Aquaman #19

I thought this was a nice reverse image of last issue's cover. The surprise twist was merely Mera and Aquaman being subjugated.

I still don't know who this new king of Atlantis is and Johns isn't giving anything away on the cover! Is there a God of Ice? And does he resent rising world temperatures which don't simply destroy his domain but hand it over to the King of the Seas? Before anyone understood the reason water turned to ice and ice turned to water, people must have believed a God was doing it, right? So that's this guy on the cover! If I understand how Gods work, then Zeus and Thor and Yahweh are just names for scientific processes that are not yet understood. Oh, and also to get oppressed people to not mind being oppressed so much because there's so much awesome sauce to be had in the afterlife.

This issue begins with Aquaman summoning a gigantic underwater flea named Topo that I'm sure was created in the Silver Age and was really super goofy.

Waking this thing doesn't seem like Aquaman's best idea.

The Atlanteans are worried that King Arthur won't be able to control Topo. But Aquaman doesn't plan on controlling the Sea Flea. He has a pleasant conversation with it and asks it if it might not be too much trouble and if he wouldn't mind maybe searching out The Scavenger in his nuclear sub and stopping him from selling Atlanteran Technology to all the horrible human miscreants. Topo listens to Aquaman's plea until it finds out that the only consequence to these weapons being sold is that some humans might get killed. Then Topo probably thinks, "Fuck that!", back at Aquaman but since we aren't privy to Topo's responses, I'm simply making a middle school level educated guess. I bet in the Silver Age, Topo said all kinds of crazy shit!

Meanwhile Orm is still locked up in Belle Reve and I find myself growing more and more pissed off at a fictional character for fucking his brother straight in his pee hole. Orm is going to be charged as a regular old criminal for the murder of every single person killed in Atlantis's attack on Boston. Which is particularly odd in the events of the Boston Marathon bombing where ill-informed, scared, horrible people are crying for the criminal in that to be held as an enemy combatant. It doesn't make me think the comic book is not presenting reality. I think the comic book is presenting reality exactly right. People don't really give a shit about law and procedure and constitutions and freedoms. They just want to kick somebody in the balls as hard they possibly can in an effort to feel more secure. And there are always one set of laws for one people and another entirely different set of laws for Americans. No, no. For rich Americans. Some would say for white Americans but I think money has a hell of a lot more influence than the color of your skin. When people point to the case against OJ Simpson for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman as being about race, I think that says more about the person pointing this out than the case. That trial wasn't about race at all. It was about money. If you got it, you can get away with murder. That's it.

What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah! Poor fucking Orm who was simply a leader of an army that attacked a country for retaliation against an attack on its own citizens is now locked up and being tried for murder. If this is the way America thinks things should be, then George W. Bush should be in the cell right next to Orm. And even though it was Vulko who caused the attack on Atlantis, realize that nobody in fucking Iraq had anything to do with the attack on September 11th, 2001 either. So while I don't really care one way or another if Orm is punished for engaging in immediate violence against an assumed enemy, I think Aquaman is a total dickbag for selling his brother out to a government that doesn't really fucking care about justice at all. It just looks for scapegoats, vengeance, and the illusion of security to keep its people herded in the correct field. That field would be the one where they barely make any money yet still love to vote for douchebag butthole shit-for-brains bastards that only make their lives worse.

You should probably have skipped the previous couple of paragraphs if you simply wanted to read some funny shit about Aquaman. You might want to skip my commentary on The Movement #1 altogether!

Tula and Murk have plans to break Orm out of Landy Prison, so they're seeking out a person named Swatt that can help him. He seems to be a lot like Ariel in that he collects Landy Things. I suppose his familiarity with the Dry World is why Murk needs his assistance. Swatt is an Atlantean that can't breathe underwater. But he can shoot lightning out of his fists! That's all I currently know about him since he doesn't even answer Murk when Murk asks him to help free King Orm. After they get done fighting, of course. Can't forget the initial fisticuffs that are standard prologue to every civilized discussion in comic books.

Getting back to the Ice King and Mera, it seems The Ice King designed the Bermuda Triangle as a portal. The only way into the portal is to be aboard a sinking ship. That's the most poorly designed system of travel I've ever heard of. As he takes over a ship and prepares to sink it to travel to wherever the Triangle takes ships, he orders Mera to bow before her new King!

"Ice King? More like Ass King."

Finally getting back to the guy whose name is on the cover of this book, Aquaman and some of his guards are hunting down The Scavenger's nuclear submarine fleet. Two Atlanteans tracked it down and reported where it was. But The Scavenger also captured those Atlanteans and turned the whole thing into a trap for Aquaman and his people. When they find one of the subs that was forced onto land, they also find one of Aquaman's subjects dead. The other they find still alive inside the submarine.

Does Atlantis have Urban Legends? Like how if you shove an oyster up your ass, you'll be able to poop pearls?

I bet The Scavenger shoved a bomb or a listening device inside this guy. Aquaman's first order of business should be to open him up and see what they did but instead he tells his guards to take the Trojan Horse back to Atlantis. I bet he's full of teeny tiny warriors!

Back to Mera, she manages to escape from the Ice King as he goes down with his new ship and enters whatever portal he was entering. When the comic book ends, we still don't have any sort of reveal on who the Ice King is or his connection to Atlantis. But we do find out why Mera had planned never to go back into the depths of the ocean!

"Well, let's see. I've been on land for a number of years running a lighthouse and taking care of the cutest little dog you've ever seen! Oh, and I've been fucking the King of Atlantis."

Aquaman #19 Rating: No change. I still very much like this comic book but the pacing seems a bit slow for only getting twenty pages per month. I feel like I need extra pages so Johns can write equally about Mera and Arthur while still throwing in other characters and side stories. Perhaps the twenty pages would be fine if Johns would cut back on the splash pages featuring a giant sea flea or the times he spends a number of pages filled with sea imagery. If I wanted that, I could go to the Aquarium! Or, more likely, watch some kind of ocean documentary on Netflix from the comfort of my couch. Me = Boring.