should have rang alarm bells. Observing these panels and experiencing the faux fo-shizzle dialogue makes the reader wince not smile. The Surfer's being played, but you cannot feel sorry for him because the attempt at humor is just ham-fisted.
In his rapper tribute garb, the Surfer turns garbage into money, but that doesn't really make sense, and everybody should have known that immediately. You cannot make money. It's against the law, and any money you make is absolutely worthless. I get that the Surfer yearns for acceptance, but one of the best things about Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was that the writers didn't turn the Surfer into a nimrod. The Surfer in Van Lente's story is a near complete idiot.
Dr. Betty makes for a poor Svengali. A lot of people fall for the quick-fix swill that self-help loons spout, but the people who normally do get suckered by these modern day snake-oil salesmen are often uneducated, have severely low self-esteem and are conditioned to believe. Dr. Doom made the Surfer a patsy, but he's Dr. Doom. He once suckered Prince Namor and lifted the Baxter Building off its foundation on a one-way trip to outer space. You can accept this character pulling the wool over the Surfer's eyes. Dr. Betty is just your garden-variety charlatan with a talk show and a book. You can throw a dart at the TV Guide and consistently hit one of her ilk's time-slots.
Cory Hamscher and Lee Louridge turn Dr. Betty into a bizarre and hilarious mixture of Oprah Winfrey and one of those black velvet paintings with the saucer-eyed kids that were common in the seventies--and hopefully collected and burned in the eighties. The artists time the battle between the FF and Betty's Surfer cult beautifully. The FF are not amused by these dolts. They angrily treat them like the annoyances they should be and give them a painful lesson in power. Did the FF overreact? Some would say yes, but I say no. These loonies had a beating coming.
Toward the end the Surfer finally learns the truth, but it's far too late for my tastes. Van Lente attempts to parody the self-help movement that has metastasized through the airwaves, but he has to make the Surfer supremely dumb to make his plot work.
What did you think of this book?
Have your say at the Line of Fire Forum!