Aquaman #38

I'm going back to calling Tacoman Aquaman because I don't want to confuse my future self when I eventually forget why the hell I even began calling him that in the first place. Spoiler: it was for no reason at all!

Last issue, Grodd and Aquaman plummeted through an ancient Atlantean Portal into the Labyrinth of Monsters! That's where Hercules was trapped for thousands of years (and might still be? Did he get shoved back in by Aquaman who doesn't have a compassionate shell in his body?). Hopefully Gorillas are as good at mazes as rats and that kid I knew in 5th grade who convinced everybody that the definition of "fart" in the dictionary was "an explosion of gasses from between the legs." I'm pretty sure it said "expulsion" but what did I care about proving him wrong? You get into those kinds of 5th Grade politics and you're just asking for trouble.

Aquaman manages to hang on to something on the Gorilla City side of the portal while he steals the trident back from Grodd. He lets Grodd fall into the Labyrinth of Monsters and then heads back through the portal. Hopefully Grodd's connection to the gorillas of Gorilla City continues to allow them to dump their worst thoughts into Grodd's head or else this city is in for a rude awakening. Gorillas will suddenly be starting their weeks with Cases of the Mondays. They'll stop picking nits out of their neighbor's fur. There'll be a sudden rise in chest thumping. That line about cats and dogs from Ghostbusters.

Mera is the hero and still she doesn't get her name on the cover. Fucking sea-patriarchy.

Fucking patriarchy is right! Here's a beautiful scene showing Mera's intelligence and perception and all I can think about is how much I want to stick my tongue in her ass. How dare you corrupt my mind like that, patriarchy! Unless I should be yelling at testosterone? Maybe I should yell a little bit at Paul Pelletier and Sean Parsons for making Mera so attractive? So yeah! Fuck one of those things for my impure thoughts!

Meanwhile in Atlantis, Dr. Evans made another discovery concerning the shapes of holes and the shapes of things that might fit into those holes!

Dr. Evans could be replaced by a toddler and this story wouldn't change one bit.

Shin and Evans suddenly have a lot more information at their disposal after having read some scrolls in the Library of Atlantis, talked to some dead people living in the walls of the city, and put shapes into other shapes. They now realize that the Atlanteans knew of a way to access pocket dimensions which exist within this universe but outside of time. The perfect place to store leftovers! After Shin reveals this knowledge, Solovar is all, "Oh yeah! Us monkeys figured that out too! Easy peasy! No problem!"

The Labyrinth of Monsters was one of these pocket dimensions. And Shin believes the Maelstrom leads to another one which the Queen planned to turn into her Merwoman Cave. She probably only meant to be there for a little while playing games on her Playstation 2 but forgot about how the place exists outside of time. She probably planned to just play a few games of Yu-Gi-Oh before heading back out to get something to eat but since there is no time, she never felt hungry. So now she's been playing for fifteen years straight. And she still doesn't understand the rules to the fucking game! It's probably hard to develop a card game based on the rules that were seemingly made up on the fly by the players in the cartoon.

Pegasus: "Now I play my Big Dicked Dark Dragon card for free because you lost three hundred life by playing your Pork Pie Platypus on a Sunday!"
Yu-Gi: "Not so fast, Pegasus! By playing your Big Dicked Dark Dragon, you've activated my Trap Card, Swimming In Feces! It floods your play field in shit, dropping all of your monsters attack power by three hundred points and forcing them into defensive positions!"
Pegasus: "Ha! I knew you would activate that Trap! Which is why I'm now going to play Shit Storm Devil Bitch! If I sacrifice four creatures while my field is covered in shit, she gets a boost of two thousand attack points and can attack immediately! And you only have five hundred more life points, Yu-Gi! It looks like this is the end! Have a pleasant stay in the Shadow Realm!"
Yu-Gi: *thinking to himself* "Oh no! What am I going to do now? It doesn't look good and my friends are in trouble! And Joey is wearing that fucking dog costume again for no good reason!"

Where does this gate lead? Atom Ant's house?

Aquaman and Mera wind up in Polynesia where Aquaman speaks to some fishermen in their own language. Mera asks how Aquaman knows the language and he dodges the question with a smooth, "Oh, well, I hung out here for awhile." I know what that means! He was fucking somebody in these waters and Mera knows her! Better to let sleeping sharks float.

Aquaman and Mera find a large version of the Maelstrom carved into the island. It's surrounded by statues of giants looking inward at the symbol which Aquaman doesn't even consider might come to life as soon as he tries to open the portal. It's not as if Aquaman is living on Earth-33 where giant stone statues coming to life is unheard of! He lives on Earth-0 where gods are real and atheists like Mister Terrific are stubbornly holding onto the belief that there must be a rational, scientific explanation for all the crazy shit constantly going down in the universe. It's just super advanced science! Probably!

The creatures come to life and vomit lava and fire all over Mera and Aquaman. I guess they're so waterlogged that they can withstand this kind of heat for at least a few pages.

The battle is just a way to show that Atlanna doesn't want anybody following her. A few pages of Mera splashing water on the giants and Aquaman getting batted around like a cat toy and they eventually make it through the portal and into the Land That Time Forgot!

Poor prehistoric rhinos. The Land That Time Forgot was such a peaceful place before the humanoids arrived.

Aquaman #38 Rating: +1 Ranking. At first, I thought maybe these rhino guys were Baluchitherium so I looked it up on Google and found they're slightly different (using a liberal definition of the word "slightly"). But I did find that Van Halen has an instrumental song on Balance called "Baluchitherium." What the fuck, guys? I remember the cover to this album but I'm not sure I've ever heard it before. "Baluchitherium" does kind of sound like I've traveled to prehistoric times by the end of the song. And the guitar riffs could probably have been pulled off by a T-Rex. The most amazing thing about the song was that Sammy Hagar didn't sing on it. They must have recorded it without his knowledge so he couldn't shit it up with his grating, tequila-damaged voice*.

*Transparency: David Lee Roth paid me to write that.