“His life is the constant, horrible drone of unspeakable, unstoppable death,” writes Andrew Thaler, aka the Southern Fried Scientist, in one of the more brutal superhero world-meets-reality tomes I’ve seen around. Specifically, he’s talking here about Aquaman being cursed with the ability to communicate telepathically with sea life, that “Aquaman can see the scars left by every trawl, can feel the life being sucked out of the ocean, knows the name of every fish, dolphin, and crab whose life has been taken by our nets and lines.” He also has to eat well over 30 pounds of tuna a day — ‘cause he swims so fast and burns so many calories — provided ocean-acidification hasn’t caved in his teeth by now. Which is surely has.Meanwhile, being constantly subject to the bends has turned Aquaman’s bones into sponges; he’s extremely hypothermic; osmotic pressure (pressure caused by an imbalance in the concentration of molecules in the ocean and Aquaman’s body) is turning his flesh into Aquaman-jerky. All of this he deals with in solitude, with no human world double-life to offset his oceanic wandering. And somehow he isn’t a villain. Thaler writes:If Superman existed to show us how high the human spirit could fly, and Batman to show us the darkness within even our most noble, Aquaman is here to show us the world that triumphs in our absence. The ocean is not ours, and no matter how great our technology, we will never master it as we have mastered land, but Aquaman has. Through this lonely ocean wanderer, we can experience a world that we can never truly command. In many ways, Aquaman was stronger than the Man of Steel and darker than the Dark Knight. He knew loneliness that the orphan and the alien exile never could.And all of this is just baseline hell, not taking into account future global warming effects, which might finally render our hero powerless. Read the rest here.
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