Aquaman #10 – Review

By: Geoff Johns (story), Ivan Reis (pencils), Joe Prado & Andy Lanning (inks), Rod Reis (colors)

The Story: This ain’t Shakespeare, but it has a vengeful cycle of sons killing fathers anyway.

The Review: This intro is a bit too short a medium to get into the whole “nature versus nurture” debate, so I’ll just rely on a pithy cliché to get my point across: the more things change…  To make things fair, I’ll use myself as example.  Even though I like to think I’ve grown up some inmye twenty-odd years, every now and then I’ll catch myself with a habit from childhood—or worse, my teenage years—I thought long gone that makes me wonder if I’ve changed at all.

Aquaman begs the same questions.  Compared to the shaggy-haired youth with major anger issues we’ve seen from flashbacks, Arthur’s slicked hairdo and cool under media mockery shows a pretty big evolution in his character.  But the moment he sees Manta, it’s as if he’s never changed from that vengeful, shirtless kid he used to be (especially when he actually rips off his shirt in mid-battle).  He abandons all teamwork, shrugging off the concerns of Ya’wara and Prisoner of War, completely fixed on his own objectives, nothing else.