Eff it, I'm doin' this. Part one.

Here's how I see him...

Atlan was a wily old wizard-- like Flagg in Eyes of the Dragon, only not so malevolent. In the DC Order/Chaos scheme of things, call him an ambassador from the realm of Chaos. He doesn't much care whether society crumbles or if good triumphs or a revolution succeeds-- but, when you get down to it, he's a smart fucker, and he likes other smart fuckers, and tends to root for them. He's thousands of years old-- at least-- and he wanders all over Earth and the mortal planes in general, but something keeps pulling him back to the oceans...

Thetis is basically Ariel with legs. (In my DC Atlantis, fuck mermaids/men and Lagoon Boy and all those Atlanteans who look like Triton from the Inhumans.)
She longs to know what the surface world is like. Her husband, King Nereus, is a generation older than her, and only interested in her for one thing-- and even then it's only for about an hour a week. She dreams of going to the surface and being treated like a real queen, not the whore with a crown that she feels like. She's the youngest of her family, one of the few noble families left in Atlantis. She had the choice of marrying the king or seeing her family sell off the last of their estates to avoid slavery for one more generation. Lord knows what they find to keep slaves busy down there.

Atlantis itself is the largest of a group of warring city-states, sharing a similar background but devoted to different ideals (think the pre-Alexander Mediterranean). They inhabit the Northern Atlantic, though they know there are other cities in other seas. They've been fighting the same stupid battles and using the same ancient magic for three thousand years or more, since they were, for lack of a better explanation, kicked out of the Mediterranean for fucking everything up (I'll figure out a better why later). Every time Atlan swings by he stirs up trouble, and every time they just rebuild everything just as it was and go back to the same genealogy-worship and Hatfield-McCoying and slavery and sieges. Think of the Inhumans and their lost city of Attilan. It's kind of like that down there.

Nereus is just another king. He's kind of an asshole, but he'll repent later, after Thetis is dead. He fucks around a lot, both with his literal penis and the figurative penis of his royal authority. That'll come back to bite him.

Atlan takes a liking to Thetis. He promises to take her to the surface world. He pretends that she needs his magic to breathe air, and lets her run around on land for a night and a day. Perhaps she meets Tom Curry, a lonely lighthouse-keeper? Perhaps.

It comes time for Atlan and Thetis to return to the palace. Thetis is giddy from her adventure, Atlan thrilled to have a new pawn to wreck things for Atlantis... the guards catch them. Nereus is an asshole, but he's not an idiot. Thetis is put under house arrest. The king's guards try to capture Atlan... in his own words, "HA!" In a flash of light and a puff of sulfur, he's nowhere to be found (not that that means he's left the premises, necessarily).

Nine months later... screaming in the Queen's quarters. Sounds of violence. The king demands to know-- is she alive? Does he have an heir?
Yes and no. The child-- the boy-- is alive. The queen went into convulsions and her hair turned white as she pushed him from her body. Now she lays still, catatonic. The boy has blond hair and green eyes. Like Atlan, the wife-stealing sorceror. Like Gamemnae, the witch who caused Atlantis to sink. Tainted by the outside. By the surface. Better if he were stillborn. So they take him to Mercy Reef and leave him to die. Herein they make the classic villain's mistake of "I'll just leave you here to suffer and die. I don't need to actually witness your death myself. I trust you." Trust not the dolphin, ye below the waves.

A pod of dolphins rescues the baby, who soon learns to swim and communicate with his new family. For years, young Orin is happy to be the Mowgli of the Atlantic... although how a human child manages to grow up without serious problems after spending most of its formative years eating nothing but dolphin milk and raw fish is beyond me. We'll file that one under "magic."

Orin is part of the tribe, so to speak, until sometime around the age of seven. Then, while he and a "brother" are hunting a particularly speedy school of fish, a terrible hurricane separates them from the rest of the pod. They're dragged to shore. His brother beaches and dies. Orin is found by, you guessed it, Tom Curry.

I see Tom as a loner type with a good heart. Maybe for awhile there are rumors around his beach of a "wild boy" causing trouble. Maybe he finds Orin and thinks he's a runaway and just tries to be a mentor to him at first. Soon, though, I see Tom taking Orin in, teaching him English, and this is the important part, putting him in public school. Soon he's calling Tom Dad, doing homework and making friends. By giving Arthur the trappings of a normal (ish) American upbringing, we make it easier for readers to relate to him. Tom puts in a call to an old friend from the Navy (of COURSE he was in the Navy) and sets up a Social Security card and Birth Certificate for his new son. Who is Tom Curry? Besides the former Navy conscription and current lighthouse-keeper job, it's pretty wide open. Maybe he's a curator of the lighthouse, a historian type. Or maybe he, well, saw some shit when he was overseas and is all bitter and grim now and he wants to live in the lighthouse, away from people. Could be we take the Golden Age route and he's a crazy marine biologist with dreams of playing God (or at least Neptune) with genetics. Lots of options. But back to Arthur.

So Arthur gets to go through a semi-typical adolescent period, first worshiping the ground Tom walks on and then being a rebellious teen. He wants to know where he came from... too bad Tom honestly has no idea. Unless it's that strange woman he met all those years ago? Tom does the best he can, but whatever his past was, he's not great with people, let alone kids. Arthur gets into a lot of trouble in high school, he fights with Tom a lot, and spends a lot of time swimming/surfing/stealing boats/whatever. But he still doesn't know who he is. At this point, his memories of life before land/Tom are blurry at best. His inherent telepathy/affinity for magic/regal charisma make for some interesting times at school, though, where a gang of followers gradually accrues around him and a lot of the girls (and some boys of course) see him as the town's hottest bad boy.

I could go on forever about the Adventures of Young Arthur in America, but let's cut to the chase. Tom Curry isn't a young man... well, I started thinking about it and I'm wondering how much tragedy needs to be injected into an origin story. He was abandoned by his birth parents. Then he was separated from his adopted dolphin family. Tom dying is a foregone conclusion... do I need to Geoff-Johns it up and see Tom murdered or is a heart attack or something enough?

Either way, Tom dies and Arthur leaves... for where? Another place where I get a little fuzzy. Does he head straight for the ocean? That certainly works... but I also really like the idea of him wandering the Earth for awhile, having adventures. This would also be where he meets Kako the Inupiat girl and fathers Koryak, his "evil" son, not to mention running afoul of other young soul-searching world travelers like, say, Bruce Wayne, Diana Prince, or Clark Kent. Just an idea. But sooner or later he's going to run afoul of Atlantis... and slavery, and wisdom, and redemption.

OH MY SHIT I LOVE IT.

A couple of my friends were apparently talking about me recently-- debating whether I would love or hate the new Batman animated series (the third one? fourth one? since 1992), Batman: The Brave and The Bold, and its depiction of Aquaman.

I was hesitant at first. I'd been reading about it for months as it was coming down the proverbial pipe, and it seemed like a poor, watered-down substitute for the impressive (in scope and theory, if kinda scattershot in practice) JLU from Cartoon Network. My mistake was in assuming that the show and its makers wanted you to take it seriously for even a fraction of a second. For Kane's sake, Diedrich Bader-- TV's Oswald from The Drew Carey Show-- voices Batman. Every line he utters is pure... I nearly said "pure Silver Age gold."

And I wonder why no one reads this.

But honestly, every word of the script of B:TB&TB is what I loved about comics when I was ten years old distilled down to something that isn't quite camp but isn't one tenth as serious as JLU was, either. It's the equal and opposite reaction to The Dark Knight... completely guiltless fun. Unlike when I watched (and only sometimes enjoyed) the Legion of Superheroes show, or The Batman! (blech), or pretty much any Marvel cartoon past the original Fox X-Men show and the second seasons of Iron Man and Fantastic Four(seriously, did you see that half-season abortion that was The Avengers? Since when do Hawkeye and Spawn share a voicebox? Argh... I'm losing the point again.)... Sorry. Unlike the aforementioned shows, I don't feel forced into the role of apologist for Brave & The Bold. If you can't have at least a little fun watching this show... I know President Obama was just sworn in fourteen hours ago, and it's a new era of unity... but if you aren't at least fighting a smirk by the time you finish watching the YouTube clip below, I don't want to know what it's like to be you. You must have had a terrible life.

At first you may be tempted to think, oh, it kind of sucks how they don't have Superman and Wonder Woman in any episodes, until you realise, as I did, that that's kind of the point. Batman's the Johnny Carson to Blue Beetle's David Letterman or Plastic Man's Bill Maher. He's running the show, but he's not the main attraction here. To use a better analogy, he's the gateway drug to the more obscure characters like Deadman, Felix Faust, the Atom, Blue Beetle, etc., ad infinitum.

...And coming up next after Brave and the Bold, it's Wolverine and the X-Me-- CLICK.

A new episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold premieres this Friday, entitled "Fall of the Blue Beetle," guest-starring Wil "(Stop Calling Me) Wesley Crusher" Wheaton as Ted Kord, who is now referred to as (gotta love this considering he first appeared in the '80s) the Classic Blue Beetle. America, I love your completely drug-annihilated long-term memory.

PS-- I forgot to mention, I LOVE THE B&TB AQUAMAN. How do you compensate for a useless character everybody (excepting me and a few other far-flung dorks) hates? Make him an overmuscled male bimbo who's completely in love with a) himself and b) adventuring! For crap's sake, he hugs Batman. I am sold on this beautiful, hilarious vision of the DC Universe, though it's as far from Alan Moore's Twilight of the Gods as it gets. Enjoy. I command you.

Aquaman Flops Around, Gasps, Dies

Booze ‘n’ Comics
Volume 1, Issue 2
!Dia de los Muertos Edicion! (early November)
This issue brought to Gordon’s Dry Gin. Gin: Keeping the poor too drunk to organize and the rich too drunk to care since 1640!


Ratings System:

Single Malt Scotch: A perfect recipe. A generations-old process. Makes me feel warm inside.

Four Whiskey Sours: Oh yes. Just enough. This is a classic. I feel good.

Three Vodka Collins: Tasty! I’d like to have some more of that.

Two Cups Gin & Juice: Inoffensive, yet afterwards I only feel sleepy.

One Shot of Bacardi 151: Pffft! What are you trying to do, kill me?!

Aristocrat Tequila: I have nothing left to live for. Self-destruction is my only remaining goal.

Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis #50-57
Written by Tad Williams
Drawn by Shawn McManus

No… NO! They blew it up! Damn you all to hell… it was Aquaman!
Charlton Heston aside, I do kind of feel like I’ve been stuck in the middle of a society of apes whenever I read an Aquaman comic. No one believes what I say, I have to walk around in someone else’s furry underwear, I get beat up a lot, and usually I end up crying and beating my hands against the ground, or else someone’s telling me they’d kiss me if I weren’t so damned ugly.
In March of 1960, legendary Silver Age writer Gardner Fox introduced the Justice League of America in The Brave and the Bold #28. And sometimes even I, diehard Aquafan that I am, start to wonder if Fox wasn’t overselling the King of the Seven Seas by lumping him in with Superman and Wonder Woman. I’ve loved him since the Zero Hour reboot in the mid-‘90s, and as my tastes matured and I got past the gimmicky cybernetic arm, I realized he was one hell of an interesting character. Here’s this guy with no huge emblem splayed across his chest, one arm and a crappy haircut, yelling at everyone else in the JLA and what’re his powers? He can breathe underwater and talk to fish. Oh yeah, and his other, lesser known power, which is why he yells at everyone else in the JLA: Tremendous, Death-Star-sized balls. I used to wonder, why does he always have to deal with all the trouble going on in Atlantis practically by himself? Can’t Superman hear what’s going on under the ocean? Then I realized: he tells all the other heroes to get bent and stay off of his turf. Because his balls are the definition of enormous. In all honesty, I wrote a sixteen-page paper for my Advanced Non-Fiction class called “The Case for Aquaman” that revolves around this very claim. If you want to read it, email me at king dot aquaman at gmail dot com. Yeah. That’s how big of a fan I’ve been.
So anyway. The new series is technically Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis. Basically, a bunch of crazy idiotic crossover stuff happened, and now the old Aquaman is this amnesiac prophet guy with tentacles for a face called The Dweller in the Depths, and the new Aquaman is a mutant kid, born of surface-dweller stock, named Arthur Joseph Curry. (Arthur Curry was the first Aquaman’s landlubber handle. Kurt Busiek is known for his style, not necessarily his originality.) The two are joined by the King Shark, a big, humanoid… shark, who’s the son of the god of… sharks. You don’t really need to know much more than that. Anyway, Kurt Busiek was off to a good start for his post-Infinite Crisis Aquaman reboot. Atlantis in ruins, new hero righting wrongs, Cthulhu-esque powers of the Deep threaten us all, blah blah blah. Not Of Mice and Men, but not bad.
Enter Tad Williams, writer of such sci-fi/fantasy series as “Otherland” and “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” …yeah, I’d never heard of him, either. That doesn’t mean he sucks! Far from it, actually. He has a very DeMatteis, X-Factor/Booster Gold type sense of humor that permeates his run—a sort of self-awareness that, yes, he’s being an even bigger dork by writing comics, but he’s having fun. He never quite overwhelms the (rather serious) plot with humor, but he definitely dabbles very close to the line. But you can tell he’s used to writing prose—the whole run is about as verbose as, well, me, for starters. And the minute Williams starts, the supporting cast is expanded so that he’d have needed three times the length of his eight-month run to flesh everyone out as well as I’d have liked. Clearly he was building towards something big, but DC didn’t want Aquaman cluttering up the monthly checklist when they could bring in some more guaranteed winners like Countdown to Mystery, Amazons Attack and Metamorpho: Year One. There was this big bad group called the Deep Church who worshipped a (yet again) Cthulhu-esque “sleeping god” called Urlok the Awaited, who could apparently only be stopped by Orin, the original Aquaman. Whom Williams conveniently “killed” in issue 50. Yeah, like I believe that for an instant. After he died, the Justice League basically showed up to go, “huh. I guess he’s dead.” This is how seriously the writer himself took it. I suffer no delusion that my favorite superhero may be dead forever, like Jean Grey or Captain America (please God). It’s just a stupid ploy to motivate the new Aquaman to greater heights. Or would it be depths? Whatever. You know.
The aforementioned supporting cast isn’t bad, it’s just big. Arthur befriends a humanoid octopus kid named Topo; he fights Krusivax, the son of the legendary Kordax (basically evil cousin of the royal family that Orin came from); old Orin is killed by Narwhal, the new identity of the brainwashed Koryak, Orin’s own son; and after the big battle with Krusivax and Vandal Savage and their plan to sink every city on the Pacific Rim, Arthur and his friends are menaced by Clownfish, a water-breathing man who was dosed with Jokerfish-toxin underwater, making him as crazy and dangerous as the real Joker. The series was running up to a confrontation with Urlok’s Deep Church in the city of Dyss, which apparently was at war with the other-dimensional city of Viatha, which was where Tempest, Orin’s old sidekick, journeyed at the end of issue 55 and… are you pissed off yet at having to keep so much in your head just to read one freakin’ issue of Aquaman? Now you get the picture. I appreciate Williams’ gusto, but his eyes were apparently bigger than DC’s mouth, and they spat him back out. (That’s a crappy metaphor, but I’m drunk and this rag is free. Sue me.) Speaking of gusto, the artist, Shawn McManus, didn’t seem to have much for this comic. I hope this isn’t the best he could do. Butch Guice’s sketchy, heavily-shaded drawings were replaced by McManus’s cartoony style, which, the writer’s sense of humor aside, just feels kind of out of place in what’s supposed to be an epic, if an underrated one. (Not to say that cartoony can’t be epic: see, uhm, anything drawn by Michael Avon Oeming.) That said, for such a wordy comic, McManus does a great job of depicting the fight between Arthur and Vandal Savage in issue 55. Fast-paced with lots of small panels, each one like half a second of film in an action movie. Well-done there.
When read all in one go, the last eight issues of volume four of Aquaman (yes, this is the fourth time since 1986 they’ve given him a monthly only to take it away again) make a compelling, if confusing, drama which ultimately falls short not due to the writer, but the editors. Read month by month, it’s just not worth it. C’est la vie. How can I be so nonchalant about the death and cancellation of my favorite character? Welcome to comics, kid. It’s a tough old world.
Dang it… now I’ve gotta subscribe to Outsiders.

Rating: Two Cups Gin & Juice.