Supervillain of the day: Galactus
Supervillain month is upon me. For October, I’ve been selected to ‘curate’ (rip off) a bunch of stuff about Supervillains for Wordsmith Digital’s Facebook page.
And I’m also posting them here.
Today I shall mostly been looking at Galactus, destroyer of worlds, bringer of doom. But is he evil? Well, this picture of a tiny counterfeit Lego Galactus I bought in Hong Kong is certainly proof of criminal breach of copyright by someone. But Galactus… is he really the villain they made him out to be?
Galactus, for those of you who don’t know, is a cosmic entity from Marvel comics, most commonly associated with the Fantastic Four and The Silver Surfer. His most notable feature is the fact to fuel his immense cosmic energies, he eats planets. Yes. Hence he’s generally considered a villain because when he comes to your planet for dinner… he really comes for dinner.
His backstory is suitably grand. He was the last living soul of the last universe — Galen of Taa — before cataclysmic entropy ended all existence. This is how universes end, apparently, and came after a previous big bang, and preceeded the next one that created our instance of the universe. As the universe ended, the voice of the cosmos, the sentience of all things, spoke to Galen and somehow bonded with him. After the big bang that created our universe, Galen emerged within a giant cosmic egg, which was a cube shaped egg (ouch) and from the egg came Galactus. Not unlike the Chinese Monkey god, born from a stone egg. But with a massive pink helmet and an urgent need to eat planets.
The first thing you’ll notice about Galactus is, of course, the massive helmet and striking pink-blue cyberpunk-meets-gladiator-meets-Egyptian-god styleeeee. Now, let’s face it, when you’re that big and can eat planets, you can wear pretty much whatever you like. I love the outfit. Love it. Notably in these images, you discover he’s not really there at all. He changes size depending on how well fed he is (don’t we all) and every race who looks upon his mighty helmet sees their own face in the helmet. Very much like the Vorlons from Babylon 5, except without the constant use of the word helmet.
What we see here, of course, is the fact there are two kinds of villain in the world of super-stuff. There’s the villain who goes off looking for trouble, and there’s the villain like Galactus who is just doing his thing (having dinner, mostly) and some irritating superhero types keep messing with his stuff.
But unlike the narcissistic supervillain who dismisses people as insects because of their overblown sense of self importance, in Galactus’s case. the Fantastic Four are about the same size relatively speaking as insects.
Large ones, maybe, like a daddy long legs, but all the same. Nobody wants a daddly long legs flying around while they’re chilling in in their massive pink helmet and metal boots, on a giant cosmic lavatory.
All the same, I’d recommend The Trial of Galactus as a genuine masterpiece of high camp 70’s Marvel. It features an astonishing breaking of the fourth wall, or possibly writer John Byrne suffering a serious neurological injury, by writing himself into the story to travel to the trial of Galactus to see it unfold. Trippy man, trippy.
I think, on balance, Galactus isn’t really a villain so much as an unpalatable reality of life in the cosmos. That, in fact, despite all the higher aspirations of the heroes of Earth and other worlds, Galactus serves as an avatar of the cosmic truism that shit happens.
And also proof of the cosmic law that a striking helmet can always shock the fashion world, no matter which universe you’re from.
