The Silver Surfer #18
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeThe Silver Surfer #18 holds a singular place in Marvel history as the final issue of the character's original solo series — the last chapter of a title that Stan Lee considered his most personally meaningful work. Its closing pages, in which a battered Surfer renounces peace and declares war on humanity, deliver one of the era's starkest tonal pivots: the optimistic cosmic philosopher of 1968 exits the Silver Age a furious, wounded figure. The issue also represents the first and only meeting between the Silver Surfer and the Inhuman Royal Family in this volume, pitting two of Kirby's signature cosmic creations against each other in a single, charged encounter. Perhaps most poignantly, the story functions as a creative elegy: Jack Kirby — who conceived the Surfer but had been shut out of his solo series — drew this issue just weeks before departing Marvel for DC, and multiple scholars have noted that the Surfer's closing declaration of rage reads as an expression of Kirby's own bitterness at Marvel's editorial culture.
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By late 1969, declining sales had pushed the Silver Surfer series to the edge of cancellation, and Stan Lee resolved to radically reinvent the character as 'the Savage Silver Surfer,' replacing regular penciler John Buscema with Herb Trimpe starting with a projected issue #19. As a bridge issue, Lee called in Jack Kirby — the Surfer's original creator, who had famously been excluded from the 1968 series launch — to draw a transitional story pairing the hero with the Inhumans, a family of characters Kirby was simultaneously writing and drawing for Amazing Adventures. Kirby provided pencils inked by Herb Trimpe, though the cover's attribution remains disputed: a 1998 letter from Trimpe suggested Kirby supplied either layouts or complete cover pencils, while researcher Nick Caputo and others argue that Trimpe penciled the cover himself, possibly working from a Marie Severin rough. The Bullpen Bulletins page printed inside this very issue announced Kirby's departure from Marvel — an extraordinary editorial coincidence that gave the book an unmistakable air of finality, even as it teased a follow-up issue that would never arrive.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Title and series finale: 'To Smash the Inhumans!' is the eighteenth and final issue of The Silver Surfer Vol. 1 (1968–1970), cover-dated September 1970 with an approximate on-sale date of June 23, 1970.
- Creative team: Written and edited by Stan Lee; penciled by Jack Kirby (his only interior art contribution to the entire Silver Surfer Vol. 1 run, all other issues #1–17 having been penciled by John Buscema); inked by Herb Trimpe; lettered by Sam Rosen.
- First Silver Surfer/Inhumans encounter: This is the first time Norrin Radd meets the Inhuman Royal Family (Black Bolt, Medusa, Karnak, Gorgon, Triton, and Lockjaw), manipulated into conflict by Maximus the Magnificent and his renegade followers Aireo, Leonus, Stallior, and Timberius.
- Aireo, Leonus, Stallior, and Timberius — Maximus's 'League of Evil Inhumans' — made their comic-book debut in Fantastic Four #83 (February 1969) and had appeared most recently in Amazing Adventures Vol. 2 #2 before this issue.
- Kirby's farewell moment: The Bullpen Bulletins page in this issue publicly announced Jack Kirby's departure from Marvel Comics, making it the house organ for one of the most consequential creator departures in comics industry history.
- Unresolved cliffhanger: The final page explicitly teases a 'next issue' featuring 'the Savage Silver Surfer,' a planned direction that was abandoned when the series was cancelled; the dangling story threads were not addressed in the main Marvel Universe until Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man #4–6 in 1999.
- No standard human characters appear in this issue — an unusual distinction for a Marvel title set on Earth, noted by multiple sources.
- The story has been reprinted internationally in Nova (Éditions Lug, France, 1980), Marvel Comic-Stars (Condor, Germany, 1981), Marvel Masterworks: The Silver Surfer Vol. 2 (2010), and the Silver Surfer Classic Collection (Panini Deutschland, 2023), among others.
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Reprints
Reprinted in The Super-Heroes #16 (1975), Nova #33 (1980), Marvel Comic-Stars #1 (1981), Marvel Masterworks #19 (1991), Essential Silver Surfer #1 (1998), Le Surfer d'Argent - L'intégrale #4 (2002), Marvel Masterworks: Silver Surfer #2 (2003), Silver Surfer Omnibus #1 (2007), Marvel Gold: Estela Plateada de Stan Lee y John Buscema #[nn] (2010), Marvel Masterworks: The Silver Surfer #2 (2010), Silver Surfer - Classic Collection #[nn] (2023)
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