Ballad of the Yellow Glove: All-Star Squadron #15

Aquaman's gloves mysteriously turn yellow while teaming up with the JSA and the, er, ASS in All-Star Squadron #15!

Maybe because he was dealing with his Earth-2 heroes, Arthur thought he'd make them feel more comfortable by donning the gloves of his parallel Earth counterpart? Yeah, that's it.

The Ballad of the Yellow Glove, Part 5

In the age of digital comics coloring, you don't see Aquaman (or any other character, for that matter) mis-colored much anymore, so let's take another trip back to the Good Old Days when printing screens were dropping like flies:

 

The Ballad of the Yellow Glove - JLA Edition

It's been a long time, but...welcome to another installment of The Ballad of the Yellow Glove!

This is our fourth time around at what I have come to call The Ballad of the Yellow Glove, where poor Aquaman was bedeviled by either an indifferent colorist or sloppy printing, leaving the Sea King to not look his best--something that rarely, if ever--seemed to happen to his more famous co-horts, like Superman or Batman. For today's segment, we're focusing on just the times when Aquaman mixed his yellows with his greens while doing his laundry up at the JLA Satellite:

(Justice League of America #125)

(Justice League of America #178)

(Justice League of America #179)

(Justice League of America #217)

(Justice League of America #190)

Okay, I admit--that last one is more Ballad of the Yellow Underpants, but it was too good not to use.

After each installment of The Ballad of the Yellow Glove, I keep thinking I won't possibly find any more. But, of course...

 

The Ballad of the Yellow Glove, Part 3

Welcome back to The Ballad of the Yellow Glove!

This is our third pass at what I have come to call The Ballad of the Yellow Glove, where poor Aquaman was bedeviled by either an indifferent colorist or sloppy printing, leaving the Sea King to not look his best--something that rarely, if ever--seemed to happen to his more famous co-horts, like Superman or Batman.

After each installment, I keep thinking I won't possibly find any more. But, of course...:

(Adventure Comics #462)

(Adventure Comics #463)

(Super Friends #2--blue gloves this time!)

(Super Friends #11--two different color gloves!)

Even in DC House Ads, Aquaman was not immune to the occasional coloring goof-up, like in these subscription ads:

...wow, this one's all over the map.

Even when Aquaman's glove was supposed to be colored yellow, that didn't stop the hiccups:

(More Fun Comics #76)

...and it wasn't just the comics! Here is in the 1977 children's book "Super Friends: Revenge of the Super-Foes"

And even the great Fred Hembeck got into the act!:

This ends our third take (in recording parlance) of The Ballad of Yellow Glove, we hope you sang along.

I'm sure this is the last installment of The Ballad of the Yellow Glove. There's just no way there's more examples out there, right? Right!

The Ballad of the Yellow Glove, Part 2

Welcome back to The Ballad of the Yellow Glove!

This is our second pass at what I have come to call The Ballad of the Yellow Glove, where poor Aquaman was bedeviled by either an indifferent colorist or sloppy printing, leaving the Sea King to not look his best--something that rarely, if ever--seemed to happen to his more famous co-horts, like Superman or Batman.

After finding eight or so examples the first time, I assumed there weren't that many more instances still to be discovered. But I was happily(?) wrong--here are some more times when Aquaman looked like he mixed his color on Laundry Day:

(Adventure Comics #462)

(DC Challenge #12)

(Showcase #33)

(Invasion! #2)

Can't quite make out Aquaman in that large crowd? Let's zoom in:

This next one really hurt: on the editorial page of Aquaman Special #1 (1988), they dug out one of the classic Jose Luis Garcia Lopez stock shots to help fill the space. A nice gesture, yet:

And it wasn't just American printers! In France they did it, too:

...but it didn't stop with yellow gloves. Sometimes it was...yellow arms!

Or even...blue legs!

...and on the cover of the book, no less! That really hurts.


This ends our second take (in recording parlance) of The Ballad of Yellow Glove, we hope you sang along!

The Ballad of the Yellow Glove

If you'll indulge me for a moment (ha! only a moment?), today's post isn't about any Aquaman comic book, or piece of merchandise, TV appearance, or reference in pop culture.

No, this is something that I have always associated with Aquaman, all through my life, an unfathomably piece of obscura that possibly only I have ever noticed.

I call this little piece of Aquaman history The Ballad of the Yellow Glove.

I call it that because it is a sad tale, one that always reminded me of Aquaman's less-than-top-rung status he sometimes had in the DC universe.

It all started on the cover to the historic Brave and the Bold #28, where the colorist mistakenly colored Aquaman's gloves yellow:

The unofficial start of the Earth-1 Aquaman was a few months earlier, over in Adventure Comics. He had been given a new origin, and it was this Aquaman who got tapped to be a founding member in the new Justice League.

Obviously, the colorist got confused, or got handed the wrong reference, for all throughout the story, Aquaman's gloves are yellow. Soon DC would correct this, but the indiscriminate yellow glove would continue to follow Aquaman throughout his career:

Sometimes, like in the panel above, it was fairly easy to miss and ignore. Although this particular mistake happened twice in the same issue:

Every time some reader would point this out, DC would always claim the colorist did it right, it was the color separators that goofed. I wonder how they felt about always been thrown under the bus?

Sometimes, it would happen at big dramatic moments, like this pin-up shot from the first JLA Annual:

...as an obsessive comic book reader, this kind of thing drove me nuts! Why do they keep getting this wrong??

You'd think, as comics printing got more streamlined and more sophisticated in the 80s, it would've happened less, but no:

One of the most egregious was when Aquaman reformed the JLA, and they redid the JLA Mail Room header to reflect the old school JLA-style headers. Except...:

Bad enough it happened here, but then no one at DC ever bothered to correct it. So there it stayed, every month, for the last two years of the book.

I know, I know; I'm making way too big a deal over this--it was just a stupid mistake where someone would drop out the blue plate over one of his gloves, so that was left was the yellow.

But I did notice...these kind of things never happened to Superman or Batman. They were always colored right. So as a kid, it always made feel like Aquaman was the underdog, always deserved a little more attention than he ever got.

And it did make me feel better to see that at times he wasn't the only one who suffered this indignity:

If any of you have examples of this that I've missed, please scan them in and email them to me! I'd love to add more verses to the ballad...