Comic Book Resources

Just the other day on his twitter page Jason Aaron said he was rating the entries to Project Rooftop. He is the guest judge, so I'm guessing it will be announced soon.

I await the Dalek Spa (”Exfoliate!”), Shaun of the Dalek (”Exacerbate!”), and, of course, Jon & Kate Plus Dalek (”Emasculate!”).

HYPERBOLE! Masterful. PAD lives in awe of that sentence.

REALITY! Sigh... Project Rooftop. That site hasn't been prompt or lively in far too long. It started out with so much potential and some much verve and sputtered right out. A shame, truly.

Has anyone come up with a decent argument against the harpoon hand other than "it's not how he looked on Superfriends?" It's a weapon, it's a grappling hook, it's a nice visual element... never understood the hate, but then we all know what a pedestal I put mid-late-90s DC on....

And all of those Dalek things sound like rejected RTD script ideas. Because they're not overexposed enough....

Well, it might be more difficult for him to cook, clean, put his pants on, or wipe his ass. Do they have toilets in Atlantis?

Stephen:

I think the 'hate for the harpoon' wasn't because that he lost his hand and replaced it with a harpoon, but the whole Charybdis stealing his abilities so he couldn't communicate with marine life and then having pirahna eat his hand off. It's sort of like "Let's have Parasite battle Superman and cut his hand off with a kryptonite table saw, only Parasite is so stupid he exposes himself to Kryptonite poisoning and dies. Clark survives that, so let's put a mini Phantom Zone projector on his stub.... "

Taking the guy's powers away in such a contrived manner to specifically do something that by the very nature of the character should never happen under any circumstance, just stuck in some people's craw, I guess.

The aforementioned being said, PAD did a pretty spiffy job of transforming the character.

"...something that by the very nature of the character should never happen under any circumstance..."

I guess I'd need more in the way of what in the "very nature of the character" means the harpoon-hand should never have happened. What is the nature of the character, and what specifically in that nature precludes this sort of thing?

'Cause to my mind, Aquaman's been fair game for radical revamping ever since his writers decided to completely drop his original backstory as a human granted his abilities by his scientist father.

Well, it might be more difficult for him to cook, clean, put his pants on, or wipe his ass. Do they have toilets in Atlantis?

In all seriousness, how exactly would an underwater toilet work? A lot of speculative fiction or fantasy worlds that work the way Atlantis does -- humans/humanoids living in environments humans aren't adapted for -- tend to do much better without the sort of questions being asked about the hook-hand.

If you never asked how people in Atlantis cooked, cleaned, and so forth back when they were just living underwater and that stuff made no sense, it's a little bit of a false premise to suddenly care when the lead character gets a harpoon prosthesis.

My answer? He just asks the fish to do it for him.

And I know he has the super-swimming powers, but it'd be harder to do so with only one functional hand. But then David gave him webbed fingers to make it a bit easier, I guess.

I don't really mind the revamp, but that's not particularly the Aquaman I'd want to write or read about-- and I know, I'm totally being a hypocrite here, what with my dislike of the Hal Jordan and Barry Allen reverts.

The problem with Aquaman is that there's really no core version of the character that works particularly well. He's one of those characters that's pretty much never really worked for long stretches of time, thanks to continual editorially-mandated reinventions and so forth.

The two exceptions were Steve Skeates's run in the late 1960s and PAD's run, both of which benefitted greatly from extended arc-based plotting...and neither of which was really allowed to finish by editorial. The Hooper/McLaughlin run was a "what might have been" without a real answer, and otherwise the basic character seems to swing wildly between various personalities and settings, with some writers wanting to play him as a king, others stripping him of his realm and giving him flooded cities and such (New Venice in the 80s; Sub Diego more recently) and so forth.

At some basic level, the character suffers from a kind of externally-imposed inferiority complex: he was created as a Namor knockoff, rose to prominence as a C-lister in a book full of A-listers, and was popularized outside of comics as perhaps the lamest character on a generally goofy cartoon series. The general public sees him as a geeky punchline, the casual reader and editorial staff obsess anxiously about how to "make him cool," and the few dedicated writers who come up with workable directions for the book are driven off by the folks in category two.

See, I think Aquaman writes himself. I think the concept is loaded with unrealized potential. Here's superhero King Arthur, in a underwater land of monsters and mystery. He's the king of the seas; almost all undersea life respects him, and obeys his mental commands. He rides around on a giant battle seahorse and kicks ass. It's a fantasy adventure series with a few sci-fi trappings, set in a superhero universe. He'd be handsome and kind, a famous celebrity no one can quite figure out, what with how he seems to reinvent himself every few years.

I like the orange shirt, and the talking to fish. I would give up a vital but not entirely necessary organ to write just 12 measly issues of a new Aquaman series. It'd be the most awesome superhero fantasy ever. You don't need to make him cool. He is cool. Start from there, and build up.

See, I think that could be the core of the character...but even the writers like Skeates, who basically did what you're talking about, as well as guys like Neal Pozner who also took that tack never really manage to get readers or editors on board for very long.

I think the character idea is cool, like you, but most people don't for whatever reason. For one thing, despite the prevalence of the myth of Atlantis in popular culture, it's rather hard to think of subsea fantasy or serial adventure narratives in any medium that have achieved great popularity and longevity after Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. SeaLab bombed back in 1972 and now exists only as a parody of itself, SeaQuest underwnt massive ratings declines and was cancelled midway through year three, and even the Disney name couldn't make Atlantis: The Lost Continent a hit. Subsea comedy, sure: Spongebob does fine with that.

I can't help but suspect that Aquaman and other undersea characters run into the serious problem of having few "normal" people and settings to interact with. In effect, there's nothing to really ground the fantasy, to the point that the exotic appeal of the differences in underwater existence and so forth also cut out the ever-valuable relateability factor. It's why Namor always ends up defined by his war on surfacemen (and his other war on Sue Richards's wedding vows). It's why The Man from Atlantis didn't make it beyond a couple of TV movies and half a season.

Undersea settings are very odd in that they should have all the appeal of outer space, given how little we know of the ocean, but the comparative lack of knowledge (or presumed knowledge) most people have about oceanography as compared to astrophysics is almost certainly to blame. We have an insanely bizarre and gorgeous cosmos, one largely unexplored, right here on Earth...but aside from the efforts of a couple of superannuated Frenchmen, no one's managed to make that appealing to a mass audience for very long.

Omar: "I guess I’d need more in the way of what in the 'very nature of the character' means the harpoon-hand should never have happened. What is the nature of the character, and what specifically in that nature precludes this sort of thing?"

I thought I made that clear enough with the Superman analogy. The nature of Aquaman's (Silver Age to Modern Day) marine telepathy and subsequent historically implied control of marine life would have meant no pirahna eating his hand, because he would have sent mental signal to repel them. The fact that PAD conveniently transferred these powers to Charybdis basically for the sole purpose of the shock value having the powerless Aquaman's hand eaten off, then turned around and had it so Charybdis couldn't control the power well enough and the piranha ate him and he transformed instead to Pirahna Man, was to some readers a cheap ploy at best, and an extremely poor idea at worst.

That said, it wasn't the worst thing anyone had ever done with the character, and PAD went forward from that and made the character more prominent for a time in the DCU.

"Cause to my mind, Aquaman’s been fair game for radical revamping ever since his writers decided to completely drop his original backstory as a human granted his abilities by his scientist father."

Why? They did the radical revamp in the Silver Age and have been consistent with him since, mostly. Just like they did their revamps of GL and Flash. And honestly, "being taught the language of all the species of marine life" so he can literally talk to them (Golden Age version) is lame. Especially when it had been scientifically proven by then that there were other methods of communication between various species of marine life excluding any sort of "linguistical structure" by the time the Silver Age version was designed, so changing it to a form of marine telepathy made far more sense.

But I agree that it would be better had the father remained a marine scientist instead of merely a lighthouse operator who just happened to hook up with an outcast Atlantean female.

@Bright-Raven: OK, I was confused about your terminology. I thought that when you said "nature of the character" you meant that somehow the core concept of Aquaman required him to have two hands or something. It seems that what you really meant was that the means by which he lost his hand was too contrived in plotting terms to be the basis of a major, constantly-referenced character change. (A goofy plot is annoying for readers; a goofy plot that becomes intrinsic to the character is an open wound with the occasional salt rubdown.) It's not really fair to blame PAD for Piranha Man, though -- Erik Larsen came up with that all by himself.

Aquaman's Silver Age revamp differed from the more successful examples, I think, in that it wasn't much of a revamp. Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, Ray Palmer, Katar and Shayera Hol, etc. were all profoundly different characters than their Golden Age predecessors, often shifting from a pulpily magical setting and origin to a slick Gardner Fox style of soft sci-fi. Aquaman was not only given the sort of "after-the-fact" reboot the other continuously published characters like DC's "Trinity" and fellow backup strip straggler Green Arrow, his reboot was for the most part superficial and didn't introduce a mythology for him. And like Wonder Woman and Green Arrow, it wasn't until the later 1960s that anyone really tried giving the character a unique or fleshed-out setting for adventures and a supporting cast that wasn't made up of just a sidekick and a funny animal.

Green Arrow eventually got his "relevant" shtick; Wonder Woman got the depowered Diana Prince, which wasn't as successful or lasting a revamp, and frankly you don't find a lot of nostalgia for Silver Age and Pre-Crisis Wonder Woman beyond the I Ching period. But Aquaman...poor Aquaman. No one ever did manage to give him the boost a revamp would -- when his origin changed, he was just appearing in Adventure Comics backups as he had in prior months, ad had the same formulaic adventures afterwards as before -- nor did anyone ever seem to find a genuinely "relevant" hook like the one that saved GA and briefly revitalized WW. The closest he came was some ecological mumbling of the sort Namor had already done better at the competition, and he started in on that after it was well on its way to being a superhero cliche in general.

Aquaman was revamped in 1959, but no one cared; and he missed out on the sort of belated revamp other characters got. And worse, he didn't get a post-Crisis revamp or boost either. That was a lot of what helped Wonder Woman out; most of what casual readers think Wonder Woman "has always been about" is the invention of Len Wein and George Perez, and a million miles away from William Moulton Marston's distinctive bu...quirky...initial concept. Aquaman's got neither the original and quirky concept nor the recent refreshing take; he's simply never been a character even creators have bothered trying to make impressive or unique, Skeates and PAD excepted.

Omar:

I was thinking that Charybdis to Pirahana Man was Larsen, but I didn't see anything citing it when I checked before I posted. (Honestly what I vaguely remembered was PAD Vs. Larsen after PAD left the book) Not a huge fan of the character, either way, and Aquaman lore is not my forte', I freely admit.

I don't know what sort of 'refreshing take' you could give the character. It seems they can't do Atlantis any better than they do Themyscaria (which after Perez gets downright deplorable), and the moment you bring it into the DCU, it's always "war with the surface world" nonsense. Doing a scientifically plausible character whose primary concern is the oceans would make him a loner hardly in contact with anyone, because of the sheer size of his territory to cover. Sure, there's much about marine biology that can be fascinating and make for some nice stories, but as you already cited with other media examples, oceanography and marine biology seemingly isn't something many writers have enough interest in to make interesting for readers.