Shalla Bal, Sha-la-la-la-la Bal (get a job)

Money! As top economist Joseph Stiglitz has written,

Money, get away
Get a good job with good pay and you're okay
Money, it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team

And he oughta know...he won the Nobel Prize twice: once for Economics, and once for Sexiest Man of the Year. And, his hit album was on the Billboard Charts for over 740 weeks.

Thing is, everybody needs money. And in these tough economic times, if you don't have a tin cup full of pencils or some shiny polished apples to sell (and no selling on my corner! This is my territory!), you're gonna need a job of some sort to earn yourself some cool green moola.


Yes, money. You can't live without it, and you can't eat it, unless it's Hungarian sausage bucks, now available in thick or thin slice currency.


But if you wanna earn a daily living, the competition is fierce, because it seems these days everybody's looking for gainful employment:


Say, just who is that behind those Foster Grants, huh? Why, it's none other than the Argent Agent, the Sterling Soarer, the Tinfoil Thrasher....

The Silver Surfer!

All panels are from Silver Surfer #5 (April 1969), script by Stan Lee, pencils by John Buscema, inks by Sal Buscema, letters by Sam Rosen
But the man with the reflective face (not to mention the rest of him) finds that getting a job isn't as easy as popular culture makes it out to be! No, first he must dress up as a woman and get a place to live in an all-girl's apartment building...oh, wait, I got The Silver Surfer mixed up with Bosom Buddies. Again.



Yep, it's just like the U. S. Army commercials tell ya: no experience, no job. But no job, no experience? What's a depressed and overdramatic glistening-skinned alien to do?!? Huh? Huh?

Well, luckily for the Twinkling Titan, the answer to all his problems, like that of all problems in life, can be found within the pages of a Marvel comic book...in fact, the very same comic book he's appearing in as we now speak read: Silver Surfer #5. Many behemoths of business got their start by answering an ad in the back of a Marvel comic. Was it by selling Grit, or flower seeds, or maybe by offering to last three rounds in a ring with the Hulk? Nay (as our pal Thor might say), it was not-eth. Hmmm, well, was it one of these ads?:



No! Nor is it a need for a GED that's holding Norrin Rad back, because everyone knows he's a proud graduate of Zenn-La High, starting captain for the Zenn-La Zygotes Nurgball team, homecoming king (despite the attempts by his mischievous rival Reggin Mann to upsurp the throne and Norrin's prom date, Shalla Bal), and later went on to two and a half years of community college, proudly achieving his B.S. in Space Astrophysics (minoring in Zenn-La studies).


No, forget all that: here's how the Silver Surfer made his first billion quatloos and became the cover boy of Zenn-La's leading business publication, Business 2099.0—by selling valuable and rare coins at an amazing and astonishing profit!


More specifically, these coins:


Say, Norrin Radd: I've just got one question: I'm wondering, um...