Galactus: Threat or Menace

Galactus is partly an analogue for a god and partly an analogue for a force of nature/event of natural destruction. A force of nature is amoral, as the sun eaters from Adventure Comics presumably are, and gods are sometimes considered above human judgement. And Galactus was also a reflection of Kirby's belief that there are things out there we don't know.

But in-story he's not really all that unlike us. He can be outwitted by humans, as in Fantastic Four #123 and #213. He's only concerned with his own needs and his motivation is straightforward: he's after a meal. One can interpret him as driven (like a drug addict), as indifferent to moral questions (like the Psions, say), or as regarding beings like us as of no importance. Those last two interpretations appear in the original trilogy, along with the idea that he's a being too high for human judgement. (One can also interpret him as full of a sense of his own importance.) But in my view if a Galactus actually came to Earth we would not be under an obligation to give his point of view equal weight with ours, as if we would have no right to go on existing unless we could convince him of our right to do so.

If he's truly amoral, as he might be since he isn't human, one might quibble over whether he can be considered evil. But he's a threat to all beings on our level, I don't buy his I'm-so-much-above-you rhetoric (extratextually he's an analogue for a god, but in-story he's not a god), and I reject the proposition that beings have a right to self-preservation that surpasses all other considerations (so that e.g. it would be moral to sell out the human race to alien invaders if it were one's only hope of survival), so I'm comfortable classing him as a villain.

What he actually eats is rather vague. It should be possible to turn an unliving world into a living one by seeding it with life, so conceivably the threat he represents could be addressed by creating farm planets, without intelligent life, for him to eat. Perhaps there was formerly a galactic empire that did this, and he's become a threat in modern times because it was overthrown by the Skrulls, Kree, and Shi'ar. But for that matter, one might ask why he doesn't do this himself. He's basically a hunter-gatherer.

In the original story he seems to be after "elements", like a cosmic miner, and indifferent to the life that's going to be destroyed. In other stories, such as Marvel Two-In-One #100, he takes something unknown to our science that makes life possible. That might be something which e.g. would be present on Earth even if all life were destroyed and will never be present on, say, Jupiter or the moon. (But in that case why didn't he eat Mars, which SF tells me might be terraformed?) In yet others stories it seems to be the life itself that he eats. Since we don't know exactly what he eats it's hard to say whether he really should be able to find it where there aren't beings. If he should, his behaviour isn't even driven by necessity.

The first version of this post displaced the thread Comics Guide for September 2, 2015 from the home page.

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Luke Blanchard September 8, 2015 at 12:27am

Galactus is partly an analogue for a god and partly an analogue for a force of nature/event of natural destruction. A force of nature is amoral, as the sun eaters from Adventure Comics presumably are, and gods are sometimes considered above human judgement. And Galactus was also a reflection of Kirby's belief that there are things out there we don't know.

But in-story he's not really all that unlike us. He can be outwitted by humans, as in Fantastic Four #123 and #213. He's only concerned with his own needs and his motivation is straightforward: he's after a meal. One can interpret him as driven (like a drug addict), as indifferent to moral questions (like the Psions, say), or as regarding beings like us as of no importance. Those last two interpretations appear in the original trilogy, along with the idea that he's a being too high for human judgement. (One can also interpret him as full of a sense of his own importance.) But in my view if a Galactus actually came to Earth we would not be under an obligation to give his point of view equal weight with ours, as if we would have no right to go on existing unless we could convince him of our right to do so.

If he's truly amoral, as he might be since he isn't human, one might quibble over whether he can be considered evil. But he's a threat to all beings on our level, I don't buy his I'm-so-much-above-you rhetoric (extratextually he's an analogue for a god, but in-story he's not a god), and I reject the proposition that beings have a right to self-preservation that surpasses all other considerations (so that e.g. it would be moral to sell out the human race to alien invaders if it were one's only hope of survival), so I'm comfortable classing him as a villain.

What he actually eats is rather vague. It should be possible to turn an unliving world into a living one by seeding it with life, so conceivably the threat he represents could be addressed by creating farm planets, without intelligent life, for him to eat. Perhaps there was formerly a galactic empire that did this, and he's become a threat in modern times because it was overthrown by the Skrulls, Kree, and Shi'ar. But for that matter, one might ask why he doesn't do this himself. He's basically a hunter-gatherer.

In the original story he seems to be after "elements", like a cosmic miner, and indifferent to the life that's going to be destroyed. In other stories, such as Marvel Two-In-One #100, he takes something unknown to our science that makes life possible. That might be something which e.g. would be present on Earth even if all life were destroyed and will never be present on, say, Jupiter or the moon. (But in that case why didn't he eat Mars, which SF tells me might be terraformed?) In yet others stories it seems to be the life itself that he eats. Since we don't know exactly what he eats it's hard to say whether he really should be able to find it where there aren't beings. If he should, his behaviour isn't even driven by necessity.

The first version of this post displaced the thread Comics Guide for September 2, 2015 from the home page.

This reply was deleted.