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The Sunshine Machine
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We briefly interrupt Minor Appearances Month to bring you an adapatation of the classic The Peril & The Power four-parter from the heyday of Lee & Kirby, in the gentle, slightly woozy, style of "Super Spidey Stories" .
As in the original, Doctor Doom wants to steal the power cosmic from the Silver Surfer, and manages to attact his attention as he flies over Latveria. Amazingly, the Spidey Super Stories version of the Silver Surfer is even more mopey and needy.
Doom slaps the power transference head gear on almost immediately and then zooms off on the cosmic surfboard to carry out the next stage of his cunning plan - not revenge and world domination this time, but instead a device called "The Sunshine Machine". His motivations are a lot simpler this time - her's going to get it because "I get anything I want!"
It's all very charming and simplistic, but it's also a pretty accurate distalation of Doom's core character! He steals the sunshine machine then zooms off into space with it, but luckily Spidey is on his tail. He manages to find a spacesuit which, when he puts it on, him to fly into the upper atmosphere.
As ever, these stories have a weird dreamlike logic that falls apart whenever you try to think about it. How come he can just grab a spacesuit? Since when do they let you fly? And how does he get into space so quickly? It's all a bit dicombobulating, which in itself is odd as the whole idea of these comics are that they're easy to read, in which case surely they should make sense too?
As an example, Spidey turns the sunshine machine around to point it at Doom, and this somehow drains him of the Power Cosmic, which can then be zapped back into the Silver Surfer so he can rush to the rescue.
They all fly back to earth, where the Silver Surfer is delighted to find a crowd has gathered to cheer for him. "I finally have friends!" he says, as Spidey takes Doom away.
As with Doom, this is a pretty nifty distalation of the Surfer's core characteristic of being immensely self-pitying, nicely tailored in a way that young kids would understand - we can all feel sorry for someone who doesn't think he has any friends, and we all know someone who is Very Naughty and thinks they can just take whatever they want.
That's all for today but the weirdness continues tomorrow as we return to the Marvel Universe proper for another minor appearance in the extremely odd "The Twilight Of Some Gods!"
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posted 28/11/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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