By 1960, the Flash and Green Lantern had already been revised and revamped in DC Comics’s Showcase and had won their own titles. So why not Aquaman too?
But unlike those characters, Aquaman had never ceased publication at the end of the 1940s. Readers remained familiar with him from his appearances in the popular new title Justice League of America, and from his backup stories in Adventure Comics in a feature that had, since 1951, been graced with the sumptuous pencils of one of the few female artists in comics, Ramona Fradon.
“Her Aquaman work is deceptively simple, combining an excellent design sense and flair for narrative with a cartoonist’s skill at expressive faces,” observed Elle Collins. “It’s within the DC Comics house style of the time, but never feels constrained by it.”
Although the publishers didn’t need to reboot and reintroduce Aquaman, they could use the freedom of a full-length story to expand his scope of operations. With that angle in mind, in Showcase 30 (Jan.-Feb. 1961), Fradon and writer Jack Miller treated us to The Creatures from Atlantis.
Aquaman’s brief stories had done little with the lost civilization of Atlantis before Showcase 30. In fact, Aquaman had never even visited his exiled mother’s birthplace until that issue, when scaly amphibious aliens seized control of the domed underwater city. They threatened to take control of the whole planet with flying submarines armed with heat rays that could melt skyscrapers, so Aquaman and Aqualad had to try to stop them, despite the long odds.
“From 1958 on, the Superman family under (Aquaman creator Mort) Weisinger’s editing started building up a complex mythos,” recalled comics historian Michael E. Grost. “This mythos involved adding many continuing characters and science fiction situations to the world of Superman, concepts that appeared in story after story. There are signs that during 1959-1960, something similar was attempted for Aquaman.”
“Just as Superman came from the advanced planet Krypton, so do Aquaman’s ancestors hail from the advanced civilization of Atlantis, although Aquaman himself was born on the Earth’s surface. Just as the bottled city of Kandor represents a survival of Krypton on Earth, one that can be visited by the characters, so does the domed undersea remnant of sunken Atlantis represent a continuation of that magnificent civilization. Just as Supergirl and the Phantom Zone inhabitants represent survivors of Krypton that are now on Earth, so too does Aquaman meet representatives of Atlantis such as Aquagirl and Aqualad.”
“Like Superman, Aquaman is something of a self-starter,” Grost wrote. “He is not sent on a mission by some higher authority figure. He simply sees that bad things are happening on the surface of the Earth and tries to stop them. Both heroes are especially concerned with protecting the weak and innocent.”
Aquaman’s origin had, in fact, been revised in the late 1950s so that it would more closely parallel the Superman mythos.
In his original origin by Weisinger and artist Paul Norris in More Fun Comics 73 (Nov. 1941), Aquaman’s father, an undersea explorer, discovered the scientific secrets of lost Atlantis and used them to endow his son with superpowers.
The revised origin, first presented in Adventure Comics 260 (May 1959), was much more poignant, with its tale of a mysterious exiled beauty who reveals her secrets on her deathbed.
“When I read this story, I liked it, but couldn’t help noticing that Aquaman’s origin had been made retroactively more similar to that of his erstwhile Timely rival, Sub-Mariner (who had actually been AWOL from comics since 1955),” Roy Thomas recalled. “Having learned of Aquaman’s first origin, I preferred it. But the new one stuck, and has generated plenty of great stories since 1959.”
In 1962, after two more Showcase tryout issues, Aquaman landed his own title, which ran for a respectable 63 issues. But I rarely read it.
Although Nick Cardy was obviously a talented artist, his work on Aquaman never appealed to me.
One infallible test of the enduring power of an artist’s work is fan loyalty, and for me, Aquaman will always mean Ramona Fradon. I’m not alone.
When DC published its sleek hardcover edition of Aquaman Archives in 2003, it was Fradon’s stories that were featured. Scenes like that, seemingly endless army of loyal sea creatures parading past the teenage Arthur Curr, were arresting to me in 1960, and remain vivid in memory even now.
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