Aquaman is Dead, Long Live Aquaman

All respect to the Pacific’s favorite son, Aquaman, and I don’t mean that to be facetious. Yes, Aquaman was the butt of a lot of water-based jokes for a long time, but the character has had a recent resurgence of respectability and frankly, awesomeness. The I-Guess-We’re-Not-Calling-It-The-DC-New-52 has produced a lot of groan-worthy, controversial and just flat out not-great books, but one really good thing that came out of it was Geoff Johns writing Arthur Curry back to badass relevance. Johns has since left the book with a few writers following him, but the Aquaman comic has continued to be of good quality since. Even while Arthur Curry continued to be a straight white male (ok, fine male Aquarian) superhero in the newest iteration, like the vast majority of comic book heroes from the major publishers, it never raised any alarm bells for me. I mean, this was Aquaman fam, dude just got back into the big leagues, I had other diversity battles to fight. Then came the news that Aquaman was not going to be the movie star version of a lean and incredibly handsome white heartthrob who loves the ocean (Lord knows we’ve got enough of those running around Hollywood). Instead we got Jason Momoa, who 14 people might know from playing Conan, but you probably know him from ripping a dude’s throat out as Khal Drogo on Game of Thrones. Or as Daenery’s husband. Surely one of those. At any rate, my first reaction that he was being cast as Aquaman was in the neighborhood of…”Oh.”

Fast forwa…