Aquaman has been around for 81 years, making him one of the longest published superheroes in the history of comics. He’s one of the few survivors from the Golden Age that has survived mostly unchanged. Unlike the Golden Age Flash and Green Lantern, DC didn’t wholesale change everything about the character in the Silver Age; like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, he was basically the same as he had been in the ’40s. Since then, the character has had a lot of downs and not very many ups, as his popularity suffered more and more, with the SuperFriends cartoon creating a version of the hero that made him the butt of jokes in pop culture for years to come.
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DC’s tangled continuity would be cleared by Crisis on Infinite Earths, but most creators stayed away from Aquaman and Atlantis. However all of that would change with 1990’s The Atlantis Chronicles, where writer Peter David brought the Atlantis mythos into the modern day. It would be a few years before the groundwork the series laid would be used, as David would return to the ocean in 1993 with Aquaman: Time and Tide, a story that introduced a modern version of Aquaman and kicked off the character’s greatest run of all time.
Peter David’s Aquaman Run Rebuilt the Character Into Something Special
David wasn’t exactly completely reinventing the wheel with The Atlantis Chronicles or Aquaman: Tide and Time. DC has created an entire history for the undersea kingdom and Arthur had always been a hybrid of sorts; sometimes he was strictly Atlantean, sometimes he was human, but this new version was given a more traditional DC origin: his father fell in love with an Atlantean princess and he was born on land, raised with humans until he was pulled to Atlantis to help battle his brother Ocean Master, one of Aquaman’s greatest enemies.
David’s modernization cleaned up the continuity of the character, giving him a definitive origin for the modern day. However, his origin wasn’t the problem; the SuperFriends cartoon painting him as useless was. The writer set out to fix this in two ways. The one was to establish that his ability to speak to fish was aquatic telepathy, changing his powers and opening the door to him using his powers against anyone, not just fish; he couldn’t command them but he could read minds, communicate telepathically, and do cool telepathy feats thanks to the part of their brains that were still related to fish. However, the biggest change wouldn’t come until Aquaman (Vol. 5) #2.
Arthur was battling Charybdis when the villain shoved his hand into a river and piranhas ate his left hand up to the wrist off. He would end up replacing it with a hook/harpoon combo that would allow him to slash, stab, launch the hook, and reel in his enemies. He did away with the orange scaled shirt and the green pants, changing his top to more of a gladiator armor kind of look. David wanted him to look like a warrior, like someone that was amazing in combat, someone who you’d never think was useless out of water. His super strength and invulnerability were played up, as were his fighting skills and he became a much more martial hero.
David completely rehabbed the character’s image, but he needed to pound home that this wasn’t the old school Aquaman and he did that with the rest of the book. Aqualad became the magic-using Tempest, Dolphin joined Arthur as his girlfriend instead of Mera, Ocean Master and Black Manta were downplayed for sea gods and Lovecraftian horrors from the deepest depths. Political intrigue became a key part of the book. David made Aquaman into a Thor-esque warrior king, and it paid off. During his run on the character, fans were engaged like never before. They loved the king of Atlantis. No one thought he was weak or made jokes about him anymore, at least no one that read Peter David’s Aquaman (Vol. 5).
Peter David Planted the Seeds for Aquaman’s Greatest Successes
Peter David has his work cut out for him when he began to rehab Atlantis and Aquaman in the early ’90s. He did a lot of work to make this corner of the DC Universe interesting again and it honestly paid off. Aquaman (Vol. 5) was the most successful the character had been in decades and he was appearing across the DC Universe, even getting a romantic subplot with Wonder Woman in JLA. The character reached an amazing new level under David, that no other writer after him, including creators like Peter Tomasi, Patrick Gleason, Kurt Busiek, and Jackson Guice, would reach for years.
It wouldn’t be until 2010’s Brightest Day and 2011’s Aquaman that the character would become a big deal again and it was by taking a lot of ideas from David. Writer Geoff Johns played the character as the warrior king, the leader who had seen it all, a supremely skilled and confident fighter. David’s version of the character shined through and since then we’ve gotten numerous great Aquaman stories, nearly all of which use David’s run as a basis. Peter David changed the King of the Sea forever, finally making Aquaman into the icon he always should have been.
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