Poor Aquaman... "a fresh new direction" seems to be his status quo, because he's one of those heroes who writers have a tough time tackling, and most of the time he just comes off as the butt of jokes when people are talking superheroes. Honestly, though I've enjoyed Aquaman stories in the past, I'm not that much a fan of the character, and I didn't come into this one with a lot of expectations. Pfeifer's story starts out from an interesting and darker than usual place, and his take on the character captures some of that tough guy, stoic attitude that Aquaman rarely gets, but at the same time I kind of learned everything I needed to know about the story from the solicitations, which means that the desired shock effect didn't really grab me.
So San Diego falls into the ocean, and suddenly we've got a crisis that is perfect for Aquaman. He's the water guy, right? Except that in Pfeifer's tale, the only thing Aquaman's powers really allow him to do is crush the hopes of rescue workers earlier than someone with a submarine might have. Not exactly stirring heroic stuff. And the revelation about what is actually going on as related by the young boy at the end is also a bit of a shocker, but seemed a bit too potentially Silver Age goofy to me. Time will tell whether the plot can balance these goofy notions with the more serious tone, but at least at first that's not happening.
Actually, my favorite part of this issue doesn't really involve Aquaman, it involves the President giving a speech about the catastrophe, and there's a very obvious parallel to the post-9-11 effects. Unfortunately, the speech has little bearing on the rest of the story, and the President serves only to spoil a pretty major DCU upset that was presumably to be revealed in the delayed Superman/Batman title. Oops.
I'm probably a little more disappointed in this than I would be otherwise because I've liked previous work by these creators. Pfeifer of course did the fantastic Finals series from Vertigo and has turned in some fine tales on H-E-R-O, and Patrick Gleason has done a handful of DC projects as well as some terrific art on Noble Causes. However, just as Pfeifer doesn't seem to have hit his groove yet, neither has Gleason. Perhaps it's clashes with Alamy's inks or just settling in, but the artwork here is fairly weak for the most part. Aquaman looks half-dazed, half-drunk and half-shaven most of the time, as well as looking more anemic than heroic. The same can be said for a lot of these characters, like a President who looks far older than he's supposed to be and characters that just generally looked like they could have used more definition. Gleason does have some terrific visual moments, particularly a stunning and surprisingly brutal opening sequence that shows the after-effects of the San Diego disaster, but once he's on land and in more basic territory, things look a lot more sketchy.
Honestly, it doesn't really matter to me whether Aquaman's book is any good or not. I'm not a big fan, and I'm unlikely to be reading for the most part anyway. But I felt like with a new creative team whose past work I've liked and a mildly intriguing hook, I should check in and see if we might be getting one of those rare cool Aquaman arcs. So far, it doesn't look like it, and this one is probably for the devoted Aquaman fans if anyone, rather than casual superhero fans.
