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Sunday, January 02, 2011

Adventure Comics #103 - April 1946

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Comics Weekend "Footsteps in the Ocean" by Joe Samachson and Louis Cazeneuve.

A new year, a new adventure of the Golden Age Aquaman!

Okay...not new at all, really, but this is the first time these particular stories have been covered on the Shrine. After finishing off the Golden Age Aquaman's run in More Fun Comics back in May 2010, I gave him a rest for the rest of the year, but had always intended on picking up where his strip moved to after More Fun became an all-humor comic--over to Adventure Comics, the book that would end up being Aquaman's "home" just as much as his solo title ever was.

DC pretty much transplanted all of More Fun's superhero strips--Aquaman, Superboy, Green Arrow, and Johnny Quick--over to Adventure, with nary a change in look or content. So let's see what happened in Aquaman's inaugural, ahem, adventure:
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The freed hostage tells Aquaman the story about how his people, preparing for an invasion, collected much of the nation's natural wealth and hid it on a remote island, leaving one elderly man, Tao-Tsung, behind to guard it. He was told that only to release the treasure to the man bearing the blue, black, and red coral (not exactly a fool-proof plan, but who am I to judge?).

Years later, the pirates looking to get their hands on the treasure took the piece of coral from Chang, knocking him out and taking him prisoner:
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...and so ends another adventure with Aquaman!


I have to say, the whole "giant decoy" plan seems way more complicated than it needed to be. Good thing Aquaman had a modicum of common sense not to take a 1,000 mile swim just because someone left him a note telling him to.

Aquaman doesn't get all that much to do this time around, letting his finny friends do most of the fighting. Let's hope next week he gets back to what he loves--cracking bad guy skulls!

2 comments:

Richard said...

Another Samachson treasure. Yet another story where he works in real ocean lore, demonstrates the importance of reasoning and skepticism even in a super-heroic world, and this time we get Chinese characters who aren't cariacatures. I am really loving this man.

Anonymous said...

Alright!! I missed the weekly fix of golden age Aquaman.

James Chatterton