Aquaman #45

This is how responsible Aquaman is with his powers. He commands other forms of life to be furniture for him.

Cullen Bunn has really turned this character around! Aquaman now spends most of his time on land, he has a whole bunch of new magic powers, he's traveling in space, and he's been raped! I'm not sure if this is the Aquaman everybody has been clamoring for! Maybe Cullen Bunn misheard "Aquaman should ride giant seahorses!" as "Completely destroy the character and make the comic book extremely hard to care about."

So last issue after being raped by Mera's evil twin sister, Aquaman teleported to a strange planet. Maybe he's going to process the violence of what Siren did to him? I mean, it wasn't really that violent. Aquaman just thought he was being intimate with his one and only love but instead found out he was fucking somebody else. I mean, some guys might just think of that as "bonus sex." Especially since Mera can't get mad at Arthur because then she'd be blaming the victim! Although Aquaman probably shouldn't smirk and smile when he talks about it.

I'm pretty flippant about everything so it's kind of hard to really figure out where I stand on any issue but I will say this: I don't fucking care about this rape. It's no big deal. Arthur's a big boy and he can handle having had sex with somebody who turned out to be somebody else. I would say this is less traumatic than Patty being raped by Future Barry Allen who was technically the same person but pretending to be his younger self! That's some fucked up shit and I could totally understand why Patty had to break up with Barry after that even if it wasn't Barry's fault. I just hope Cullen Bunn isn't around long enough to have Mera get angry at Arthur for this encounter (which was rape).

The great thing is that nobody has to care about my opinion of how much I care!

Aquaman has been in a pulp comic for the last few months and he's just getting deeper into the pulpiness of it all. Now he's John Carter!

I was under the assumption that Aquaman was teleporting via Ya'wara's bauble but apparently it's just another magic power that was granted to him via Poseidon. Of course!

Aquaman winds up in a battle he's sure to lose against a pack of vicious predators. But a bigger creature screams and the predators run off because that's just what happens in a situation like this! When the hero can't save himself because he's terrible, he needs some kind of cliche intervention!

Aquaman, now safe, wanders off to discover that the world he's on shares a lot of similarities with Thule. Oh my gosh! Atlantis is an alien civilization! You don't get much more pulp than that!

Aquaman passes out from loss of blood from the wound Siren gave him. So he fails again and dies!

Stupid aliens. Can't they leave well enough alone?

Aquaman meets the queen of the aliens but she only speaks in garbled Old Portugese [sic]. That means that Arthur has to make a whole bunch of assumptions on why he sees architecture and creatures from Thule on this alien planet. He has no evidence for his assumptions; he has no proof for his guesses. But I'm sure he's figured it all out anyway because that just makes everything easier. He's pretty smart to figure out that Thule has been colonizing other planets. I was an idiot to think that maybe Atlantis came to Earth from this planet! That was such a stupid assumption without any evidence to back it up. Of course I was wrong!

Arthur figures out that the way to defeat the Thules is to surprise them! Wasn't that the first chapter in The Art of War? But he finds out that surprising them is going to be harder than it seems because the Thules know him! THEY FUCKING KNOW HIM!

But if that's Earth That Was, does that mean Arthur needs to travel through time as well?! And that they have a reason for hating him! Such pulpy sweet goodness!

I am actively trying to ignore the nonsense of the needing a bigger boat tag at the end.

Aquaman #45 Rating: No change. Cullen Bunn's run on Aquaman simply feels like a story he wanted to write or tell in a pulp fiction setting and he just crammed Arthur Curry into the lead role even though he doesn't belong there. Is it a good story? Who the fuck can tell because it doesn't work as an Aquaman story and Aquaman's name is on the fucking cover. I can understand how DC's editors would okay this story though because I think DC Comics really doesn't understand Aquaman. He's pretty simple at his core. He protects the sea, he's king of Atlantis, and he talks to fish. But DC is like a child who has been told over and over again that they're worthless. So they hear all the jokes about Aquaman and assume he needs to be tinkered with and changed. But he really doesn't. Just stick with his core shit no matter how silly it can be. In fact, embrace the fucking silly shit. Make him ride seahorses! Introduce a dolphin that has a huge crush on him and won't leave him alone. Give him a manatee sidekick. Do anything that involves the sea or sea animals and forget about all of this shit where he suddenly has more powers than Martian Manhunter. Come on, DC! A five year old can write a better Aquaman story!