The Atlantis Imperative
Okay, we begin Atlantis Attacks, one of Marvel's crossovers of 1989, with How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth, a Silver Surfer story written by Steve Englehart with art by Ron Lim.
The plot of this issue is really simple and, for a lack of a better word, lacking. The Silver Surfer awakens the Deviant known as Ghaur who then goes to Earth and joins forces with Llyra to obtain the Serpent Crown. Yeah, this issue is just pure set-up and exposition. There's little else really going on here. I was incredibly surprised to see that the Silver Surfer barely features at all and he even comes across as an enormous ass in his own book. After barely putting up a fight against Ghaur, Silver Surfer just decides "so what?" and flies off elsewhere considering himself too busy to involve himself with Earth's conflict. This story is purely driven by Ghaur, who isn't given any characterisation outside of slow exposition and teases of the upcoming plot. On the plus side, I'm impressed that Englehart went a whole issue without crowbarring a mention of Mantis or the Celestial Messiah into it.
Ron Lim draws the pictures of this issue. This stuff is quite early work from Ron Lim, and maybe some of his first Silver Surfer work too. Despite the issue not really having a lot going on, the art was pretty good in places. I thought the Silver Surfer looked good and Llyra was the right mix of evil-looking and hot. Drawing empty fields of space and underwater sequences doesn't present all that many opportunities for Lim to show much variety though.
As said, this issue is utterly set-up, and the fact it happens to be a Silver Surfer issue seems irrelevant. Silver Surfer is reduced to a cameo in his own book for the sake of a prologue to Marvel's big crossover which for the most part is back story and explaining the two principal villains motivations. However, next to their then-recent crossovers of Inferno and Evolutionary Wars, it's actually welcoming to see this sort of thing. Sure, it's not perfect, it doesn't really have any character work and the headlining character is sidelined, but I find it acceptable in that it's really just an overly long trailer for Atlantis Attacks which happens to have a cameo appearance by the Silver Surfer in it.