Guilt By Association

Now that the dust has settled from Fantastic Four #60, it's time to tie up a loose end from that story--at least, the one loose end that the story chooses to follow up on. Namely: What happened to the Silver Surfer?

While Dr. Doom was using the Surfer's power to tour through Europe and the rest of the world and terrorize the populace, the Surfer was locked in Doom's tower enduring a cruel form of captivity--though to the Surfer, now confined under a roof and denied the freedom of the skies, his captivity itself was a form of cruelty. But that didn't stop his captors from twisting the knife at every opportunity. Naturally, one person to rub it in was Doom himself:

(Whoa! Who made off with that background?)

But once Doom departed to initiate his plans, the Surfer's jailers also got in on the fun:

"I do not crawl... I do not whimper!" Surfer, should we play back those first couple of panels for you? You've got crawling and whimpering down pretty well, pal.

Be that as it may--now that the FF have dealt with Doom, will the Surfer ever gain his freedom? It would truly suck for him to now be confined to two prisons--first Earth, and now a cell in a dictator's castle. No wonder the guy is whimpering. But at the end of the issue, we spotted the Surfer's board on its way back to the castle, so something's up. And just in time, too, because the Surfer's jailers have apparently decided they've been going too easy on him:

These guys are a piece of work, eh? But things are about to start looking up for the Surfer--just as soon as he himself looks up to the sky and notices that his ride is here:

Now, you're probably thinking that the Surfer is above such concepts as revenge and payback--and that he'll chalk up the horrid treatment he's suffered at the hands of Doom and his men as yet another example of the incomprehensible savagery of humanity, and let it go at that, right?

Oh, hell no.

We'll have to keep in mind that the Surfer isn't human--and that underneath all that rubble and debris are people like cooks, servants, and other workers who just lost their lives from his strike and who had nothing to do with either his mistreatment or even Doom's R&D projects. For what it's worth, the Latverians are likely to lay the blame at Doom's doorstep--assuming they can find it in those ruins.