Thursday, January 09, 2014

Reboot


Joe also asks:

Are there any heros that if possible you would change anything about them (backstory, powers, personality, morals, etc), if so who would you change, what would you change about them, and why?

I did do a bit of this with the Scarecrow in Detective Comics #835 and #836, but I have two characters definitely in mind. If I could, I would love to take on either Namor, the Sub-Mariner and/or Aquaman and rebuild them from the ground up.

Of the two, Aquaman could use the reboot the most. I like Namor as a character with his arrogance and hot temper. I also like some of his supporting cast and villains, what I don't like, and never had, is the whole underwater world of Atlantis and its environs. These same problems apply to Aquaman as well.

What do Atlanteans look so human? It's not really efficient for living underwater, or swimming around. Why do they wear clothes made of cloth? They'd be a hindrance. They also sleep on beds with sheets and pillows, sit at tables to eat food off of plates and drink wine out of cups which never seems to dilute into the surrounding sea water. They carry steel weapons in the highly corrosive salt water of the ocean. They have stairs for crying out loud. Why? This is stuff that bothered me even as a little kid. It should all be done away with. So should all of the hundreds of other humanoid races beneath the sea. It's like the Mos Eisley cantina down there. Why so many on one planet?

Aquaman has other reasons to be rebooted, he's been reduced to such a generic embarrassment that that's the angle that was specifically played against in the New 52 relaunch. His personality still seems generic to me. He also seems like he'd be the easier of the two to fix without mucking up established continuity.

I actually have a lot of ideas for what I'd do, but I'm not going to offer them up here for someone else to utilize.

I'd really love a shot at rebuilding either of these two characters and their environs from the ground up.


2 comments:

joe said...

i would like to say thank you very much for all your responses and they are fairly quick and insightful and also actually pertain to the question.

John Rozum said...

No problem, Joe. That's what I'm here for.