The rumor monkeys are flying around in my e-mail, so I'm going to post about this ludicrous rumor that keeps growing. For those of you who aren't comic book fans, you can stop reading right now.
Basically, this is a silly rumor. It is almost as insubstantial as air, but it keeps coming back to me. I won't name my sources, but I'll tell you that they shouldn't be believed in this. Basically, I'm about to spread a rumor that I don't believe in. Take that as you will.
The rumor goes like this: After Rick Veitch ends his run on Aquaman, Peter David will be taking over. The significance of this lies in the fact that Peter David wrote Aquaman from 1993 until 1998, with a mini series before that in 1990.
You would think that PAD is done with Aquaman. That he's said all he wants to on the subject. But that's not true. I wrote an e-mail to PAD to ask if he would consider returning to Aquaman to be retreading old waters, or if he'd want to write Aquaman again... and his answer was "Sure, I'd do it."
In and of itself, that wouldn't be enough to get me speculating on a possible Peter David return to Aquaman. But there have been other flying rumor monkeys landing in my e-mail box, and some have been more... interesting, shall we say? than others. But I still don't believe that they add up to anything more than wild speculation at this point.
Still, that's the rumor, and it's not the rumor specifically that I want to address in this blog entry. It's my unexpected reaction to it.
To say I have mixed feelings about Peter David possibly returning to Aquaman would get you an understatement of the year award. One side of me thinks it would be incredibly neat to see where Peter David would go with the character after the changes Aquaman has been through in the last five years, while the other side is terrified of going back to the pre-Jurgens and pre-Veitch days. I like what Jurgens did with the future Atlantis, with Cerdia and all. And I like how Veitch removed the harpoon... with both reason and understanding instead of just replacing it off-panel with a golden hand (like some other "writer" did).
So I have to wonder, if PAD were to take over Aquaman writing again, would he "undo" what has been done in the last five years, or find a new direction to move in? Would he try to go back and finish his infamous "water elemental" storyline that everyone (including myself probably) misinterpreted, or would he try something completely new? While I think of Peter David as an excellent writer who is always amazingly sensitive to what has gone before (sometimes to things the fans even missed), some part of me is really scared that he would undo the last five years to make up for his premature departure from the book back in '98. I may be doing him a grave injustice, but there's a lurking fear there that won't go away.
But then, as one fan put it, Aquaman as written by Peter David was always a fascinating book. A rippin' good yarn. It just wasn't always what a fan would want or expect from Aquaman.
The forward movement of Aquaman through the years has been interesting. There's been a chip on Aquaman's shoulder since his Silver Age Angst days, since his son died. Peter David did his best to put that chip away by first taking the character into totally savage realms. By the end of the PAD run, Aquaman was at peace with his past and willing to be the leader, the King, that he was born to be. That was mostly undone in the year after Peter David left, when the follow-up writer was told to "make him happy, but have him jealous about his ex-wife" which didn't work on any level. Jurgens restarted the romance between Aquaman and Mera, and re-established the Peter David status quo to some extent, but the series ended too quickly for any character development to hold. And Aquaman had always been treated by other writers in other books, such as JLA, as "Mr Grumpy with a pig-sticker on my hand" which stunted his growth in the eyes of anyone NOT reading the Aquaman title. The whole thing was basically thrown out the window when Poseidonis was sent back into the past for 15 years. Veitch was working with a character who had been in solitary confinement, unable to communicate with ANYONE for 15 years, and a supporting cast who had gone through 15 years of slavery.
So Veitch has taken his year of Aquaman to recover the character from his imprisonment. Where will the next writer go from there? What sort of stories does the future hold? And are the flying rumor monkeys giving me pretty misdirection or the scoop on the Aquaman story of the year? Time will tell.
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