Adventure Comics #234 - March 1957

Comics Weekend "The Aqua-Mailman" by ? and Ramona Fradon.

It's Adventure Sunday!

Okay, this is slightly embarrassing.

As some of you more familiar with blogging probably already know, I don't use original paper copies of Adventure Comics as the image source for these posts: it would simply take much too long to scan, correct, and upload the hundreds and hundreds of pages just for these Adventure Sundays alone.

So I use scans of the original books, helpfully provided to me by Aqua-Fans over the years. Over time, I've received enough files from people that I now have a complete run of Aquaman in Adventure Comics, and that's what I've been using for these posts.

For some reason, every single digital version of Adventure Comics #215 (Aug. 1955) available to me features the story "The Super-Aquarium" as the Aquaman segment. But that's not correct--that story actually ran in this issue, #234! I don't know why this substitution was made, or why I didn't catch it while looking up the issue on Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics. So when I did the Adventure Sunday segment on #215, I was talking about the story that I should be talking about this week, for #234.

Of course, that means at the time I missed the story that did run in Adventure Comics #215, so I decided to right the ship by talking about that story, "The Aqua-Mailman", today. Confused? Me, too, but let's just keep moving:

Jim Blake keeps getting harder and harder deliveries to make, and contemplates packing it all in. But Aquaman refuses to give up, even when the task is to deliver a wreath on a sunken ship, which is now crushed under an iceberg:

...and so ends another adventure with Aquaman!

This is an incredibly wordy story (check out pages three and six, which reach Skeates-ian levels of verbosity), which doesn't leave Ramona Fradon a lot of room to really kick it up a notch--so we have to settle for her normal top-flight work on the strip.

I like the idea that there are teeming masses of crooks just hanging around large bodies of water, just waiting to exploit other people's plans or ideas. I wonder, does this hold true as the areas get smaller? According to these Aquaman stories, the ocean has hundreds of bad guys hanging out. So that means there's dozens around lakes, a small group along rivers, and then just one or two really sad crooks waiting to run a scam around the local pond.


Sorry about the story mix-up; The Aquaman Shrine is running an internal investigation to come up with answers as to how this mistake could have happened, and the people accountable will be sacked. Press conference to follow.