Aquaman #28 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (story), Paul Pelletier (pencils), Sean Parsons & Andrew Hennessy (inks), Jeromy Cox (colors)

The Story: With any luck, Arthur can avoid getting Carrie-d at this high school function.

The Review: Geoff Johns did a lot of great things for this series, but one of the best things he did was firmly establish Arthur’s life in Amnesty Bay: holing up in his dad’s old lighthouse, getting fish and chips at the local diner, adopting a dog.  It was too easy to laugh at Aquaman when he was the undersea foreigner who visited the surface on occasion; you’re less comfortable poking fun at someone who genuinely wants to fit in.

As a big fan of a superhero’s out-of-costume moments, I’ve loved each development to Amnesty Bay as much as I’ve loved the purely Aquaman bits, like the Others or Atlantis’ troubled royal heritage.  You can thus imagine how much I’ve looked forward to Arthur’s high school reunion, which on paper is just a great idea.  School reunions are just so rife with dramatic possibilities; even for us regular folks, there’s a lot of baggage that comes from confronting that particular part of your past.  Imagine adding the weight of a secret origin on top of that.