Can I get a little Aqua-Love?

Have you ever been next to someone who smelled so strongly of being unwashed that the smell stayed with you long after the person was gone? Well, if not, you should be sure and go to a comic book convention next time one rolls through your town, as I did last Saturday.

Lest you mock, be aware that I will brook no jesting, and have been looking forward to said event for two years, since I had to skip last year. So there.

The first time I went, I had a pitiful little twenty dollars to spend, and so bought my first black-market bootleg DVD, Song of the South. This time around, I came armed with plenty of dough, as well as a carefully-researched list of things I wanted and how much they cost on eBay, so I didn’t overspend in the heady rush of seeing real items in front of my eyes.

So, first to the bootleg DVDs, which I’m now careful to limit to things I’m certain will NEVER be released commercially:

• The Banana Splits (the complete 1968 series)
• Jason of Star Command
• Supergrass (a British movie with Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French)
• Pufnstuf, the Movie (with special guest star Mama Cass as Witch Hazel)
• Three unreleased super-hero tv pilots (Aquaman, Power Pack, and the Human Target starring Rick Springfield)
• And, for Jet: Captain Eo, the special edition

Then, on over to the comics side of the hall to pick up a ton of Adventure and Aquaman comics, bringing me ever closer to my lifelong goal of owning every 1970’s appearance of Aquaman ever.

Pardon?

Because 1970’s Aquaman rules, punk, and I won’t hear anything against him.

Now, if by “1970’s Aquaman” you think I’m talking about the lame-ass, emasculated fool on Superfriends who’s primary skill seemed to be riding a jet ski and sending small schools of perch to attack nuclear subs and the like, then you’ve got another think coming. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be (also know as Time-Life-Warner-AOL, or whatever the hell it’s called now), who seem to own every cartoon character EVER, have done little to correct this impression of Aquaman. Rather, they seem to have bought into it themselves, and have struggled fruitlessly to re-invent Aquaman for a cool, hip audience, instead of just going back to what worked just fine for, oh, about 35 years.

Don’t get me wrong - by “worked”, I don’t mean that Aquaman was ever a sales dynamo, nor is he ever likely to be. He is, after all, sort of limited by his environment (as LSBB remarks, “How much crime could there be underwater?”) nonetheless, he was a good, solid, dependable secondary character, who headlined his own feature through the “dark ages” of the early 1950’s (when Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and fellow second-stringer Green Arrow were then only other survivors), he had his own pre-Superfriends cartoon show, and his wife even had her own "Super-Queen Posin' Doll".


Yes, wife, for Aquaman was the first of the super-hero set to marry his long-time girlfriend, Mera. Mera was the queen of an inter-dimensional water world who forsook her throne in order to marry Aquaman and help him fight crime. She had the ability to make water hard (among other things, one would presume - rrrrrrowl!) and shape it into giant fists and battering rams and....well, yeah, that's pretty much it.


My presumption is that Aquaman hurried the wedding along to quell rumors about he and Aqualad, a purple-eyed Atlantean orphan that Aquaman had taken in years earlier. Poor kid always looked a little fey to me, despite the presence of his “girlfriend”, Aquagirl



Mera and Big A had a baby (wait for it…….Aquababy) who was later killed by Aquaman’s arch-foe Black Manta (a family death...another first!) Once Aquababy died, all bets were off. The powers-that-be set off on their ill-advised coarse of making Aquaman “hip” and “relevant” by:

• Driving Mera crazy, having her try and kill Aquaman, and then sending her back to her own dimension
• Having Aquagirl drown to death in a toxic chemical spill
• Having Aqualad grow up, become a sorcerer, and change his name to “Tempest”, and get a new costume that still made him look like a fag
• 
  
• Revealing that Aquaman had an illegitimate Eskimo son who inexplicably has Mera’s hard-water powers
• Having Aquaman get his hand chewed off by a school of piranhas, replace his lost hand with a harpoon, grow a beard (and sometimes chest hair, depending on the artist - a bright spot in a sea of bad ideas) and wear armor
• 
  
• Having Aquaman have an affair with a human-dolphin hybrid, who then had an affair with Tempest, who impregnated her
• Having Aquaman get a new hand made of water, and wear some of Abba's old stage outfits
• 
  

Currently on the comics scene, Aquaman has put his orange shirt back on, and protects the city of Sub Diego (previously San Diego, only now it’s submerged in the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, I think it sounds stupid, too.)

But, I have my seventies’ comics, and that’s just fine.