Issue(s): Silver Surfer #22
Cover Date: Apr 89
Title: "Monsters... from the Ego!"
Credits:
Steve Englehart - Writer
Ron Lim - Penciler
Tom Christopher - Inker
Craig Anderson - Editor

Review/plot:
I read some of the early issues of Englehart's Silver Surfer series in realtime, and i was put off with the pastel coloring and Marshall Rogers' cartoony art at the time. But i did really love seeing Ego the Living Planet being counted among the Elders of the Universe in Silver Surfer #4, and over the years as i picked up random back issues i kept wondering what the heck happened to him. Even now having all the issues and going through the series systematically, the unexplained disappearance of Ego during the Elders' plot to destroy Galactus has irked me. I mean, if you're going to try to kill Galactus, you'd think you'd want the guy who'd previously fought him to a standstill with you. So i'm certainly happy to finally get back to Ego with this issue...

Click to inflate your Ego

...but i'm also disappointed to see no real explanation for why he split with the Elders. The closest we get to that is when he says in this issue that he was brother to the other Elders "in name only".

And i kind of agree with that, in the sense that i think there ought to be more to being an Elder than just literally being the sole survivor of your race (is Gamora an Elder?). But i'd still like to know why he was working with the Elders and then stopped.

That said, any Ego appearance is a fun one. Usually my complaint about Ego fights is that he's so big that the characters he's fighting just wind up fighting little antibodies on him and you never really get the sense that they're battling with an entire living planet. But Ron Lim's art provides the right sense of scale and even when the Surfer is fighting antibodies or whatever, Englehart's script helps us remember what the larger threat is. So it's one of the better Ego appearances, and that's saying a lot since all Ego appearances are awesome.

Ego stymies the Silver Surfer by keeping him away from his surfboard this issue, but the Surfer realizes that he can fly, albeit not as gracefully, without the board.

The plot here is that Ego is having trouble controlling the propulsion unit that Galactus once implanted on him. Galactus installed it to prohibit Ego, but Ego reversed the situation and took control of the device, allowing him free range in the universe. However, we learn here that the device is still hard for Ego to control. So he wants to eat the Silver Surfer and use the extra energy to control the device better. The Surfer fights that by heading to the device, the one part of Ego that he can't control...

...and super-charging it and forcing Ego towards a nearby sun until he surrenders.

Even then, the Surfer refuses to remove the propulsion unit, which i would think would have left Ego flying in harmless orbit around this sun, but both the Surfer and Ego seem to think it's worse punishment to leave the device in place, even though it means Ego can still get around the universe.

At the end of this issue, the Surfer detects another planet being moved unnaturally, and this time it's one in Earth's solar system. So he heads there to investigate.

Quality Rating: B+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: This is not part of Inferno, of course, but the end scene is duplicated from Fantastic Four #324, which is an Inferno tie-in. So while i've been trying to keep non-Inferno issues from cluttering up the major part of the Inferno storyline, i've made an exception for this issue. The Surfer next appears in Fantastic Four #325.

References:

• The Surfer saw Ego last in Silver Surfer #4.
  
• No footnotes, but Galactus put the propulsion unit on Ego in Thor #228, and we saw that Ego had taken control of it in Fantastic Four #234.
  
• Ego learned from the "Contemplator" that the Supreme Intelligence didn't have a good time of it when he tried to eat the Silver Surfer in Silver Surfer #8, but Ego intends to eat all of the Surfer, not just his soul.
  
• The end scene in this issue is a (newly drawn) duplicate of the one from Fantastic Four #324.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

I don't understand how Ego could ever have been considered an Elder. Unless I'm mistaken, nowhere in his history does it state that there once was a race of living planets and he's the last survivor. If I'm wrong, please correct me with the right information.

This is nearly two years after the fact, but Engelhart may have been referring to the origin of Ego given in Thor #228 (linked in fnord's References here).