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Sunday, March 04, 2007

DC Universe: Inheritance - 2006

sgYesterday, my pal and F.O.A.M. member Russell Burbage reminded me that Tuesday, March 6 is officially Aqualad's birthday! He wondered if I was going to do a "theme week" for the occasion.

Upon checking my archives, I saw that I didn't have a whole week's worth of stuff to post, but I did want to celebrate (I mean, who else would?), so retroactively starting yesterday, I'll be posting all Aqualad-centric stuff until his birthday on Tuesday.

So for today we've got Inheritance, a DC Universe prose novel written by comics scribe Devin Grayson. There's been a series of these lately, and when I happened across a book starring three of my four favorite DC characters (Plastic Man being the only one missing), I knew I had to pick it up.

The book features Aquaman (of course), Green Arrow, Batman, plus their former sidekicks Aqualad, Speedy, and
Nightwing. And even though they're not pictured on the cover, the book is mainly about them, and the relationships to their often-difficult mentors. Indeed, the plot (involving weapons smuggling by a foreign nation into the US) is pushed to the background in favor of characterization. I thought that was a nice approach, since comic-book-style action scenes I think wouldn't translate that well to prose.

Ironically, it's Aquaman who (IMO) gets the best moment in the book, where he flashes back to right after his son Arthur jr. died. It describes Arthur's solemn duty to "bury" his son, which involves releasing the body from his arms, letting it drift back into the ocean, to return from where it came. It's a fairly touching moment, and one that I doubt would've ever worked had it been tried as a comic book--in this instance, its the lack of a visual that helps it work.

Overall, not bad--I'm not sure I'm dying to read the other books in the series that don't feature Aquaman (and Aqualad!), but I'm glad I read this one.

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