The Lesser Hunter

I was reading some writing lessons posted on Facebook by a member of the endangered species of great writer, Joe Lansdale, and as usual I came away excited by his expertise where it concerns being a writer.

Lansdale is pretty much the writer's equivalent of El Santo, a champion of hand-to-hand combat and with a firm grasp on a preternatural world, often at odds with killers, zombies, and beautiful Mexican vampires.

I'm near 41 years old, which is unbelievable to write down, and I've never had a lick of writing earn me a single cent. Lansdale had published his first novel by around age 31, and was one of the most prominent horror and genre writers to be found in nearly every anthology concerning anything to do with Horror in the 1980s. And there was a pig-choking lot of them.

I don't like to make excuses about my lousy publishing history. I could blame a lot of things, external issues, but for the most part I've had plenty of time to finish good work. I've written "novels" if by novel you mean a stack of pages with letters in sentences on them. Publishing has changed, in such a way as to make it impossible for me to understand. The original paperback novel is practically extinct, and that was always my dream you know: I wanted to see a line of paperbacks on a shelf with my name on the spine. Preferably with covers displaying a Lucha Libre fighting a robot.

I've said for quite a while, I'm not interested in writing for myself. I write to sell books, but I'm not a slavering hypist. I want to write for other writers, essentially. I want the adulation of men like Lansdale, who will be inspired by what I just put down just as he inspired me when I was a teenager.

I don't think there's anything more I want, than to impress Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Lansdale, Norman Partridge, the unfortunately-passed Don Westlake, and maybe even a "literati" like Paul Auster, David Mamet and James Ellroy. Funny thing: writers who write about nightmares and spies and professional crooks are happy writers. Ellroy writes vicious novels about real vicious people, and he's a tormented soul. But writers are loners, and we're not looking to be pals who share a six-pack or each other's wife during a literary key party. I just want the respect of my writers, the men who collectively educated me about the world and how a man acts and how a hero should act and how a writer should compose themselves.

I've been paralyzed for well over a year, maybe longer, unable to conceive a story, inert as if poisoned by a giant blue spider's venom in a forgotten jungle. In most senses, I feel like I've landed on a world where language is useless to me. I should be more adept at the spear and the hunt. In Lansdale's view, if you are not inherently instinctual in survival as it pertains to writing, then you must surrender to the law of the jungle.

I understand his meaning, and real writers are constant hunters, driven by blood and the vibration of skull-shattering impact as the tomahawk strikes. I have lost a keen instinct, but I am a writer. Whether I am devoid of kills should not disqualify me from the hunt. At least, that is my hope.

Burly Things I Want to Write: Stop F*cking With the Doom Patrol!

The Doom Patrol is a comic book. The first incarnation of the DP happened in 1963, at DC Comics, who had just realized the upstart "rival" company, Marvel Comics, had hit upon a new formula for success with mags like FANTASTIC FOUR and THE UNCANNY X-MEN. Those books had come in response to DC's own JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA of the late 1950s. Marvel had kinked the formula of the superhero team to reflect then-current moods and tensions, such as the Cold War and racial pressures. So DC wanted their own version of Marvel's success, and thus was born DOOM PATROL, by writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani, with a few issues drawn by strong journeyman Bob Brown. The 1960s stories all involved the Doom Patrol core of original characters:

Robotman, a pro racecar driver named Cliff Steele whose body was destroyed in an accident, his brain salvaged and placed in a special robot body, giving him superhuman strength and durability. The drawbacks are, Cliff as a robot cannot sleep, taste food, feel a breeze, or make love to a woman ever again. Definitely not good times.

Negative Man, Larry Trainor, an Air Force pilot who becomes fused with a strange ionic shadow being of unknown origin, which leaves Larry's body for 60 second intervals to fly around at impossible speeds performing all kinds of incredible feats. Larry dies if he's seperated from the Negative Being for longer than a minute, it's theorized. Worse yet, Larry Trainor is a "radioactive" man, his body's radioactive levels deadly to anyone near him. Only by wearing mummy-bandages, "specially-treated" by the Chief, is Larry able to even be in the same room as his comrades.

Elasti-Girl, Rita Farr, an actress exposed to weird gases in a volcanic region, she is able to shrink to ant-size or grow to King Kong mass in an instant. Rita can be "normal", unlike the other DP members, despite her powers, but her lost film career has left her with only an undying loyalty to the Doom Patrol. A kind of compensation as the field leader and matriarch of her new family.

And their leader, wheelchair-bound, bearded super-inventor The Chief. He had rescued them from the despair of their accidental marrings by Fate, giving them purpose and meaning. The Chief pushes the Patrol to be more than they are, stronger than the sum of their powers. He gives them meaning.

The DP considered themselves "freaks", and with good reason, but within the stories they were viewed by DC civilians as a benefit to Mankind. In fact, the Doom Patrol are the hardest working superhero group ever created. They didn't go off dimension-hopping for no reason, like the Fantastic Four. The Doom Patrol maintained a far more blue-collar ethic. They saved normal people from natural disasters, averted accidental man-made mass destruction, as a primary reason for being. In the DP's world, early on particularly, they faced off against the ocassional weird freakazoid, like the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, or Mr. 103, or some alien invasion menace. Only later in the run did their mirror-image rivals, the Brotherhood of Evil, consisting of a disembodied genius brain called The Brain and an intelligent French gorilla, Mallah, deviate the DP's focus from their service to Man by providing a constant superhero threat.




Strangely, DOOM PATROL for all its reputation hadn't nearly the strangest stories to be found at DC Comics. Because in those halcyon days, DC had cornered the market where weird was concerned, starring much more prominent/respected characters like Batman and Superman. Almost anything could happen to a DC superhero at any time, like traveling eight billion years from Earth or having their head turn into a giant ant's. By the end of the story, the superhero was normal again, returned to the status quo to return for another opium-induced plotline the next month.

But DOOM PATROL did something that had never been done before. With cancellation looming in 1968, Drake decided to blow up his Doom Patrol, literally: the heroes sacrifice their lives to preserve a small Maine fishing town. The ploy was designed to get readership to write in and "save" the DP and thus the DP's comic. You know how that went. The Doom Patrol stayed "dead" for almost ten years. Then the revivals began. And then some talented people started f*cking up the Doom Patrol.

There's plenty of places online to read more. Writer Paul Kupperberg has decried his 1977 revival Doom Patrol comic, which brought back Robotman in a new robot body, along with several new characters, one of which took on the "Negative Being" once belonging to Larry Trainor and became Negative Woman.

After that short series, the second DP revival happened in the mid-1980s. Starting off as a typical superhero yarn, with mediocre results, DC Comics brought in Brit intellect and writer Grant Morrison. He decided to completely alter the comic book landscape in order to appeal to the adult readers of the 1990s who replaced the 8-16 year old comic book reading demographic. DOOM PATROL wasn't the first comic book property to be distorted by Brit writers, or Morrison specifically. Morrison turned the DP into a nearly-impentrable puzzle, devoid of the formula trappings, which were replaced with myriad intellectual references and symbology. DOOM PATROL became "cult", establishing itself as the canon by which many pretentious college students would proclaim the comic book to have "grown up."

This version of the DP was the most impactful with a certain reading public, and it's this version which the characters and conceit have yet to shake. After Morrison and his successor Rachel Pollack had their way with the DP, the comic again was cancelled. The cult status, however, did not end.




There have been several more attempts to revive the DP, none lasting very long. The DP has continued to vex talents trying to produce tales about them. Writer/Artist John Byrne attempted to reboot the Doom Patrol from scratch, but the comic suffered from a kind of inexplicable antipathy. Just last year, another DP comic began, and has strained through a dozen or so issues, unremarkably. This version has steepled itself in the conceit that all of the various histories of the Doom Patrol are, in fact, wholly extant. Drake's, Morrison's, Kupperberg's, Byrne's and Giffen's lukewarm take.

Meanwhile, the DP twist in the wind, prepared as always for extinction and eventual resurrection by the next whims of talent.

The essential core of the Doom Patrol is evident in the original stories from the 1960s. Prior to the ascension of the Brotherhood of Evil, and the superhero melodrama they represented to the DP, the comic was about something fundamental. The nobility of Man, overcoming the "worst" Fate had to offer. The Patrol members are "handicapped", but they continue on despite their tragedies.

For the record, if I was writing the Doom Patrol, I'd know exactly how to create a successful version of the team. And it wouldn't be yet another quirky take derived from the unfortunate Grant Morrison-ization of the comic. Because anything less is just f*cking with a great conceit and great characters.



Many people believe if you went back to the original DP series and began it seconds before the DP are "killed" by an exploding island off the coast, you could ignore all the versions of the DP which have come since. All of which are as different from one another as the members of the Doom Patrol themselves.

But I'm here to tell you, this is unnecessary. You have to go back further in Doom Patrol history. You have to return to the core of the conceit. Which is not how strange the DP are in relation to the world around them, but how strange they think they are. The Doom Patrol is a comic about noble pursuits, and the odd love between people who feel they have no one but each other.

The Doom Patrol are treated like the Addam's Family of the DC Universe. There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea, as the DP themselves believe they are the strangest team of all. But again, it's only perception by the Doom Patrol themselves. Their very name suggests a fatalism, an acknowledgement that without "normal" life they will risk their lives again and again until they are dead. There is nothing else for them to do, no children they can raise who are not irradiated and suffering, no husband who could endure his wife's superior mammoth size and strength. Even poor Cliff Steele hasn't enough tissue left to create a clone he might transfer his brain into.






I love the Doom Patrol. The stories that worked the best with the Patrol presented these odd, broken people with an impossible situation to overcome, and they managed to overcome it. Not because they were more powerful, more intelligent, or more savage. They were simply more unified and strengthed by the love for each other. DOOM PATROL is a love story unlike any you will ever read. A true love story, devoid of the worst cliches, and full of all of the hope and dreams of Mankind.

Characters I Want to Write: THE INCREDIBLE HULK!

One of the greatest things I ever read growing up was this (click on it, of course):

In the late 1970s, nothing and nobody was bigger than the Hulk. THE INCREDIBLE HULK television show was a smash hit, punnily put, and Marvel Comics (never one to look a gift horse) jumped in with both feet to promote the Hulk in every possible way. I mean, the way comics companies used to do, instead of timing their "death" of Batman in the comics to coincide with the astronomical success of the Batman movie from last year, ridding Batman's comic of, you guessed it, Batman.

No, Marvel in the 1970s went the other way. They had the Hulk shilling everything, in ads, on shirts, on Slurpee cups. And you need a sales boost? Slap the Hulk on the cover. He was better than a gorilla (which in the pulp days used to guarantee sales spikes)...the Hulk was green gold.



There's no doubt the pre-teen me identified with the Hulk of all the superheroes ever. And nothing caught the eye quicker than that brilliant combination of emerald and purple pants on a cover in a spinner rack. The Hulk was instantly accessible and understandable: he wanted only to be the most powerful bum to ever walk the Earth. He took food when he saw it, he jumped down on people's property leaving giant craters from his weight, and if he even saw a puny human he shouted and raged at them to go away. Sociable and the Hulk did not mix. I understood, down to my marrow.


So when I say the Hulk needs to be saved, right now, as a viable character with pathos and meaning, I mean I'm ready for the job. I've had a lifetime of Hulk comics. In my head, I have been the Hulk all my life. I know what it means to Hulk out. In fact, we all do, which is why the character had such lasting appeal.

"Had" is the operative word. The Hulk hasn't been the Hulk in years. Years and years. I'm talking pre-Peter David (the last notable Hulk writer), and certainly not since Sal Buscema (the most prolific Hulk artist) left Jade Jaws behind.

The only blip would have been John Byrne's truncated run in the mid-1980s, one of those vivid redefinitions of the character that we can only speculate on. Byrne departed the title to become the spearhead for DC Comics' revitalization of their Superman franchise, right around Superman's 50th publishing anniversary. We truly will never know what John Byrne might have accomplished, or how the Hulk comic might have altered his life as well. A true mystery.

Going back to John Byrne's take, though, is worthy of attention. Because the one thing Mr. Byrne understood very well: the Hulk is not a man colored green. The Hulk is not human. He's decidedly cro-magnon in appearance (dating back to the master Jack Kirby's "Frankenstein Monster" design for the beast, with prognathous brow, long ape arms, flat anvil head.)

To say the Hulk is not human is cruel, I know, considering how essentially human the Hulk's desires are. Core desires, to eat, to sleep, to be at peace, to not think too much, to enjoy nature. And even to feel grander emotions, of love. Bruce Banner, the scientist the Hulk emerged from, is a repressed guy. He's timid, withdrawn, brilliantly awkward. He's a man who doesn't "belong" in the real world, but he's a genius unparalleled whose work could benefit Mankind. When he transforms into the Hulk, all of his inhibitions are gone, replaced by animal instincts, the kind of instincts that enabled man to survive long enough to evolve and climb out of the trees. To become the dominant life on the planet.

The Hulk is not a psychological construct of Banner's id. The unfortunate process of updating the character has led to this fractured psyche element that never existed in the first place. The Hulk is a common denominator for all of us, a missing link one might say to a primitive yet necessary evolutionary path. The Hulk is not "just" Banner, he's Mankind itself, the core basis for the beast who walks upright, capable of using both brawn and brain to survive any situation. To survive, and to become more.

So I feel like the current writers have missed the point of the Hulk. The rage is but one aspect of a primitive reaction. Banner's anger, his emotional stress, his panic, brings forth the Hulk. He becomes the Hulk to survive. It's a symbolic survival, a scientific version of a warrior's spear and a bear skin to protect against the elements. Banner becomes the most advanced form of Man, as the Hulk...a creature which heralds the primitive instincts while Banner's intellect tames the savagery. The Hulk is actually more evolved, not less.

So the way to fix the Hulk is simple. You get him back to his Kirby look, because as much as I adore Sal Buscema's take, I think the Hulk works better the less human he seems. Right now he looks like a psychopathic steroidal Dolph Lundgren. He's also way too big; the Hulk isn't fifteen feet tall. The purpose of the Hulk, in Kirby's hands, was to show the incredible strength of an ape-like anthropoid. Deceiving strength, in a beast man about as large as a very large human male (seven feet, as noted). When Superman displayed his strength and good looks, he was beloved. When the Hulk, with his bruiser's hairy barrel chest and slouch throws a car, people flee in terror.

Also, erase all indications that the Hulk is a manifestation of Banner's psyche. Ditch that. Not only is it cliche, but it's been used to create more Hulks, Hulks of different colors to indicate different personas. You're de-uniquing the character, Marvel. Cut that out. All you're doing is confusing readers looking for the actual Hulk, who is green and burly and misanthropic, and smashes people who try to capture and kill him. The formula is simple and effective, even now.

Lastly, cap the Hulk's strength. For decades now, the Hulk has been one of the strongest beings on Earth. That's fine, but to have his strength increase proportional to his anger, that really takes the suspense out of a Hulk story. He needs to escape the death trap? He gets angrier, he breaks free of the unbreakable bonds. He is down for the count? Ditto, big knockout punch driven by his Gamma Ray-spawned steroids. The Hulk doesn't need this articulation. It's like Superman always having a super power ready to deal with whatever he needs to deal with. Super-memory, Super-friction, Super-whatever. The Hulk is this strong, and that's it. Anybody stronger than the Hulk is stronger than the Hulk. The cool thing is, when you reach that point, it makes it even more imperative that the Banner part of the Hulk come forward to help Greenskin figure out a physical way around the stronger opponent. A way the Hulk can understand, if you see my meaning, since Banner isn't a football coach inside the Hulk's mind...the two beings are one. The Hulk has to summon Banner's intellect from his subconscious, and Banner has to face his fears and repulsion of the Hulk. To survive. See what I'm getting at?

Anyway, it'll rain tiny Selma Hayeks before I ever get a chance to write the Hulk, but it would be fulfilling. All the way back to some primal origin point only my genetics can recognize.

The Series Character and the Stone Spines of Timelessness

I am the kind of dude who covets other people's series characters.

I love series characters. I love to see characters who are already familiar to me appear in another, different work. There is something very comforting about the series character, or even the secondary character, who appears in more than one novel by the same, or even another, writer.

For the last ten years, easily, I've been obsessed with finding my own "series character." My own Travis McGee. My own Tarzan. My own Hap Collins and Leonard Pine.

Some say the writer is limited who conceives of a series character and milks them until the stories are trite and formuliac. Some argue this happened with nearly all the great series characters, and their writers.

For me, the recognition of continuity within a writer's work began with Stephen King, and Castle Rock, his fictional Maine town. This town itself became the first series character I knew about. The secondary players in books like CUJO, IT, and THE DEAD ZONE began to overlap. The first name I recognized from one King book to another was Sheriff Walt Bannerman, who helps capture a serial killer in DEAD ZONE and meets his violent death by rabid dog in CUJO. Being a kid, I didn't make the connection at first, but when I did, it created a cool kind of legitimacy to King as a chronicler of Sheriff Bannerman's adventures. As if, in a way, Bannerman actually lived and his life, like many, was too big for just one novel. He didn't just stop living after DEAD ZONE. He didn't just become another lost character, but something more memorable.

Other characters filled in King's continuity from one book to the next. You knew them when you saw them. You appreciated King's loyalty to Castle Rock, and in letting go of that fictional town (in the unfortunate NEEDFUL THINGS), King lost part of himself I believe. The town was King, King was the town.

Obviously King influenced my reading choices, and John D. MacDonald soon brought the series character to its apex in his "Travis McGee" novels, about a "salvage consultant" musclebound beach bum type who helps friends and acquaintences in trouble. McGee is a knight errant, and his unshakable ethics remain untainted for the whole of the series, some 21 novels begun in 1964 and ending in 1984. MacDonald died in 1986.

These books taught me, at the tender young age of fifteen/sixteen, everything I needed to know about becoming a man. That I failed to become Travis McGee is incidental, as I had the blueprint before me. The point was that everything McGee believed in was everything a man of worth needed to believe in: help the helpless, adore women in their beautiful mystery, assert justice, be civil, be independent, be masculine and free of guile.

Travis McGee didn't change much over the course of the books. The circumstances of his adventures wasn't expansive. McGee didn't look inside himself and question his motives or his actions. He questioned only the provacation of evil in the world, and he sought mostly to pull his friends and others out of evil's path. It's only in THE GREEN RIPPER, when McGee seeks revenge for the murder of a woman close to his heart, does he determine to destroy the evil.

Compare that to Richard Stark (Don Westlake) and his "Parker" novels, which interestingly run parallel to the Travis McGee series. Professional heist man Parker stars in 24 novels, begun in 1963 and ending in 2008. Unlike McGee, Parker is a cold robotic engine of efficiency, uncompromising and unromantic. Parker has a code, but it is designed around a strict system of plan, job, escape and score. Whatever deviates from Parker's code is a deadly threat to Parker's survival and freedom, and he quickly removes inconstants, by strangulation or a bullet.

Richard Stark's series completed a circuit for me, the series character as villain instead of hero. Suddenly the "bad guy" is the only guy to root for. Whether you like Parker or want to be Parker is immaterial: Parker bludgeons his way from page one of book one and never stops. He still hasn't stopped. He is never settled, never fulfilled, never changing. You know as little about Parker in the first book as the last, but he is compelling nonetheless. Every human Parker encounters is changed forever, while Parker remains the anvil, the constant.

The series character, in my studies, seems almost incidental to the novel in which he/she stars. Noting most of the best of the series characters over the last 100 years or so, you can find that most of them are totemic stone spines holding up the novels'/stories' plots. While the plots might exist without these stone spines is nothing new, which nothing grows from stone. The series character doesn't "grow" or "change", but are as ancient and stern as time.

The secondary players, generally, end up absorbing the emotional context of the series novels. They are the Sheriff Bannermans of the fictional world, who play out their lives, and the drama of their existences, upon the craggy surface of the stone spines. These secondary players do not depend on the series' main protagonist, but rather live their lives around them, or die beneath or behind them. Occassionally the series character encounters some human drama/tragedy nearly collossal enough to shatter their immutable presence, but in the end the timelessness of the series character is intact. It must be. Even for the writer themselves, this is a constant unshakable truth.

After all, who is to say only the writer truly exists? Perhaps even the writer is just another dollop of human blood and bone upon the thrusting spires of stone. Maybe even the writer must bend and break before and beneath something immeasurable and without end.

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.

http://www.aquamanshrine.com/

for all, and I do mean ALL, things Aquaman on this beautiful blog!