Brevoort : "I should probably start out by saying that this run of SILVER SURFER, produced by Dan Slott and Mike Allred, is one of my two favorite runs out of everything I’ve ever worked on. (The other, for the record, is the Mark Waid & Mike Wieringo FANTASTIC FOUR, which we will no doubt cover here in the days to come.) This book was a total labor of love, and I used all of the authority at my command to stack the deck for it a little bit: there were no fill-ins throughout its run. Every single issue was by Slott and Allred. As the series ran for fifteen issues, then was rebooted with a new #1 and ran another 14 issues, plus a preview story in MARVEL POINT ONE #1, that’s a span of just under thirty releases by the same creative team. That’s a rarity in this day and age, and one of the things that helped separate SILVER SURFER from the pack.
The other thing is that, while on the surface it seemed to be a super hero book, SILVER SURFER wasn’t really that at all. Many pundits, both for and against the series pointed out its similarity to DOCTOR WHO, casting the Surfer as an alien with a human companion with which he travels the cosmos. And there’s some truth to that, certainly. But what SILVER SURFER really was is a romance comic cleverly disguised as a super hero adventure story. Every issue was about the developing relationship between Norrin Radd, the Silver Surfer, and Dawn Greenwood, the human woman he found himself in contact with. And sure, we took inspiration from DOCTOR WHO, but more from showrunner Russell T. Davies writings about what made his iteration of the show work, as laid out in his book THE WRITER’S TALE. ( Amazon.com )
So SILVER SURFER was a series we did entirely for ourselves, and we pulled from all sorts of different influences throughout the run of it: Hayao Miyazaki films (Dawn is deliberately styled in the mold of a Miyazaki heroine), British Sci-Fi (Not just DOCTOR WHO, but RED DWARF and HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY and others), Jack Kirby comics, and everything else under the sun. And because we were building this series just for ourselves, without a whole lot of concern for how well it might perform (though it always maintained itself well throughout the run), that also gave us the latitude to try some experimental storytelling. Many years earlier, Dan had written the REN & STIMPY: MASTERS OF TIME AND SPACE Special, which was done in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and was both super-clever on a formal structure level and very fumy despite its complexity. Since then, he had often spoken about wanting to try to do more issues build around a structural conceit, both to see if he could pull them off and to make something more immediately memorable than a typical issue of a given comic. In SILVER SURFER #11, he got his opportunity to do this once again."
Slott : "So what is this very weird issue of SILVER SURFER and WHY did we make it?
Silver Surfer #11, “Never After”, is a story in the style of GROUNDHOG DAY, EDGE OF TOMORROW, and the STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION episode “Cause & Effect”, but with a comic book twist. The main guts of the story would be told on a 20+ page Möbius comic strip.
Why would you EVER do that?
Like most people who do this for a living, Mike, Tom, and I LOVE the medium of comics, studying it, and messing with it. There are moments when you read a comic that suddenly goes out on a limb and it floors you. Whether it’s the transitions/layouts in WATCHMEN or KILLING JOKE, or that big 4th wall breaking page in ANIMAL MAN, or the issue of ZOT! that abuses its regular format and sneaks in an extra sequence after the letters page, or that one MIDNIGHTER that intentionally runs the pages back-to-front.
And if comics are your EVERYTHING, you don’t put those issues down. You analyze the fuck out of them. You pull their “engines” out, take ’em apart, and study them piece by piece– like an industrial spy trying to reverse engineer them. And standing on the shoulders of those giants, you start coming up with new takes. Then comes the hard part, not just having a bizarre concept or the will to do it… but talking your co-conspirators into coming along for the job. It really is like convincing a crew to come together for a bank heist.
Comics (especially issues for the Big 2) are supposed to come out regularly. You’re not serving up filet mignon, you’re cooking up In-N-Out Double Doubles. And that IS a noble endeavor! (Who doesn’t love a Double Double?) But there’s a pressure to get it done and make the next one… and the next one and the next one… Everyone breathes easier if you keep the line moving and don’t try the experimental maneuver.
There’s a very talented artist who I dearly love who I once pitched a weird outside-the-box issue to– and when I finished describing it, he shook his head and said, “Can’t we just tell a good, straight forward story?” And he’s right. You’ve got these issues to get out and there’s a pride to be had in doing your job regularly and doing it well.
And then there are mad men like Mike Allred who hear your weird pitch and start applauding, jumping up and down and saying stuff like, “Yeah, man! Let’s go for it!” And there are editors like Tom Brevoort who go, “This isn’t a high selling book. It’s not an anniversary issue or a big number, it’s going to take extra pages, which will eat into our budget, and be a nightmare to put together. But I believe in this. Let’s do it.” And with more criminals on the crew, you start drawing up the plans for your big heist.
And that meant going to the whiteboard!"
