A true restart would have been a better choice than this exaggerated mishmash of the worst superhero cliches. The confusing art has the 'camera' zooming around almost randomly. Veitch goes overboard with poetic descriptions, sea references and puns, and laughable character dialect, while the story relies too heavily on deus ex machina. (Since this is a superhero comic, the Lady is well-built and wears revealing strips of fabric.) Everything in this book is either high-volume exaggeration or sappy mystical peacekeeping. All of this is a prologue to establishing the new status quo, in which Aquaman fights for the Lady of the Lake and her magical healing water. Never mind the logic gap in a group of sea-dwellers who hate the surface world (as hammered home in the opening dialogue) being so mad over having to live underwater that they keep trying to hunt down their former king.

They've stuck him, wounded, on a reef, and all his formerly friendly fish hate him. The book begins with Aquaman sentenced to death by his former subjects as a result of these events. After seeing this daunting list of old story lines, readers who haven't been scared away will understand the need for a character update. In the aftermath of the Obsidian Agewhen the King of the Seven Seas was forced to re-sink Atlantis in order to save itAquaman is now hated by his former subjects and exiled from the life-giving ocean he once called home. An introduction summarizes previous events: Aquaman's death, his travel back in time, a fight with an evil sorceress and the raising and re-sinking of Atlantis. Battered and left to perish on an exposed reef, Aquaman discovers, to his horror, that all the denizens of the deep are instructed to attack him without. The classic saga that saw Aquaman exiled from his own kingdom now gets a new edition in AQUAMAN: THE WATERBEARER. Aquaman, DC's underwater hero, gets an overcomplicated revamp inspired by Arthurian legend in this collection.

Aquaman by Rick Veitch