Review: Aquaman: The Becoming trade paperback (DC Comics)

I’m no less impressed with writer Brandon Thomas after Aquaman: The Becoming; what promising things we saw in Thomas' Future State: Aquaman (collected in Future State: Justice League and also here) continue. The six-part Becoming is less frenetic and bloody than the two-issue Future State story, but still with plenty of surprises, Easter eggs, and espionage machinations. I like my Aquaman stories best when the political stakes echo a world just slightly removed from our own, and Becoming has that — and a likable Jackson Hyde, to boot.

[Review contains spoilers]

For reasons not made wholly explicit, Aquaman Arthur Curry is training Aqualad Jackson Hyde here to be the new Aquaman. Whether that’s an anachronism in the run-up to Dark Crisis or a result of Arthur becoming a new father is never quite clear (or that Thomas' shows Arthur and Mera have an ongoing tendency to leave Jackson guarding the shore while they go off to canoodle).

But what Thomas does show is that Jackson fills the role well. Perhaps not unlike counterpart Superman Jon Kent, Jackson has come up in a world where superheroes are commonplace, and so his friendly interactions with both Atlantean guards and the everyday people of Amnesty Bay are less fraught than those we imagine from Arthur’s early days. By and large, at least at the outset, the only barrier to Jackson filling the Aquaman role is his own self-doubt; certainly Arthur — in Thomas' boisterous depiction reminiscent of the cartoon Batman: Brave and the Bold Aquaman — is more than ready to share the title.

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What follows is a mildly predictable turn for a six-issue miniseries, in which Jackson is framed for a crime and goes on the run to prove his innocence. But those familiar bones are buoyed by the strength of a variety of Thomas' elements. For one, his writing of Mera, a central figure here; we’ve long since known Mera can carry a book without Arthur, but this further cements it. Particularly powerful is the sequence of new mother and former regent Mera staring down an Atlantean police interrogation while also caring for her child, and then Thomas' revelation that Mera was lying through much of the previous scene for the accused Jackson’s benefit.

Second, how much of the story turns on things political. All of this is predicated on Mera being about to make a speech in her home country of Xebel, advocating for renewed relations with Atlantis. At the same time, Mera’s been working behind the scenes with Jackson’s mother Lucia and others to help refugees flee Xebel; the kingdom is poverty-stricken on one hand, and on the other the militaristic government conscripts child-soldiers to train for an imagined war with Atlantis. I am not often much for swords and sorcery, but I can certainly stand underwater kingdoms when metaphor-rich geopolitics are at stake.

And third, Thomas writes a Jackson Hyde story that embraces many aspects of the character’s career. Ha’wea is here, from some Jackson-centric issues by Jordan Clark in the midst of Kelly Sue DeConnick’s run, and events from Aquaman Vol. 4: Echoes of a Life Lived Well, published about 18 months ago, are referenced heavily.

With a wink and a nod, Thomas deposits Jackson at the JLA base in Happy Harbor, acknowledging it as the former home of Steve Orlando’s Justice League of America and Brian Michael Bendis' Young Justice, not to mention the amount of time an alternate animated Aqualad spent there. Jackson rides a transporter relay cross-country that could only happen in this Infinite Frontier-era, from Teen Titans Academy to the headquarters of Justice League Detroit to the San Francisco Titans headquarters that was destroyed when Jackson was a member. Though that Rebirth-era Titans group doesn’t quite match to modern times, they all still cameo.

Artist Diego Olortegui kicks off the volume and defines the art, with a wide-eyed manga-leaning style that underscores Jackson’s open honesty. The book ultimately has more artists than one would want on a miniseries, but credit to DC to getting artists like Skylar Patridge and Scott Koblish to do sequences, both of whom are similar to if not quite as polished as Olortegui. (There is no overtaking Daniel Sampere on the Future State story.)

I was pleased to see, swiftly and incongruently, Paul Pelletier draw a random handful of pages from this book, because if you don’t have Paul Pelletier, is it really an Aquaman story? Khary Randolph, who created Excellence with Thomas, draws a variety of nice animated variant covers, though I can’t argue with David Talaski’s painted main ones, either.

2.5

Rating

Following Aquaman: The Becoming, Brandon Thomas returns with Aquamen (which gets a rare advertisement in this trade), and then apparently the finale to his Aqua-presence is a backup story in a Superman Dark Crisis tie-in special. That’s a shame, though I can’t tell if that means he’s done with DC for now in total, or just with Aquaman. Either way, two books in and he’s won a fan; I’ll be on to Chuck Brown’s Black Manta on the road to Jackson’s next appearance.

[Includes original and variant covers, ink and color pages, character designs]