Aquaman, Volume 1: The Trench

So how does one deal with Aquaman's baggage as a lesser light in the DC Universe? How does one make him relevent when he's always been the easy target of pop culture jokes (and his Marvel equivalent is decidely more bad ass)?

If you are Geoff Johns you address the issue head on, out in the open, morphing it from a negative into a positive, challenging the reader to set aside their biases, feel some shame for their "uninformed opinions" and empathize with Aquaman.

It works a treat. On

So how does one deal with Aquaman's baggage as a lesser light in the DC Universe? How does one make him relevent when he's always been the easy target of pop culture jokes (and his Marvel equivalent is decidely more bad ass)?

If you are Geoff Johns you address the issue head on, out in the open, morphing it from a negative into a positive, challenging the reader to set aside their biases, feel some shame for their "uninformed opinions" and empathize with Aquaman.

It works a treat. One issue is all it takes to get hooked by Aquaman, and I figure Geoff Johns will be reeling me in by the end of the arc.

Cheesy puns aside for this issue, I promise.

What we have here is a classic Aquaplot. Crazy sea creatures, in this case fish-like humanoids with giant pointy teeth -- sort neo-uber-gila men -- have attacked a fishing trawler, then a town, so Aquaman is called in to have a look.

Turns out Aquaman's not too popular with law enforcement, and they certainly don't take him seriously, but none of that matters when the neo-uber-gila men are attacking at full force, spitting paralytic goo and generally giving Aquaman and Mera a tough battle on the docks of the wee beseiged town.

If you like big, nearly bloody battles you'll dig this issue. I'm not a huge fan of these sorts of battles, but it's fun to see Aquaman in action. So there's that.

The neo-uber-gila men run into too much resistance and retreat into the sea, bearing humans in goo-pods as future food, but they leave behind one of their kind, which gives Arthur / Aquaman a reason to fill Mera and us in on his background, and how his youth fits in with deluded and slightly evil Marine Biologist Stephen Shin.

Not much happens in this issue, except that Dr. Shin helps Aquaman determine the origin of the new-uber-gila men, which is good enough for Arthur. He and Mera take off for the Trench, antagonizing Shin in the process and setting up, no doubt, some future trouble for themselves.

A slower pace in this issue would have helped, but I know this isn't going to happen. It's not in Johns writerly-DNA.

Aquaman and Mera track the new-uber-gila men to their lair with a hive-Queen at the center. Mera wants to kill them and do away with their "evil," but Arthur wants to protect their species and to understand them if he can. The conflict between their approaches is interesting, but there's little debate -- almost no debate. Aquaman presses on, not killing the new-uber-gila men in the process, and Mera follows unhappily.

Then Aquaman kills them all anyway (or so it seems) because steals (liberates?) their food, and when they try to take it back to fee their starving children, Aquaman unleashes the violence he'd been holding back in the form of an ocean floor volcano, thus burying them under rock and lava. Yep, twelve humans from a small coastal town are more important than an entire species. Glad we have that sorted out.

The first ten panels, which include a two page spread, are ten of the best panels I've seen. Arthur falls from the sky, and climbing out of the crater he left in the desert, he looks around and whispers, "Uh-oh." It looks gorgeous and it is scripted with sparing beauty. The rest of the issue fails to match this brilliance, however, and disappointment in this arc is truly beginning to settle in for me.

Before the next arc begins, before we figure out "Who sank Atlantis?" (the big question surrounding what's to come), we get an interesting little interlude with Mera (a.k.a. Aquawoman, but don't call her that). We see her Atlantean ethics at odds with supposedly human ethics (which are always a little too benevolent in the DC universe beyond Gotham), we discover the breadth of her powers, and she makes a friend. I like her. I wonder if I will like Arthur as much as I like her the next trade around. Doubt it.