Aquaman Special #1 - 1988

Comics Weekend "The Missing Peace" by Gary Cohn & Dan Mishkin, George Freeman, and Mark Pacella

Hard to believe I've never gotten around to the 1988 Aquaman Special before now, but somehow I hadn't. Seeing it on my "to do" shelf for the one millionth time finally got me to sit down and start scanning.

This was Aquaman's first solo story since the 1986 Pozner/Hamilton mini-series. For various reasons, a second mini by that same team was not to be, so this one-shot was put together to help bridge the end of that series and where DC ultimately wanted Aquaman to be--namely, back in his classic orange and green suit.

But before we get to that, we find ourselves on the moon. Yes, the moon:

Aquaman--with the help of Mera--rescues the crew of the ship and drops them safely off with the Coast Guard.

On their way home, Arthur expresses how "Good...free..brand-new!" he feels, and as any regular Aquaman reader knows, this is a big change for the man.

We get a brief recap of the earlier mini-series, and Aquaman's only regret is that his brother Orm had to die in the battle that caused Aquaman to experience this transformation.

Back in Atlantis, Arthur expresses interest in reclaiming the throne, but Vulko seems a little uncertain, leaving Aquaman frustrated:

...a bravura sequence, courtesy artists Freeman and Pacella.

We see this mysterious, "other" Aquaman still floating through this alternate reality, but this time, our Aquaman seems to feel it.

That feeling is interrupted by a telepathic distress call from a pod of porpoises in danger, and Aquaman and Mera head out to find them.

They are startled to find a massive, glowing, pink orb, which seems to pulse with life. As he begins to get closer, Aquaman is blasted in the back by a Russian mini-sub nearby.

Aquaman easily wrecks the sub, and forces it to the surface. Mera takes pains to surround the sub in a hardwater bubble, so the men inside don't die from the sudden decompression. Aquaman then lashes out at Mera, and she worries about his sudden unstable mood.

They then discover a typhoon-class nuclear sub that looks to be protecting the orb, and they climb inside it. There they meet a scientist named Yuri Popov, who explains he is the research assistant to Professor Vladmir Magus, who has been studying parapsychological phenomena under the sea.

Magus discovered four mystical artifacts buried in the seabed, and when he aligned them a certain way, a huge burst of power came forth, transforming Magus into the giant orb!

Aquaman thinks those might be the same mystic artifacts that Orm used against him, so he heads down to investigate:

Face to face with Magus, Aquaman is perplexed by Magus' talk of a "soul-self" with Magus claims was split asunder by his battle with his brother.

Aquaman vows to find the mystic artifacts and separate them, which will remove Magus' powers. But, Magus warns, doing so will kill Aquaman's other half, and himself!

Aquaman realizes that maybe what Magus says is true--there is some part of his personality missing. A conscience, for lack of a better word, that guides both his emotions and ego. But before he can worry about that too much, he must find the mystic artifacts.

They lie in his mind's eye, inside four structures representing various signs of the zodiac: Taurus, Capricorn, Gemini, and Leo.

Aquaman experiences another mood swing, rushing headlong into Taurus' palace. He is grabbed and thrown by the bull before he can retrieve it, and he has to force himself to remember that it was his impatience that caused him to fail.

He then heads into the palace of Capricorn, where he is met by a phalanx of beautiful woman, who try to seduce him. He sees in the distance, a statue of his queen Mera, holding the magic crystal!:

The old goat does what the bull did, and tosses Aquaman out of the palace. He has failed again.

He then battles the lion, but lets his thirst for a fight do him in--he fails a third time.

He is knocked out, and wakes to find himself in the presence of Magus, who has created an alternate world commensurate with his ego--Magus is now wearing a super-villain-like costume, perched upon a giant hammer and sickle.

Magus then shows Aquaman that his astral twin is near, but that doesn't stop him from trying to fight Magus directly.

Magus wonders if this quest--even if it means self-immolation--might be a form of suicide? Maybe all the guilt Aquaman has felt over the years is finally causing Aquaman to be so reckless, because he thinks, deep down, he'd be better off dead?

Magus uses this moment of doubt to attack, but its just the slap in the face Arthur needs to snap out of his funk. But instead of fighting Magus, Aquaman sidesteps him and goes after the fourth mystical artifact--the Gemini Seal!

Once removed, Magus' entire universe disappears into nothingness. The giant orb begins to disintegrate:

...between this, and the Pozner/Hamilton mini-series, Aquaman was well situated for a fresh start: writers wouldn't have to feel bogged down from all the grim back story that had built up over the years, and simply write a more fun-loving, adventure-driven character, with his beautiful queen at his side. And in his original costume, to boot!

But of course, that didn't happen.


Re-reading this special, I appreciate all over again how well it supports the mini-series' themes, but moves Aquaman back to his original set-up and look, something DC specifically wanted writers Cohn & Mishkin to do.

The art I find phenomenal--I've always liked George Freeman's work, but he renders a terrific, fluid Aquaman, and a absolutely stunning Mera. Freeman tended to do work just in specials or annuals (perhaps he was too slow for a monthly book?), which is too bad, he would've been a great choice as regular Aquaman artist.

Teen Titans Spotlight #18 - Jan. 1988

Comics Weekend Aqualad teams up with his former mentor in this issue of Teen Titans Spotlight!

This issue of Teen Titans Spotlight stretches the format quite a bit, in that this issue is pretty much an Aquaman and Aqualad story, and could've run in an Aquaman solo series, had there been one at the time.

As the cover indicates, this was one of the approximately ten thousand Millennium tie-in books, featuring ancillary stories involving the main baddies of the series, the Manhunters.

This issue's story is "Sea Change" by our pal Dan Mishkin, Gary Cohn, with art by Art Thibert, and it opens with Aqualad in the grips of a giant squid, who is not only ignoring Garth's mental commands, but seems completely oblivious to them!

As the squid starts to crush Garth into paste, (preparing its dinner, presumably), he is rescued by an old friend:

...Aquaman!

Not a minute after Aquaman gets the squid to ease up, Garth gets mad at Arthur because he perceives his old mentor as humoring him, when Garth insists he could've eventually freed himself, if given another minute.

Garth tells Arthur that his mental powers have started going haywire ever since he was held prisoner by Mento (a nice tag-back to the previous issue of TTS, that we talked about yesterday), but their discussion is interrupted when they notice massive throngs of fish all hurriedly headed in one direction.

Suddenly they are hit by an explosion, and when they investigate, they see something they didn't expect:

Inside these mechanical jellyfish are Manhunters, and Aquaman clues Garth in on some of the events that took place in Millennium #1. One of the jellyfish then blast our heroes with electricity, knocking them out.

The Manhunters then proceed with their mission, which involves them digging into the sea floor with high-powered lasers.

Aquaman and Aqualad eventually wake up, and see what the Manhunters are after--a spaceship that has been buried under tons of undersea rubble! The Manhunters get it free, and use their jellyfish to start carrying it away. Aquaman then whips out the old "finny friends" bit:

While Arthur uses the fish to slow the Manhunters down, the two of them swoop in and start busting some mechanical heads.

They are met by some specially-designed Manhunters, like one with crab-like pincers, and another with scary, shark-like teeth. Luckily Aquaman and Aqualad defeat them as well.

Aquaman asks Garth if he notices the brief flashes of an alien mind that he experienced when in contact with the jellyfish. Garth says yes, and Aquaman surmises that these jellyfish are at least partly real living creatures, and susceptible to the Sea King's mental commands!

He tries this, but finds his mental powers are being blocked, and then thrown back at him, like feedback! This stuns Aquaman, and he lets out a painful scream.

Aqualad is now being attacked by the re-grouped Manhunters, and he decides to go for broke--he grabs the one of the jellyfish's tentacles, causing their tremendous power to "break" the mental block Garth has been experiencing!

While this is enormously painful, it works, and Garth commands some killer whales to attack the Manhunters, as well as taking control of the jellyfish:

Aquaman then wakes up, hands him off to a friendly octopus, and then finishes off the Manhunters.

The Manhunters don't take defeat well, and they blow themselves up! Sore losers, those Manhunters.

Aquaman returns, and guesses that the massive explosion the Manhunters buried themselves in was to hide what they were doing, but they resign themselves to never knowing what.

But they are in possession of the recovered spaceship, which they take topside to deliver to some of the other heroes involved in this escapade. Aquaman realizes that Garth beat the Manhunters, rescued the jellyfish, captured the saucer, and regained his powers!

He says: "I'm proud of you, Garth!" Garth replies: "I'm proud of me, too!" The end.

A fun issue, and it works on its own without having to read all the Millennium books, which is nice. Thibert provides solid superhero art, reminiscent a bit of Mike Grell's work on the character back in Adventure Comics.

DC Comics Presents #48 - 1982

Since we featured an interview with Dan Mishkin earlier this week, I thought this week's Comic Friday would be the perfect time to talk about one of the two Aquaman stories co-written by Dan!

The first was this, DC Comics Presents #48, which was of course the Superman team-up title. The story is called "Eight Arms of Conquest", written by Mishkin and his writing partner Gary Cohn, and drawn by Irv Novick and Frank McLaughlin.

Aquaman runs afoul of some very hostile octopi, and is taken control of by them! He later smashes into the lab of a Dr. Marche, who works at (of course) S.T.A.R. Labs (didn't every scientist in the DCU work at S.T.A.R.?), but luckily Superman is there and manages to put Arthur in his place.

Supes and Aquaman decide to investigate these weird octopi, where after a pitched battle they discover that these are no ordinary hostile octopi--they are space aliens that crashed into the ocean that, over time, devolved into octopi (they'll do that sometimes), still bent on world conquest! Superman of course has a problem with this, and just as the whole thing starts to heat up that troublesome Dr. Marche shows up (yes, underwater, piloting some weird deep-sea craft--you know, S.T.A.R. shouldn't leave those things lying around with the keys inside).

The battle is a bit of a stand-still after Superman gets knocked out. As I mentioned in the interview with Dan, it's at this moment that writers Mishkin and Cohn really broke some new ground for Aquaman, albeit unheralded. Aquaman realizes that he can "tap into" the ancestral part of a human's brain that comes from sea-dwellers! With that, he can take control of another person:










...Grant Morrison came up with this in an early issue of JLA, and I remember reading it and thinking what an imaginative, well-thought-out execution of Aquaman's powers. What a shock it was to see that Mishkin and Cohn did it first almost fifteen years earlier! It's a shame that more writers have not thought to explore this angle--it would certainly make Aquaman even more of a powerful, interesting figure in the DCU. The next time someone says "All he can do is talk to fish!", Aquaman can give the guy a seizure or make him go see Norbit.

But I digress.

Anyway, Aquaman pulls this trick, and it works, "using" Superman to do the heavy-lifting that Arthur can't. They defeat the octopi, and Superman finishes the the job by transporting the aliens to a "habitable water world where they can thrive in peace." Dr. Marche vows to "stay in my lab from now on", and Aquaman cheerfully seconds that, resisting the urge to take over Dr. Marche's brain and make him drown himself. Don't piss off Aquaman.

There was also a back-up feature, the ongoing "Whatever Happened To..." that was always one of my favorites. This issue features the Black Pirate, in a tale written by Roy Thomas and superbly drawn by Alfredo Alcala. This feature, exploring some of the forgotten characters of the DCU, was always one of my favorites; I'd love to see them collected in some trade paperback.

All in all, a very fun issue, with Aquaman well handled by Mishkin and Cohn. It's too bad they didn't get a chance to write the character a lot more!

Aquaman Shrine Interview with Dan Mishkin - 2007

In the newest Back Issue! (#21), there's an interview with writing team Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn on their creation Blue Devil. As I read (and enjoyed) the interview, I recalled that Mishkin & Cohn were responsible for at least one Aquaman tale--the Aquaman Special from 1988, the first follow-up to the excellent mini-series by Neal Pozner and Craig Hamilton.

I then did a little more research (i.e., digging through my Aquaman comics) and found that they also wrote DC Comics Presents #48, starring Superman and Aquaman! I figured that was enough to justify contacting Dan (whose myspace page was listed in BI) and begging him for an interview. Luckily, Dan generously agreed:

The Aquaman Shrine: What comics have been the most fun to write? Were books like Amethyst or Blue Devil for instance better/more fun because you were in from the ground floor?

Dan Mishkin: Working on the characters that I've created has always tended to be the most enjoyable for me, both because the connection with the characters is so strong and because the possibilities of where there lives can go are a lot less limited than with an established character. But I have to say that my early opportunities to write Superman (with Julie Schwartz as my editor) and Batman (with Dick Giordano) were very exciting because, hey, they were Superman and Batman and for some reason DC was letting ME tell their adventures.

AS: How did you write with your partner Gary Cohn? Did one of you do dialogue, one do plot, or did you mix it up?

DM: We pretty much mixed it up. Generally, we'd talk over plots together--we're able to bounce ideas off each other extremely well--and then one of us would write a first draft of a full script or a plot and the other would revise it. Gary tends to be a better at the big idea stuff than I am, and I'm probably a better detail person, so we had some complimentary skills, but looking back at any particular comic I'd be hard pressed to say which one of us did what.

AS: You wrote DC Comics Presents #48 with Superman and Aquaman. How did that come about? Did DC come to you and say "we want a Superman/Aquaman story" or did you have any input as to the guest star?

DM: This is getting to be a pretty long time ago, and my oldest child was born in the middle of scripting the issue, so it's hard to dredge up a lot of the details (though I do remember calling Julie from the hospital to explain nervously why the script was going to be late).

I think it was probably Julie who chose the guest star in this case. As for how Gary and I got the opportunity in the first place, it was kind of a natural progression from having written a lot of one-shot stories for the House of Mystery-type books and then moving up to a superhero book that also had self-contained stories and no regular writer. I think I wrote or co-wrote about half the issues of DC Comics Presents during that next year.

AS: Was it more/less fun writing a self-contained story without any connection to ongoing storylines?

DM: Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, but I probably like doing self-contained stories better because they force you to get things right rather than letting you tell yourself that you'll figure it out eventually--although sometimes the same tendencies that can lead to sloppy plotting and pacing in continued stories can push you to a brilliant stroke when you realize you've written yourself into a corner.

The ideal for me--and I think we did this well in the early issues of Blue Devil--is the Silver Age Marvel books that had self-contained stories with a new villain in each issue and a beginning, middle and end, but that also advanced a larger arc in the life of the hero.

AS: Back in the late 90s, Grant Morrison had Aquaman use his mental powers to basically "shut the brain down" of an opponent. I thought that was incredibly inventive and expansive view of Aquaman's abilities, so it was with shock that I see that you did it first in DCCP #48, with Aquaman pulling the same trick with Superman! Did this "thinking outside the box" idea occur to you as you were writing it?










DM: I don't remember any of the details of writing this story, and rereading it didn't help, unfortunately. But I do remember that Julie was very involved in working out plots with writers, and this would be especially true with writers he was working with for the first time.

The important details of the story would probably have been worked out in Julie's office after Gary and I pitched some one-sentence idea (it might not even have been a sentence, but a phrase like "super-octopuses from outer space"), and which parts came from me and which from Gary and which from Julie I don't think we'll ever know. But Julie was also a big believer in thinking outside the box--in coming up with the twist we've never seen before--so he should probably get credit as instigator even if that particular bit wasn't his.

AS: How did you end up writing the Aquaman Special in 1988?

DM: I think it came our way because I was already doing work with the editor, Barbara Randall. I'm not sure how Barbara ended up with the character.

AS: Had you read the Pozner/Hamilton mini-series to that point? Were you instructed in any way to follow in the direction that story had been going?

DM:I'd read the miniseries--in fact, I read everything DC was putting out in the 80s, and would have done so even if I hadn't been on their comp list. And I think the instruction was just to find a way to move forward with the character, not necessarily to stick with Neal's sensibilities (in fact, I'm pretty sure that the decision to put the character back in his orange and green costume -- which definitely went against the miniseries -- did come from higher up).

This is of course a running story with Aquaman, Green Arrow, and some other longtime DC characters: they hold some interest for readers and are even much loved by some of those readers, but they can't seem to make it as lead characters; and since no one really knows why that is exactly, editors and writers are always trying to find a way to portray the characters that exploits whatever it is we love about them while sharply defining them in a new and hopefully appealing way.

I suspect there's a lesson to be learned from the fact that it keeps happening and keeps not working. For myself, I'd be happy if somebody would bring back the Aquaman of the Steve Skeates/Jim Aparo days (preferably Skeates himself).

AS: Was there any indication you would do more Aquaman if the special was successful, sales-wise? Would you have wanted to?

DM: Nobody said that to me, but I think there's always an assumption that if you can light a fire with a character in a special, there would be interest in doing more. And I certainly would have given it a try. Once I invest my time thinking through a character so that I can write a story about him or her--and Gary and I certainly looked at Aquaman's past and what made him tick in preparation for this particular story--I feel like I have an ongoing investment in that character and an interest in writing more.

AS: Who were some of your favorite artists who you've gotten to work with?

DM: I've loved working with Kubert School grads like Tom Mandrake, Jan Duursema and Ron Randall, and the experience of working with Ernie Colon on Amethyst and Paris Cullins on Blue Devil was great. I also had the thrill of having the great Steve Ditko draw my very first published story, and working with other long-established pros like Curt Swan, Jim Aparo and Don Heck, who impressed me with how much energy and heart they put into their work even late in their careers.

AS: What are you working on now?

DM: I'm writing the sequel to The Forest King, my children's prose novel that was published by Actionopolis last fall, and I'm doing research for another young adult novel that's not an action-adventure genre story. I have a some comics pitches and proposals in the works or being looked at by various publishers, but I expect to spend more time with prose in the near term.

Thanks so much to Dan for his time and to him and Gary for their great stories!