He talks to fish, lugs around a trident, has an octopus for a sidekick and gets weaker out of water: even if you’ve never read an Aquaman comic, you can still make a joke about him. Being the embodiment of everything risible and lame about superheroes, the piscine paladin has few defenders (“He once summoned a SHARKNADO, how’s about your dumbass actually reads a comic book?” one irate online comment reads) but Aquaman’s reputation has stuck to him like batter on haddock.
This is “the Aquaman problem”, as DC’s very own co-publisher Dan Didio called it. “I have a running joke,” he once said. “In all my dinners with the talent at conventions, I get three or four writers who will lean into me and say, ‘I know how to fix Aquaman’. Everybody says that. It’s become a cause celebre.” Robot Chicken has made a whole series of skits detailing Aquaman’s failures, such as his impotence in the face of oil spills. On Family Guy, Aquaman fails to prevent a sexual assault because he refuses to leave the water, while a crossover cameo saw him saved by the Powerpuff Girls because: “My ability to talk with fish is of no help!” On South Park, Kanye West rages at being mistaken for Aquaman, while on Entourage, awful actor Vince is desperate to play him (“Aquaman 2 is going to make Speed 2 look like Citizen Kane”).
Originally depicted taking on Nazis in submarines and pirates at sea in the 40s and 50s, Hanna-Barbera’s TV cartoon Super Friends cemented Aquaman’s reputation as a joke in the 70s. Seen as pathetically wholesome, a sort of Ned Flanders who rode dolphins like jetskis, it didn’t matter how seriously he was treated by DC. Now, more than 70 years since the character first appeared on the page, ribbing Aquaman has become more popular than reading him.
Which is a shame, because he’s actually an interesting character. Like so many superheroes in the DC universe, Aquaman has undergone a process of transformation in comics. These days, in DC’s Rebirth series, Aquaman is a head of a foreign power – Atlantis – that is busily unsettling America as a new military force, with an embassy uncomfortably close to Massachusetts coast. As an individual, Aquaman has a charmingly domestic relationship with his fiancee, Mera and an amusing self-awareness that, no matter what he might do, a lot of people just think he talks to fish.
“Aquaman has never been as spectacularly famous as Batman or Superman, but he deserves to be,” says Rebirth writer Dan Abnett, who has written the character several times for DC over the last 20 years. “He really carries a stigma. He is a pop culture joke, the epitome of the silly superhero. I quite enjoyed the idea of writing a character who is incredibly proficient but hugely misunderstood, as both a nemesis of the deep and a superhero who isn’t quite up to scratch.”
Despite the jokes, Aquaman attracts writers, Abnett says, because he is not as famous as his Justice League colleagues: there is a certain flexibility left in his character that does not remain with Batman, Superman or Wonder Woman. “He’s well known but he’s not iconic, which is appealing [from] a writer’s point of view. You can do things with him because he’s not cemented in the public’s minds. And any writer who takes on an old character these days inherits a legacy – so if you write Batman today, you are as aware of Christian Bale’s Batman as you are of Adam West’s.”
But while Batman eventually got to brooding Christian Bale, Aquaman has been perennially stuck in the Adam West mould. Various attempts to explain why Aquaman exists at all have fallen between the mundane and the ridiculous. He’s the son of a mermaid. He’s the son of a wizard. He’s a premature baby who had a freak accident. But DC has gone back to the drawing board in Rebirth, reducing all focus on where he came from and instead asking, as Abnett does: “What would a man do if he could influence everything under the water and wasn’t just chatting to turbot? How would the world react?”
Instead of treating him like their beloved Superman, the White House in Rebirth views Aquaman as the face of a despised, pariah state. Atlantis’s sudden visibility sees TV pundits fretting over its scaly citizens just as they would over other alarmingly “foreign” states. “As an individual, he is extremely potent. He is biologically designed to withstand huge amounts of pressure, which makes him very agile and strong,” Abnett says. “But his superpowers are incidental to his responsibilities of governing a country, and that country is not necessarily on America’s side.”
One element of DC’s latest incarnation that helps his credibility is how politically prescient his latest storyline has become; with its take on a panicked US administration and how it treats alien neighbours, Abnett says DC joked about calling it The Wet Wing. “More than once, I went back and looked at a script I’d written two months before and tweaked things slightly because it really looks like I am being overtly critical, when I had not intended to be,” he says. “Even though I was dealing with a fictional America, I wanted their reaction to Atlantis to be something like what the real America’s reaction would be to a hostile state.”
Another depiction that may fix “the Aquaman problem” is the 2017’s Justice League film and the 2018 standalone Aquaman film, starring Jason Momoa in the title role. Momoa is set to take the character away from the familiar blond, crew-cut, all-American superhero to present him as a salt-sprayed pirate with flowing locks and startling muscles. This, as Abnett sees it, is “an extremely good thing.”
“He looks fantastic – and serious. He looks impressively intimidating,” he says. “And Momoa is just very cool. If he can’t help with Aquaman’s problem, positioning him as something serious and not a joke, maybe no one can.”
- Volume one of Aquaman: Rebirth is published as The Drowning by DC Comics.
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