Hamilton, Hooper, Jurgens, Maroto, Swan,and more! Aqualad: From Titan to Tempest • Atlantis Chronicles Aqualad: FromTitanto Tempest•AtlantisChronicles Aquaman TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Black Mantavillainhistory •Aquamanmerchandise No.108 October 2018 with Aparo, Calafiore,David,Egeland, Giffen, $8.95 The pre-Crisisandpost-Crisis Aquaman SPECIAL ISSUE ™ 1 82658 00127 8 Volume 1, Number 108 October 2018 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond! John Morrow DESIGNER Rich Fowlks TM COVER ARTIST Eric Shanower (from the collection of John Schwirian; art © Eric Shanower) COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS BACKSEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . .2 Marc Buxton David Michelinie Jim Calafiore Dan Mishkin OFF MY CHEST: Buried Treasure: Guest editorial by Rob Kelly. 3 Gary Cohn Jerome K. Moore One of comics’ most devoted Aquafans appeals to DC Comics Arthur Curry Richard Paolinelli Peter David Martin Pasko FLASHBACK: Bronze Age Aquaman Team-Ups . .4 DC Comics John Schwirian Does the Sea King play well with others? Kevin Dooley Eric Shanower Steve Epting Steve Skeates GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD: The Intended Tale for Aquaman #57. 14 Tom Floyd Anthony Snyder Green Arrow was headed to Aquaman’s mag before its cancellation Grand Comics Bryan D. Stroud Database John Trumbull THE TOY BOX: Bronze Age Aquaman Merchandise . .20 Robert Greenberger John Wells From Aquaman action figures to Underoos, check out these Sea King collectibles Craig Hamilton Marv Wolfman Tim Hauser Dennis Yee BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Black Manta. 24 Heritage Comics A villain history of the Marine Marvel’s malevolent adversary Auctions Dan Jurgens FLASHBACK: Changing Tides: The Post-Crisis Aquaman. 31 Rob Kelly You’ve got to hand it to Arthur Curry for keeping his head above these roiling waters Paul Kupperberg Erik Larsen FLASHBACK: Aqualad: From Titan to Tempest. .52 Paul Levitz The purple-eyed hero’s murky metamorphosis from sidekick to sorcerer Esteban Maroto Shaun McLaughlin WHAT THE--?!: Seadragon . .62 This little-known indie superhero comic was more fun than a barrel full of Sea-Monkeys Don’t STEAL our BEYOND CAPES: Atlantis Chronicles . .66 Digital Editions! Peter David and Esteban Maroto revisit their DC fantasy series C’mon citizen, GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD: The Animated Aquaman Movie . .76 DO THE RIGHT Warner Bros. animator Tim Hauser discusses the Aqua-movie that wasn’t THING! A Mom & Pop publisher like us needs BACK IN PRINT . .78 every sale just to Aquaman: A Celebration of 75 Years survive! DON’T DOWNLOAD BACK TALK . .79 OR READ ILLEGAL COPIES ONLINE! Reader reactions Buy affordable, legal downloads only at www.twomorrows.com or through our Apple and Google Apps! BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: [email protected]. Eight-issue subscriptions: $76 Economy US, $125 International, $32 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to & DON’T SHARE THEM WITH FRIENDS OR POST THEM ONLINE. Help us keep TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by and © Eric Shanower. Aquaman TM & © DC Comics. producing great publications like this one! All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2018 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING. Aquaman commission by Neal Adams, courtesy of John Schwirian. TM & © DC Comics. Aquaman Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1 Super Friend or Frenemy? Aquaman may have TM gotten along swimmingly with his fellow Super Friends on Saturday morning television, but in the comics, he wasn’t always the most congenial partner. Super Friends bumper cel art by Alex Toth; courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). by Michael Eury TM & © DC Comics. Aquaman team-ups often pose problems for writers. Most superheroes all sorts of new, wild, and psychedelic settings and cities,” Skeates don’t adapt to his waterworld (and look ridiculous when they try, wrote in a text piece in Aquaman #52. It was agreed that this would with their scuba masks or fishbowl headgear), and when the Sea King take place in three 16-page chapters to run in Aquaman issues #50 ventures onto land he’s limited to 60 minutes of action before (Mar.–Apr. 1970) through 52 (July–Aug. 1970). requiring a dip. Also, the personality for Aquaman that surfaced in the To round out the book, a temporary backup feature was envisioned. Bronze Age—that of a hard-edged, vengeful monarch—didn’t earn Giordano turned to his pal Neal Adams, the two having worked him the DC Comics “Plays Well with Others” Award (outside of his together when Dick took over as editor of Neal’s Deadman feature appearances in the kid-friendly Super Friends Saturday morning cartoons (which had recently been cancelled) in Strange Adventures, and asked and spin-off DC comic). him to produce some Deadman backups for Aquaman. “I didn’t think Still, during our halcyon years of Bronze Age fandom, the ’70s and a backup was a good idea for Deadman,” Adams told John Schwirian early ’80s, the Marine Marvel managed to cross paths with several in John’s in-depth article on the Aquaman/Deadman team-up in BACK members of the DC Universe. Which team-ups made a splash, and ISSUE #45. “He’s a lead feature type character, not a backup.” which sank? Let’s find out… Adams eventually agreed to produce a Deadman mini-feature for Aquaman that was more than a mere self-contained backup. AQUAMAN AND DEADMAN What evolved was a parallel storyline that both Steve Skeates and Neal This one’s a bit of a cheat as a “team-up,” because the King of the Adams would tell in their respective stories. Skeates wrote his Aquaman Seven Seas and the Hater of the Hook don’t really join forces. stories first, introducing extraterrestrial aggressors that transport the The oddball Aquaman/Deadman crossover of 1970 might better be Sea King into a weird world. Adams’ motivation for his contributions, called a patchwork that morphed into a round robin. as he revealed in BI #45, was to tell an interwoven ghost story, and the It began with Dick Giordano, the editor (and artist) who jumped writer/artist riffed off what Skeates had scripted. As the analogous tales from Charlton Comics to DC in the late ’60s, bringing with him progress, Deadman, unknown to Aquaman, thwarts an alien inva- Charlton writer Steve Skeates and artist Jim Aparo. Giordano wanted sion, while the two stories dovetail, reuniting the dimension- to shake up Aquaman’s book, which had gotten a bit stale despite its hopping Aquaman with his wife, Mera. beautiful Nick Cardy artwork. So Skeates and Aparo, beginning with 1968’s issue #40, sent the suffering Sea King on a multi-chaptered, AQUABOY AND SUPERBOY sci-fi “Search for Mera” to find his missing wife. Remember the Aquaboy series from the Silver Age, “The Adventures But a year and a half later, the burden of a long-running saga of Aquaman When He Was a Boy”? Of course you don’t—there was in Aquaman was taking its toll on the creative team (and on some no such thing. readers unaccustomed to such protracted storytelling) and shorter Well, except for that one time… stories were in order, as the Skeates/Aparo/Giordano (SAG) team In late 1970, DC introduced Aquaboy—a teenage Aquaman—in the agreed during an impromptu 1969 coffee klatch in the offices of pages of Superboy #171 (cover-dated Jan. 1971). In “Dark Strangler of National Periodical Publications (that’s DC Comics to you and me). the Seas,” the patrolling Superboy—the real Superboy to us BACK ISSUE This matter was forced by Aparo’s slow recovery from an illness, types, the one who was Superman as a kid—assists a fisherman who’s which was adversely affecting his output. “We finally decided to struggling to reel in an errant catch: a crude oil-saturated human who’s toss Aquaman into another dimension, giving Jim a chance to draw choking to death! Rushing the slippery victim to a nearby detergent 4 • BACK ISSUE • Aquaman Issue plant, Superboy and factory workers race to scrub the oil off the gasping figure, soon discovering the form of the amazing Aquaboy, the “half-fish, half-boy” who can talk underwater! Sounds like the kind of outrageous shocker that Bob Haney, the cavalier storymeister notorious for his continuity blindness, might concoct, doesn’t it? Nope, not this time. Bob had nothing to do with this one, although his Brave and the Bold editor and the tacit enabler of that old Haney zaniness, Murray Boltinoff, edited this Superboy tale. Scribe Frank Robbins was responsible for the Aquaboy story, a continuation of a Silver Age trope of Superboy’s youthful encounters with characters he’d know later in life as Superman. Aquaman’s Silver Age origin had been revealed some ten years earlier in Showcase #30 (and reprinted in Super DC Giant #S-26, which hit the stands several months after the Aquaboy story)— and even earlier than that in 1959’s Adventure Comics #260 (where his real name of Arthur Curry first appeared)—and it included a flashback to young Arthur learning to telepathically command sea life. But Aquaman’s career as a superhero began as an adult. Once you get past the head-scratching concept of a previously unrevealed Aquaboy, Robbins’ story is a great deal of fun. Aquaboy’s oleaginous predicament is the result of his running afoul of the corrupt commanders and crew of a Trans-East Oil Company tanker whose toxic spills are endangering marine life.