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Sunday, December 23, 2012

Adventure Comics #214 - July 1955

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Comics Weekend "Station Neptune" by Jack Miller(?) and Ramona Fradon.

It's Adventure Sunday!

So far Aquaman has seen underwater museums, jails, restaurants...so why not a TV station?:
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Aquaman tries out his underwater juggling skills, which Captain Wilkins is none too impressed by. Neither is Station Neptune's host, who thinks that the shellfish swam around themselves, leaving Aquaman to try again to get on the air. The Sea King vows to try again.

His next trick is a feat of acrobatics, using electric eels as the "high wires." It's impressive all right, but:
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...and with that, so ends another completely insane adventure for Aquaman!


This plot was used and re-used a lot for Aquaman: he pretends to be doing something else all the while luring some band of sea crooks into a trap. At the end, after the bad guys are apprehended, the surface dwellers who doubted what Aquaman was up to are shown the light.

Of course, complaining about the re-use of plots in a superhero comic is pretty ridiculous; it's all about how you spin it. I'd say this one is on the low end a bit--there's a lot of 'splaining Aquaman has to do in those last two panels. But we did get to see the Sea King in an cowboy hat, so there's that.

On side note: I love that soldier in the foreground of the splash page, relaxing with what looks like a comic book. It probably wasn't Sub-Mariner, because of course his series had been cancelled long ago. Ooh, burn!


3 comments:

Anthony said...

The "make everyone think they're doing something else obnoxious as part of a plan" is a staple of Silver Age Superman stories... thus the probably-created-by-Superman-haters term "superd*ckery" (and the also-stupid related site). (BTW, I'll note nobody calls *Batman* such crude terms whenever he does anything obnoxious, esp. in 90s/2000s comics, but I digress...)

Anyway, guessing they wanted to work into an Aquaman story that hot new medium, television. Interesting that "don't touch that dial" is used here, though guess it might be a holdover from radio...

"Swim-Along Aquaman"? Ah, the 50s and its relentless obsession with the Western...good cowboy nickname, though.

Re: Superboy: Superboy finds a canine double of Krypto to throw off Lana's suspicions, but the fake double gets captured by a crook who hopes to use its "powers" to commit crimes.

Joseph Brian Scott said...

That's a hard way to make a crooked living.

Anonymous said...

Viva Adventure Sunday!

Sub-Mariner was briefly revived in the mid-50's, so that soldier could be reading him. It didn't last. He's just no Aquaman.

Happy dogs with capes. I'll have a permanent smile on my face today.

James Chatterton