Thursday, November 02, 2006

Insert Clever Title Here

I'm reading every Aquaman solo adventure in publication order, one per day. After I read each story I'm going to post the cover/splash page and a few thoughts on the story. This will no doubt evolve as I continue reading for the year and a half required to get through all the Aquaman tales.

I've gotten a lot of suggestions for the name of this feature, and I'm mulling them over now. Feel free to add more if you think of any. Suggestions so far: "Curried Tales", "Aqua-blogging", "Aquaman through the Ages", "Writing the Waves", "Past Ripples", "Talking to Fish", "Waves of Time, Time of Waves", "EYWTKAA,BWATA", "Fish Stories", "Sea Tales", "Water Log", "Charting the Course", "Deep Sea Thoughts", "Deep Thoughts", "Fish Tales", "Water Lines", and "Strait Talk".

More Fun #74 Aquaman Splash Page
More Fun #74 (December 1941)

Aquaman stops pirates from attacking a yacht, then fights the pirates and sinks their ship, but the captain of the pirates survives.

The first appearance of Black Jack the Modern Pirate! Yay! Black Jack captures Aquaman (using gas this time, not a sledgehammer to the head like the Nazis in the last story) and asks him to join the crew. Black Jack explains that by wearing old-fashioned pirate gear, the ships he attacks know exactly what they are in for as soon as he appears.

Lots of really amusing banter during the fight scenes in this one. The language is just lovely! "Into the cradle of the deep you go, Lubber! Sleep well!", "Bust his binnacle for him!", "I don't like your faces - think I'll scramble them a little -", "If I knew the swab that did this, I'd keel-haul him from here to Singapore!", "Here, let me part those whiskers in the middle!", "I'll gouge out your headlights!" While the art was excellent, and the story ok, the dialogue really made this one shine.

Black Jack's ship is the Nemesis... The splash page is signed "by Paul" (Paul Norris)... Black Jack's crew wear green shirts with black horizontal stripes... Depending on which view we get of it, the Nemesis looks like everything from a motorboat to a destroyer, but it has metal sides and torpedo tubes, so I'm leaning towards a destroyer-type vessel... Aquaman is more clueful in this story about the ways of the the surface. He knows what a torpedo is, when in the first story he didn't recognize a grenade.

Have you read this story? What do you think?

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