Spotlight on Aquaman / Batman team-ups

I tend to give DC’s live-action movies a lot of crap in this blog, so I guess it’s only fair to admit I had a great time watching James Wan’s Aquaman. It’s a fun slice of schlock that manages to be both grandiose and silly at once, making it the most entertaining take on this kind of material since the Soviet Amphibian Man. Sure, the plot is cliched and some of the acting can be quite bad, but the movie more than makes up for it through the giddy attitude and flamboyant, spectacular visuals.

Superhero movies have finally begun to abandon the ‘realistic’ paradigm that first earned the genre mass audiences and relative respectability. Instead of merely translating the content of superhero comics into something recognizable onscreen, you now see daring attempts to capture their form by going berserk in sequences reminiscent of pop art. In recent years, both live-action (Doctor Strange, Ant-Man and the Wasp) and animated films (The Incredibles 2, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) have been exploring more experimental, psychedelic approaches… Aquaman is the latest blockbuster to join this movement, with its subaquatic travelling shots, physics-defying metropolis, and over-the-top battles involving thousands of sharks and giant seahorses.

Aquaman’s underwater techno-monarchy may seem a world away from Batman’s crusade against crime in Gotham City, but the two characters have been paired a few times throughout the years. My favorite team-ups took place on the pages of The Brave and the Bold, where Bob Haney kept writing the King of Atlantis into adventures that, more often than not, involved him fighting the Dark Knight due to some contrived reason…

The first of these – ‘The Sleepwalker from the Sea!’ (The Brave and the Bold #82, cover-dated February-March 1969) – is, believe it or not, a noir tale, complete with a femme fatale, a guy tormented by memories of murder, and the following open narration: ‘The Gotham City waterfront – the smell of rotting timbers and the rivers murmuring blend with the click-clackety of high heels and a waft of expensive perfume as a brutish figure stealthily follows a beautiful mini-skirted vision. And in turn is followed by the dread stalker of the night… the Batman!’

Sure, the tormented guy is actually Aquaman, who is being manipulated by his half-brother, Ocean Master (‘collector of men’s souls and women’s hearts’), through the guilt he feels over having accidentally killed a marine biologist, but the whole thing reads like a hardboiled yarn nonetheless. Neal Adams totally gets into the spirit of things, even drawing a noirish shot from the Dark Knight’s POV as he regains consciousness at one point:

The Brave and the Bold #82

Their second team-up – and the best of the lot – is a crime story as well. In ‘Last Jet to Gotham’ (The Brave and the Bold #114, cover-dated August September 1974), the Caped Crusader tries to rescue the passengers of an airplane that crashed into the ocean because one of them is a mobster he hopes to turn into a snitch (the crash was caused by Aquaman, hence the obligatory fighting). Bob Haney provides the usual plethora of twists – besides the mob, our heroes have to face the US Navy (who hates Aquaman because he opposed a plan to use porpoises as undersea war weapons) and foil a plot by minor officials from the fictitious country of Karatolia. The latter are involved in the drug trade and, upset over the fact that Washington paid their government to plow under its poppy crop, have decided to teach the Americans a lesson by hiding a hydrogen bomb in the airplane, disguised as a wine shipment.

Because this is a comic from the golden era of Jim Aparo art, we get a powerful illustration of the stakes:

The Brave and the Bold #114

The Cold War zeitgeist is clearly in the background of ‘Last Jet to Gotham’ – at one point, Aquaman even explains that, to protect his ocean domain, he has established his own secret intelligence network operating on land.

International tension moves to the forefront in ‘What Lurks below Buoy 13’ (The Brave and the Bold #126, cover-dated April 1976), in which an investigation into a gun-running ship leads Batman to an underwater satellite – an Atlantean super-weapon that could tip the ‘balance of terror’ by allowing one side of the Cold War to detect and knock out the other side’s fleets of atomic submarines. Naturally, everyone goes after the weapon – the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Nations, and even a group of surviving Nazis bent on starting World War III. Fortunately, the Caped Crusader and Aquaman manage to recover it and hide it in the Aquacave ‘until all nations learn to live in trust and peace!!!’

Jim Aparo shares art credits with John Calnan on this one and the result isn’t quite up to Aparo’s standards at the time, although we do get some neat Thunderball-like action:

The Brave and the Bold #126

Haney and Aparo brought the two heroes together again a couple of years later, in ‘Enigma of the Deathship!’ (The Brave and the Bold #142, cover-dated July-August 1978), where they spent most of the issue pointlessly fighting each other (again). It isn’t a particularly inspired tale, but at least nobody can accuse it of lacking underwater slugfests!

If you want a more thoughtful piece, I recommend ‘Cavernous’ (Gotham Knights #18, cover-dated August 2001), in which Batman asks Aquaman to help him recover the Batcave’s giant penny, lost during Gotham’s 1998 earthquake (depicted in Cataclysm). Devin Grayson writes an issue that’s light on action yet strong on character work, using the fact that Batman and Aquaman aren’t really all that close to suggest the former’s loneliness in the form of him finding a pretext to hang out with the latter.

In 2008, the animated show Batman: The Brave and the Bold reinvented Aquaman as an overenthusiastic adventurer, hilariously obsessed with chronicling his own saga. The spin-off comics featured this version of the character teaming up with the Caped Crusader, for example in order to reclaim his throne when his entire kingdom gets brainwashed by the Ocean Master (‘Atlantis Attacked!,’ Batman: The Brave and the Bold #22, cover-dated December 2010) or to help a ghost pirate get rid of his curse (‘Under the Sea,’ The All New Batman: The Brave and the Bold #8, cover-dated August 2011).

You’d think this upbeat, fun-loving version of Aquaman would be even more distant from the Dark Knight, but writer Sholly Fisch amusingly suggests that they’re not so different after all…

The All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold #8