Black Manta is a joke. Not even a very good joke. He’s the epitome of the lame, cheesy comic book villain – I mean, look at him. He’s an evil top-heavy scuba-diver from Hell. But now he’s cool. Heck, now he’s a badass. I blame Geoff Johns.
Ever since Aquaman started last September, it’s had a lot of East Texas’ comic community talking. Not quite a reinvention, or even a reinterpretation of the character, it’s simply showed everything that’s been consistantly true of him since the very beginning – and if you point out, as Geoff Johns has, the truth behind all the “talks-to-fish” jokes, you end up looking at one of the DCU’s preeminent testosterone-fueled badasses. And, of course, with that revelation of Aquaman’s character, we had to eventually come to see his most notorious foe in the same light.
All that being said, though, Manta himself is hardly in this issue. His presence is felt throughout, as this storyline is tasked with reintroducing him to the DCU, along with a brand-new “team” Arthur was part of prior to the formation of the Justice League. While we’ve only gotten glimpses of them so far, these other team members look extremely interesting, and I hope we get to spend more time with them in the future. For now, though, we have a great, tense setup involving Arthur’s search for Atlantis and Black Manta hunting down the members of Arthur’s previous team colliding violently, with what promises to be electrifying results over the next few issues. Another interesting thread introduced here is Arthur’s machiavellian, revenge-driven past – it’s a Geoff Johns book, you know that’s going to come back to haunt him. Haunted protagonists, of course, always making for good drama.
Of course, one can hardly talk about Aquaman without talking about the art. It may not be the best-drawn book in DC’s stable right now, but it is most definitely the best-colored. I recently wrote a long tirade on another site about Marvel’s new Defenders book, and how the colorist on that is completely sinking the book. Here, the opposite is occuring. Rod Reis is taking a book that would be very pretty in black and white, and making it absolutely dazzling in color. I would posit that Aquaman is the strongest argument currently on the marketplace for the importance of good colorists in comic books.
Overall, Aquaman remains in the upper echelon of DC’s relaunched titles, both in quality and popularity (at least locally). With all the different far-reaching subplots that Johns is already weaving into the story, I think it’ll stay that way for a long time to come.
Be sure and check out DC’s official page for the book at: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/aquaman-2011/aquaman-8 and you can purchase the book digitally from Ground Zero Comics at: https://comics.comixology.com/ret/383/Ground_Zero_Comics_DC_Comics_Digital_Store/#/issue/24041/Aquaman-2011-8
As published on examiner.com
