Characters I Want to Write: AQUAMAN!

That's right, folks, the laughing stock of the superhero set, the character every writer and artist loves to talk about and think about and mess with, the character no one seems to be able to sustain public interest in...Arthur Curry, known as Aquaman.

Honest injun, I don't have an overriding love for Aquaman. I never read Aquaman comics growing up in the 1970s (where he was relegated to ADVENTURE COMICS and his own series for a short time, and then as a back-up in ACTION COMICS "starring Superman by the early 1980s). I did see him on "SuperFriends" along with the rest of my generation. You can all hear the thought-wave sound effect from the cartoon, as Aquaman called his finny friends to help him combat some menace. The effect was cool, and I did dig his orange shirt and green fin-pants combo. But interesting he was not.

The popular comic book writer Peter David took on Aquaman for perhaps the most successful portion of Aquaman's four-color history. Despite the fairly terrible art in the mag, David's approach made sense: chop off Arthur's hand, replace it with a harpoon, put a gnarly beard and long hair on him and Conan the Barbarian him out. And despite myself, after actually recently reading the first 14 issues of the comic, I liked the approach.

But like anything, the approach collapsed once David left the book, and subsequent writers tried to integrate the "classic" Aquaman and the new Aquaman, leading to all kinds of problems. Nobody can or has been able to determine just what it is Arthur Curry brings to the table. Is it the orange shirt? The fish telepathy? The harpoon/magic hand made of water thing? Just saying that is disturbing, isn't it? "Magic hand made of water." It's like the description on a bottle of anal lube.

I was reminded again how much of a challenge the entire conceit is. It isn't just about having an Aquaman solo comic on the shelves; DC Comics doesn't have an interest in what happens to Arthur, unless their star Geoff Johns decides to write him. Then you'll hear the slobbering over how great the character should be, and how Johns will take him there. Well, let's just say Johns doesn't impress me much anymore. Not at all.

I already wrote about some ideas concerning Aquaman in the past. His conceit is difficult, yet not. He's the hybrid son of an Atlantean dame and a human father. Arthur is a caucasoid after his dad, but he can breathe underwater like his mom. Arthur is also of royal blood, so he's really the King of Atlantis, which is full of blue-skinned underwater people. In the 1960s, Arthur somehow managed to surround himself with a caucasoid redhead babe in a skintight outfit, a caucasoid sidekick Aqualad who wore a cool red shirt like Aquaman's and sported a man-fro (which is awesome, I now realize), and a caucasoid Aquababy who ended up murdered by Aquaman's mortal enemy, the Black Manta.

Suddenly, Arthur had a bunch of whities around him and you didn't see those blue-skins much. Which is interesting, in a "there goes the neighborhood" kind of way. Arthur ended up practicing some extensive racial discrimination, there. Without some diversity, it was just another comic about homogenized, deodorized, whiter-than-white superheroes.

Look at the X-Men reboot in 1975, and how reader interest was drummed up by the racial/cultural diversity of the new group. It was an original take in comics of the time, to have a Russian and a German and a Canadian and an African hottie and an Irishman and a Navajo indian, all with superpowers, teaming up. It was the "Star Trek" approach to diversity, but it held reader interest until the X-Men became the biggest thing in the comic book world.

Today, everyone is trying to shake up various characters by changing their race, their identity, even their sex, in order to propose "change." None of that gets to the heart of change. The success of X-Men (and it wasn't immediate success by any means, but at least that new cast kept the book from imminent cancellation) came from the character-driven sub-plots most notably exploited by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the writer/artist team that changed the book's downward spiral into, literally, a phoenix from the ashes.

Basically, Aquaman needs to become another kind of character, not another character completely. I imagine Arthur to be a pretty tough hombre, but not in the league of his creative influence, Marvel Comics' Namor the Sub-Mariner (created a couple years prior to Aquaman, 1939 to 1941). I don't think Arthur is super-powerful strong, able to punch holes in a submarine. But he might use a fancy Atlantean battle ax to hack through the steel and sink the thing.

On land, Arthur is no less imposing physically than in the sea. He is more adept at fighting in the water, so if you rumble with Arthur in the ocean, it's like taking on a judo master in his dojo. For an idea of Arthur on land, battling, you just take the judo master out of his dojo (training room) and put him on the streets of Detroit. He's not nearly as effective, but he's still effective. Learning how to survive on those streets, the judo master must attain another kind of knowledge: street sense. Interesting, no?

Also, Arthur has an advantage on land in that I believe, personally, his skin will be tougher, his muscles harder, due to the stress and pressure of an entire life in the oceans. He's stronger than most any normal man whose body has not been shaped by that life. His skin is half-Atlantean, which means it could be similar to a shark's, that rough concrete texture that protects those fish. It takes a high-velocity weapon to pierce a shark's flesh, and thus will it be with Arthur. He's still vulnerable, but he's also way more durable.

I think Arthur is going to be a hard-looking dude. You see the way boxers faces become misshapen from the constant impact of blows? Well, I think ramming his kisser through water all the time will have a distinct impact on Arthur's facial features, which will be more "weathered." Also, I don't think he grows facial hair, frankly, nor do any Atlanteans. Kind of like a lot of Native Americans and Asians. For undersea people to grow facial hair or body hair of any kind would be kind of weirdly counterproductive of evolution. Arthur has hair on his head because he's human, but as much as I obviously dig the beard, he doesn't grow one. Not this version of Aquaman anyhow (though he might rock some sideburns, if we're going to get technical.) Arthur's hair is short, because he isn't a hippie or a rocker. It's a utilitarian haircut. He's a warrior, not a fashion slave.

All this aside, Arthur Curry's persona is private, a bit on the aggressive side. I think he judges people, Atlanteans or humans, by how they move or hold themselves. Fish in the oceans determine danger by the frenetic activity around them. Nothing that hunts in the waters does so without announcing their intentions in a kind of language of motion. Sharks almost always seem to "dance" around prey, determining danger, or advantage, before striking in earnest. Arthur perceives in much the same way, which would be particularly interesting on land if he misreads intention based on how people approach him.

I get the sense Arthur should be more "feral" than he is mostly shown. He's usually just a man, a King, a politician, a hero. But living beneath the waves must affect the thought processes, the survival instinct, the reactions. He's not an animal, but I think Arthur must have more in common with sea life than with either the Atlanteans or humans. In a sense, Arthur is more in tune with sea creatures, like Grizzly Adams and Tarzan to wildlife in their respective worlds. Arthur doesn't "talk" or "command" fish/dolphins, but he "reads" them by their movements. They relate information to him by how they act. And who's to say there isn't some orca whale somewhere who long ago befriended the boy Arthur and is a protector?

The last thing is to alter Arthur's reason for being. He's not interested at all in being a King. If that element must be part of his conceit (which, originally in his earliest incarnations, was not), then let it be something Arthur refuses utterly. This will alienate him from Atlanteankind in one swoop. Yet still he has to face his blood right someday. Let it be someday then.

The other aspect is to put Arthur in situations where he is most likely to find action. This Aquaman seeks conflict, from his righteous belief that neither Atlantean nor human have the best interest of the Seven Seas at heart. Dig it?

The way to do that is put Arthur in a research facility run by an independent purveyor, using the old Sea Devils adventurer/explorers and other DC second-string/supporting characters for history's sake. The point is to have a cross-section of a lot of interesting characters involved in studying the heretofor unexplored 3/4ths of the world currently deep under water. Even the Atlanteans, for all their thousands of years before Mankind's ascendance, have lost the knowledge of the what is to be found in all that vastness. This includes islands, and reefs, and deep ravines and so on. Anything could there. ANYTHING, and a lot of harm besides. And the Atlanteans are isolationists at this point in time, lacking interest in exploring, or learning, of anything but their own prideful superiority. Which isn't to say some young Wyatt Wingfoot-type young Atlantean won't get fired up and join the research team, wanting to learn while also impressing the cool-as-a-moose Arthur Curry, who remains unimpressed. If you can feel me.

Can this work? Would you read that Arthur Curry, that Aquaman? This is just part of what I'm thinking, but it's the game to play. Nobody knows how to make Aquaman popular and readable and cool...but I'm sort of a nobody, right? Maybe that's what Aquaman needs? A nobody, instead of some somebody. Just saying, of course. Just a little hint, is all.

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