Happy Cinco De Mayo!!

Okay, okay, so El Dorado is not actually a Silver Age character! And yeah, that's a Valentine's Day card! But still, I can't keep posting the "Green Arrow of Mexico" every year.

If anyone is still reading this more and more infrequent blog, I have plans to try and resurrect it soon as a more regular feature. So keep your fingers crossed and wish me luck!

Why Aquaman is actually pretty cool

Yes, yes, we've all heard the jokes about how Aquaman is a useless character whose only ability is that he talks to fish. Comedians from The State to Dave Chapelle have made that observation. Even "Family Guy" spent about three minutes on Aquaman asking a fish to get him a beer. Sure, I laughed too, but where did all this Aquaman abuse stem from?

In the 1940's and 1950's, Aquaman was a solid backup feature in comics like More Fun and Adventure and World's Finest. Every issue, there was Aquaman, using his unique superpowers to rescue ships at sea and battle modern pirates and alien invaders. He was to the Coast Guard what Batman was to the Police Department. Aquaman's powers are limited to his ability to "talk to fish". They include:

1. The ability to breathe underwater. When Aquaman was created, reliable scuba gear was still in the future. The very idea of being able to breathe and move about underwater without cumbersome equipment was the stuff of dreams.


2. The ability to command every living creature in the seas. Far from just talking to fish, Aquaman can telepathically tell them to do anything, and they obey without question. That's not small potatoes. When was the last time Superman commanded a pod of whales to carry a sinking ship to port?? (Okay, not that he'd have to. He could just fly the ship there himself, but you get the idea).


3. Superhuman strength. Aquaman is far stronger than a normal man. His muscles are able to withstand the crushing pressures of the ocean depths and his legs can propel him through the water at a superhuman pace. Not even Michael Phelps could out swim a dolphin.

So how did Aquaman become the butt of so many jokes? It all starts with the Justice League of America. In 1959, DC decided to revive the cross-title super team concept they had invented in the 1940's with their Justice Society of America. The idea of a "Society" seemed stuffy and old-fashioned by the late 50's, so the new team was called the Justice League, which sounded vaguely athletic. The roster of the new team included DC's big guns, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman (Wonder Woman had been part of the old JSA, too- she served as the team's secretary :P )but also featured some of DC's newcomers, the new Flash and Green Lantern and stalwart backup stars Martian Manhunter and Aquaman.

Although the newly formed JLA made Aquaman even more recognizable, it began to hurt his standing. Here's how: You have a super-hero team featuring seven superheroes. The writer has to write an adventure in which each of these heroes plays a role. One of your team's members can only live out of water for an hour. No writer could come up with a plot every single month that called for some reason why someone would need to take care of a menace in the ocean. Basically, because he's more of a specialist superhero, Aquaman was left standing around with very little to do in a lot of JLA stories.

Still, Aquaman was a pretty cool character and readers recognized that. He got his own solo comic at last and in 1967, he got his own animated TV show.


Well, technically he shared a TV show with reruns of last year's Superman cartoons, but his name was in the title. Aquaman was becoming a household name. Then, The Super-Friends happened.


On the Super-Friends, Aquaman was back to standing around doing very little. Sure,the ocean was a hot topic in the environmentally-conscious 1970's, and the A-man got some screen time in the earliest episodes (which were usually about pollution and/or misguided scientists trying to fix the world by force) but as the show went on, Aquaman was usually on monitor duty or babysitting Wendy and Marvin or the Wonder Twins.

Maybe even more bizarre, was the Super-friends' writers' tendency to pair Aquaman up with Wonder Woman. "What's that? He can't breathe out of water for more than an hour? Well, he should be perfectly fine riding shotgun in the Invisible Jet." In at least one episode, the Super-Friends get a Troubalert that there is an alien menace under the sea. So, of course, they send Batman and Robin in the Bat-sub while Aquaman stands around twiddling his thumbs. *sigh*

I guess my point, if I must have one is that there is nothing fundamentally uncool about Aquaman conceptually. It just takes a talented writer to see his full potential.

One of the Many Reasons I love My Wife!

So, this morning (being Saturday) I popped in a "Challenge of the Superfriends" DVD. As (my wife) Amy and I sat watching Superfriends over breakfast with our 5-year-old (who LOVES Superfriends), the Superfriends were in trouble. Seems they were captured by the Legion of Doom. The L.O.D. locked the Superfriends in a cage and launched the cage into space, headed for the sun.



Now, every time I see this, I think to myself, "I'm pretty sure they'd all starve to death before they ever reached the sun." Never mind other questions regarding exposure to cold and radiation. But Amy, out of nowhere, says " As they were getting closer and closer to the sun, wouldn't Superman be getting more and more powerful?

Damn! I love you, baby!

Saturday Morning 1978- Black Who?

I have always wondered why Hanna-Barbera bothered to make up Black Vulcan? When I first saw him as a little kid, I assumed he was Black Lightning in a different costume. I don't know how long it took me to realize his name was Black Vulcan. BV debuted on "The All New Superfriends Hour" about a year after Black Lightning first appeared in comics. One would assume that, in their quest to diversify the Superfriends, Hanna-Barbera would have simply licensed the new and popular Black Lightning. Many people have conjectured that Black Lightning seemed too topical and angry for Saturday Morning in the 70's. However, Superfriends, already avoided the grittier elements of all the other characters' comics series, so that seems an unlikely reason for abandoning Black Lightning.

According to Wikipedia (The receptacle for the sum total of all human knowledge) DC was unable to license Black Lightning to HB due to a dispute with BL's creator, Tony Isabella.

Whatever the reason, Hanna-Barbera gave us Black Vulcan. The first and longest-lasting of the "ethnic" Superfriends. And though I may have been confused about his name, Black Vulcan will always be a cherished part of my Saturday Morning memories.

Green Lantern's weakness: a rant

Green Lantern may be one of DC most iconic superheroes, but that won't stop me from airing my bemusement at what may be the lamest superhero weakness of all. See, in order for a superhero to be interesting and allow room for some dramatic tension, the hero has to have SOME vulnerability. Superman is vulnerable to the effects of Kryptonite and also to magic. Wonder Woman becomes powerless if you tie her hands together. Aquaman can only breathe out of water for an hour. Martian Manhunter becomes weak in the presence of fire. You get the idea.

Green Lantern, one of the most powerful heroes in the DC canon, has what may be the lamest vulnerability ever. GL can't use his virtually omnipotent power ring on anything yellow. I'll say that again. Green Lantern can't use his virtually omnipotent power ring on anything yellow.

Now, at first thought, that may seem perfectly reasonable. Everyone has something they can't do. But consider this: How subjective is the concept of "yellow". Never mind that the power ring and it's energy are green and that green is made by combining blue and yellow. Never mind that it might have made more sense if the ring wouldn't work on things that were red (the opposite of green on the color wheel). What is yellow?? Does the ring work on yellow green? How about yellow orange? How much blue or red have to be involved before something isn't strictly yellow?

Now, obviously, this weakness wouldn't be too big a deal. I mean, Green Lantern can still manipulate everyday non-yellow objects to, say, block a blow from a yellow folding chair or something. What's funny is how often important things in GL stories seem to just happen to be yellow. I mean, is he going around telling everyone that he's vulnerable to yellow? His lame vulnerability inevitably leads to situations like this:


Also, on the Super-Friends cartoons from the 70's and 80's, about 90% of the stuff Green Lantern picks up with his ring or even the stuff he makes with his ring seems to BE yellow. It's like the ink and paint department misunderstood the memo. "OH everything BUT yellow!! Boy do I feel silly!"