No time for love, Dr. Richards: Graeme gets the silver.

Firstly, isn't SFO big? I always used to think of it as a fairly small airport, but then last night, I ended up doing laps of the building when a number of snafus sent me from terminal 1 to terminal 3, and then back again, while meeting my vacationing father off his flight. Of course, in a perfect world, parents give you the correct arrival time and flight number, and airlines wouldn't tell you that it can't be them, it's actually another airline you're probably looking for, necessitating said airport laps, but since when did we live in a perfect world?

SILVER SURFER: REQUIEM #1: So, picking this up at the store last week, I pointed out to Hibbs that the cover had the same design and logotype as Spider-Man: Reign. "I can't wait to read about Norrin Radd's Power-Cosmic-Sperm," I said. Little did I know that this really would turn out to be a story about how the Power Cosmic was, indeed, killing poor Norrin. Admittedly, there's no cum-related incidents, but it's only the first issue. There's still time.

Here's the thing, though; Marvel Knights is obviously becoming the imprint for Marvel to push what they've decided are their more prestige and self-important projects featuring their superheroes, between this and Reign. It's just somewhat strange that the first two projects were both in some sense about the twilight days of the characters - I wonder if someone at Marvel feels as if the only way to tell a timeless story about someone is to make it happen at sometime outside of when they were at their best?

(DC does the same thing in reverse, of course; they'd rather go back to "Year One" at any given opportunity.)

That said, this is a perfectly respectable first issue - I had an issue with J. Michael Straczynski's plodding narration (Ending the issue with "I am dying" three times felt like overegging the pudding to me, if you can forgive the food metaphor. I know what JMS was going for, but it seemed off for some reason), but Kate - who ended up reading the book after falling for Esad Ribic's admittedly beautiful painted artwork - pointed out that the Silver Surfer is meant to be a bit over the top and pretentious, and she's kind of right - despite just being entirely set-up. Despite the protestations of the characters, I don't believe that the story really is going to end with the Surfer dead, but I'm sold on the idea that the characters believe it, which is enough to start with. There's more than enough potential for this to go off the rails at any moment (and with the cover for the next issue featuring Spider-Man, I actually somewhat expect it to), but for now? It's a high Okay.