Historically, Aquaman has been a blond-haired white man, an image largely iterated by white creatives behind the screen and page. But that’s begun to change in the recent years, as what ‘Aquaman’ is and can be has become more varied, and less fixed. For a whole generation now, ‘Aquaman’ means Jason Momoa, the brown-skinned Native Hawaiian and Polynesian star. This iteration has been mostly shaped by James Wan, an Asian-Australian director, with the Aquaman film being the first and only post-Nolan DC effort to cross a $1 billion at the box office.

The sea change isn’t just limited to film. Over the past two years, Aquaman, largely written by white writers for decades, has been exclusively handled by Black and Brown writers.

And the results have been fresh and quite interesting, as they complicate the ideas and thematic interests of the enterprise. So, we’re going to dive into three fantastic modernizations of the world of Aquaman and consider their implications. For these are all books filled with ideas and evolutions that ask us to reassess our assumptions of what Aquaman stories can be.

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Aquaman: The Becoming is a 6-issue series starring Jackson Hyde and his journey to becoming Aquaman, as told by the creative team of Brandon Thomas, Diego Olortegui, Adriano Lucas, and Andworld Design.

Black Manta is a 6-issue series starring David Hyde and his journey as he comes to terms with his legacy, as told by the creative team of Chuck Brown, Valentine de Landro, Matthew Dow Smith, Marissa Louise, and Clayton Cowles

Aquaman: Andromeda is a 3-issue prestige series at DC’s Black Label imprint starring Arthur Curry and Black Manta as they deal with an undersea disaster, as told by the creative teams of Ram V, Christian Ward, and Aditya Bidikar

Aquaman: The Becoming and Black Manta are ‘mainline’ titles that are both written by Black writers, whilst Andromeda is an ‘evergreen’ title written by an Indian writer. And they all offer rich, varied views and lenses by which to understand what the very word ‘Aquaman’ entails.

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The bridge between worlds

Jackson Hyde first debuted as Kaldur’ahm in Brandon Vietti, Greg Weisman, and Phil Bourossa’s Young Justice animated series. He was an update of the classic ‘Aqualad’ idea for a new generation of the 2010s, and a long due expansion of the Aquaman mythology. Jackson was a dynamite concept: ‘What if Black Manta, the ultimate nemesis of Aquaman, had a son? And what if that son was Aquaman's heir?’. This concept suggests countless dramatic possibilities, as two men are caught in a cycle of eternal hatred, with a boy trapped in-between.

Aquaman, as an idea, is about being a bridge between two worlds. It’s about someone who connects, who binds, and has to make sense of two disparate halves of themselves. For Arthur, as the child of an Atlantean mother and a human father, those two elements are Atlantis and the Surface World. And he eternally struggles with acceptance and questions of identity, in trying to bridge those two aspects.

As good legacy ideas do, the concept of Jackson Hyde pushed that idea even further, with him being the son of a Xebelian mother and the human Black Manta. But there was a second layer upon which he evolved the concept too, beyond any Atlantean/Human tensions that Arthur dealt with. Jackson is an immigrant with roots in Xebel, an underwater kingdom caught in a state of perpetual war with Atlantis. Like Arthur Curry, he is a boy stuck between two fundamentally opposed worlds. And beyond that, he's caught between his two father figures, Arthur Curry and Black Manta, too.

Jackson is an evolution of the fundamental ideas that make Aquaman so rich and dramatically compelling. But he's rarely been given a solo focus as a character, beyond a terrific standalone/out of continuity YA OGN You Brought Me The Ocean. That changed when writer Brandon Thomas came along. Thomas would be the first Black writer to not only get to write Jackson in a major capacity, but also to take a major, meaningful crack at Aquaman in general.

This is something Thomas was very cognizant of coming onto the title:

“For me, personally, there’s always an additional responsibility whenever I’m doing a Black or Brown characters, especially for these major companies, because I know that sometimes that opportunity is…let’s just say there will probably be very few Black writers of Jackson Hyde stories, so I do feel it’s very important to kind of establish a baseline for his personality and the way he reacts to certain things, and the way he is gonna be depicted in the series. I’m always very cognizant of the kind of imagery, the kind that Black and Brown heroes are allowed to express in these stories.

I’ve said this a lot, but I’ll say it again. One of my big pet peeves about mainstream comics, mainstream genre material in general is sometimes you get a lot of shrinkage, when it comes to stories featuring Black and Brown characters. As much as I love Luke Cage, for instance, there’s something that really bothers me about how his purview and his scope of operations is just like…Harlem. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I think you know what I’m saying. So I feel a responsibility, when I have an opportunity to get my hands on these characters to make sure that they are not kind of limited, in any way. Any time I have a character like Jackson Hyde, you can see it in the Future State stories too, wherein the characters go to all these different worlds, they’re interacting with all these different environments and cultures and species and villains, my Black characters are always traveling through time. So I just want to try to make sure that Jackson and his scope is never limited. - Brandon Thomas

And in keeping with that spirit, Thomas and his creative collaborators, with editors Andrea Shea and Marquis Draper, try to do something bold by making the story about the complications between diaspora and home. This shift adds specificity and heightens the weight of the eternal struggle between worlds that Aquaman is famous for.

To further layer and complicate the core struggle of being torn between worlds, the team introduces Delilah, Jackson’s half-sister from his mother’s side who still resides in Xebel. Delilah proves to be a new modern evolution on a classic Aquaman idea like Orm The Oceanmaster, the Half-Sibling who represents one aspect or side of the hero’s respective worlds, and makes them question their place in it.

But where Orm was a figure merely rooted in sibling rivalry/conflict, Delilah becomes more complicated, as Thomas and his team frame her as The Family That Didn’t Move, in contrast to Jackson’s immigrant background, presenting the difficult questions and conflicts between diaspora and those rooted in their homelands.

In The Becoming, Atlantis is no longer just a broad strokes mythic magical kingdom of urban fantasy to contrast against the ordinary mundanity of the Surface World. It is instead framed as almost an underwater imperial power in perpetual war with other nations in the sea. It is granted an explicit political context and history, and the layering complicates the underwater setting and grounds it in a reality.

What is it like when the place you now live in is in perpetual Forever War with the place you immigrated from? When your people are unfairly demonized as murderers, terrorists, and killers?

In representing the surface, Arthur was representing the broad archetypal idea of ‘humanity’ itself, and so Atlanteans mocking ‘Surface Dwellers’ is a dig aimed at humanity at large, all of us. But that’s not the case with Jackson, who is representing a very specific place and a specific people and culture- who are unfairly Othered and demonized. The mockery aimed at Xebelians is much closer to the realities of actual immigrants, particularly Black immigrants.

The prejudice Arthur faces for being ‘human’ and Jackson faces for being ‘Xebelian’ are radically different, and the latter is a much more considered expression of that idea of prejudice as experienced in reality. And this is also why it is important that this creative team made Xebel less an abstract idea by capturing the difficulties and internal corruptions and failures of movements in war-torn states caught in conflict with imperial powers like Atlantis.

That’s a radically different conception of the character than under Arthur Curry. Jackson is not just caught between the ordinary and the magical (Atlantis). His realities are informed by his Black queer immigrant truth, with the creative team taking central Aquaman ideas and evolving them to speak to the truth of diaspora.

The False Prophet Of Revolution

With the transformation of the idea of Aquaman, there must also follow a reimagining of his greatest nemesis- Black Manta. Historically speaking, Manta’s a messy character. Many know him as a shallow meme screaming ‘How’s the wife and kid?’ But beyond that simplistic spite focus, Manta has struggled to be a character, particularly given he’s almost exclusively been handled by White creators.

Many know of Black Manta killing Aquababy, as chronicled in the 1977 Adventure Comics #452 by David Michelinie and Jim Aparo. But that very same issue is the one where it is revealed that he is a Black man and we get his actual motivations and drive as a character, as we find out he wants to take over the oceans and Atlantis so that Black people could live and reign in the seas without being oppressed. And then right after this? The cartoonish baby-killing would commence. If that feels absurd, it’s because it is.

Such problematized approaches to Manta would persist, as decades later under the stewardship of Rick Veitch and Yvel Guichet in 2003’s Aquaman #8, it would be revealed that Black Manta was Autistic, with the work positing that Aquaman could save Manta by ‘curing’ his Autism, which is really what made him evil. In both cases, you have well meaning White creators trying to speak to marginalization, with both Blackness and Disability. But it’s so carelessly done that it feels disastrously messy.

Since then, Manta has been revamped and given a bit more meat on the bone, with Geoff Johns’ iteration locking Manta in a cycle of hatred with Arthur over the death of his father, and Dan Abnett taking that story to its final, logical culmination. And so Manta is the ultimate force and antagonist that helps define who and what Aquaman is and becomes. Aquaman is many things to many people- king, friend, partner, family, father, hero, but to Manta? He is a murderer. Manta's perspective is one that helps shape Aquaman as much as anything else, because he is what Aquaman is defined against.

Chuck Brown is the first Black writer to actually sit down and define Black Manta, with fellow Black artist Valentine de Landro. And they inherited all this historical baggage. Brown and his collaborators understood that they couldn’t just lean on a ‘Meme Manta’ who lived and died by spite. This was one of the earliest notable Black characters DC had; he was real history, and he was a major Black villain. But given the history he’d been subjected to, Brown knew he had to complicate things.

"I definitely didn’t want to take away the fact that he does have a villainous nature, but I wanted people to know that he doesn’t have a black heart in the sense where he’ll kill for the sake of killing. I want to slowly take people away from that and show another side of him to show people can change, and people don’t have to be totally murderous and villainous all the time, and kind of elevate the character beyond that, yet still maintaining his edge and his viciousness and his fury.

I don’t think it’s a redemption story. It’s just showing evolution. People can change. Change for the worse or change for the good or, new people come into your lives and it affects you in ways you had no idea it would. That’s just real life." - Chuck Brown

What we get from Brown is a complicated, messy figure estranged from his own son, to whom he keeps writing letters and messages that he never sends. He’s a failed man, but a prideful one. All he knows is his harsh way of brutal survival.

In this storyline, Brown reconsiders Manta’s entire history and legacy, and motivations by returning to that original central idea of Black liberation. And he returns to it via a Dwayne McDuffie creation Devil Ray–the Black Manta pastiche created for the DC Animated Universe when McDuffie and his team did not have the rights to use Black Manta.

Devil Ray is reintroduced as a young man who dedicated his entire life to the promise of Black Manta. To the promise of this revolution and quest for liberation, wherein finally he and his people would be safe and free.

But what Devil Ray found was that Manta always put himself, his petty grudges, and beef above the sacred mission he’d professed to. He had lost sight of his supposed goal of Black liberation and paradise. And so Devil Ray dons his costume, and swears to do what Manta swore by but never did.

This portrayal accepts that the original motivation of Manta as true. But it also accepts that he’s been a spiteful failure who put his own nonsense above any of that. And then, through Devil Ray’s existence, it asks:

What’s next?

Who do you want to be now, Black Manta?

Through Devil Ray, Manta comes to understand his own heritage and history, finding out they are part of the same shared tribe–a lost Atlantean tribe in fact, who returned to Africa from Atlantis before it sank.

And suddenly Manta’s understanding of himself, of his own history and his mission are brought into sharp reflection. He’s bound to the underwater world that he’s been at war with his whole life, even if he didn’t know it. And his own people, his own ancestors, had a place and a seat at the table amongst these oceanic kingdoms once. He’s forced to consider what his mission has been and should be, beyond just hurting Aquaman or making money as a pirate. What is his purpose? Who is he, really?

It’s very much in line with Chuck Brown’s own creator-owned work, and as Brown himself explains: In Bitter Root one of the things we played around with was Black empowerment, and knowing your roots and your origins, and finding out who you are, and how you fit into the world. I’m really bringing that aspect of things to Black Manta as well. He’s a very popular character, but not a lot is known about his roots, and where he came from, and giving deeper meaning to his motivation. In everything I write recently, race is definitely going to be something that I’m going to touch on. It’s important, and it’s just a part of me, it’s always in my writing. - Chuck Brown

Black Manta is not redeemed, and nor is he absolved. But he is made self-aware. And so he tells Devil Ray that his dream is a worthy one, that it has made him strong, but that he must not pursue that dream by emulating the ways of Black Manta. He wants Devil Ray to not be the man he once swore to be, but the kind of man he never could have been to begin with.

Manta has now witnessed what he, his actions, and his legacy, have inspired. And as his own son grows up and he becomes Aquaman of all things, bearing the title of his most bitter enemy, the murderer of his own father, Jackson’s grandfather, Manta’s forced to find new purpose. Aquaman is not and can no longer be his bitter enemy, not any more.

And that radically transforms the Aquaman idea and context. Neither father nor son can truly hate each other the way Arthur and Manta could.

With Black Manta, it is impossible to ever ‘go back’ to the way things were. Suddenly, the simplicity of that prior easy binary cracks, as Jackson by his very existence complicates it. Aquaman and Black Manta are still forever bound, but not in a blood-feud like in Arthur’s case, but just by blood. It’s a powerful evolution of the whole ‘Aquaman’ enterprise in a way that thrusts it into a whole new era and sea of storytelling possibilities..

The Avatar Of The Oceans

With the bold reimaginings of Aquaman as a new legacy hero and his greatest foe Black Manta, there had to be a striking new take on Arthur Curry himself.

Historically, Aquaman has never been afforded the same treatment as his peers like Batman or Superman. He’s not been blessed with classic Elseworlds or ‘evergreen’ prestige takes and reimaginings. He’s never gotten an Arkham Asylum or a Dark Knight Returns. But that changes here with Andromeda, as V/Ward/Bidikar bring us a new look at Arthur. Out of the three books, this is the most ‘classical’ approach, in that it is not a drastic perspective shift the way The Becoming and Black Manta are, centering on the classic mainstay of Arthur. But at the same time…it’s also the absolute biggest departure from Aquaman stories out of all the above.

Aquaman stories have usually tended to veer towards pulpy adventure stories or Sword & Sorcery. And as Ram V put it, that’s not something he was pursuing here:

"My understanding was that Aquaman just became Sword & Sorcery, Fantasy underwater for large stretches of that character’s narrative. And I felt like that was a missed opportunity. In that, I can write Sword & Sorcery, but also it didn’t seem to matter that it was Sword & Sorcery underwater? Like, you’re literally under the ocean, use that! And I felt like a lot of the narratives didn’t. They however did a lot of other things that were good, like the focus on character and character development and trauma and conflict, all of those things, but essentially when I came to this book, my remit was to do something that wasn’t expected of an Aquaman book." - Ram V

Andromeda would be a sci-fi horror drama about an underwater expedition and its ship crew, with a diverse cast of characters getting caught in a problem underwater that would pit them right between Aquaman and Black Manta.

And the vision of Aquaman here would be radically different. This was to treat Aquaman the way many legendary creators from Mike Mignola to Frank Miller and Grant Morrison had treated Batman- as an unbreakable diamond suited to relentless reinterpretation.

Thus we got an Aquaman a lot closer to the Jason Momoa visage than ever before, capturing that ageless quality that so defined his visual. But at the same time, this was not the guy you knew or were familiar with. This was something weirder and stranger.

The perspective and lens here was not Arthur’s, like in other Aquaman comics. Nor was it even an Atlantean perspective. It was the perspective of regular humans, ordinary, random people, seeing this supreme stranger of the seas. And it would thus be about us and him- man and the Aquaman.

If so many Aquaman books mined Aquaman in relation to Atlantis and its vast mythology, then this was to be a meditation about him in relation to humanity. It pulls Aquaman out of the typical frameworks he exists in and lets us just consider the idea on its own, as something open to endless reinterpretations. It’s Vertigo Aquaman, forcing you to reconsider the very essence of the idea to begin withWhat defines Aquaman really, when you take away all the accumulated stuff across the years? What is its basic essence?

If the threat in Ram V's other projects These Savage Shores and The Swamp Thing were European Colonization and American Capitalism respectively, in Andromeda, it would be their chief agent–The Military Industrial Complex.

The entire Andromeda mission is a doomed voyage of human hubris driven and funded by the Military, with armed bombs set to nuke something they want taken out. Under the guise of exploration and understanding is the base instinct of banal violence and cruel destruction. And Aquaman must save people from the designs of their own systems, from the dangers of their own ideas and assumptions, and help them survive through their worst fears.

This story reframes Aquaman in relation to ‘humanity’ and his human side. He’s not our representative to Atlantis. And he certainly can’t do our work for us. He can only provide a moment of comfort and reprieve for us, as we overcome what we must, and become who we need to. It’s a vision of Aquaman closer to, say, Morpheus, The Lord Of Dreams, in The Sandman than a typical action hero. It opens up Aquaman to an array of infinite human-centric stories wherein he’s a mythic figure or participant in a way beyond superhero conventions. It makes you think “What if Karen Berger had taken over Aquaman under Vertigo in the 1990’s and broken all the rules? Or proven in fact, that there are no ‘rules’ at all?”.

Andromeda distills down the idea to its naturalistic essence such that it opens up the landscape for the character. Anything is possible with Aquaman, it reminds you.

Underwater futures

The world of Aquaman has changed and evolved radically. Aquaman is now a Black queer immigrant dealing with diaspora struggles, caught between the two places he belongs to, the two parents that define him, the two legacies that forever overshadow him, and he deals with problems and complications his predecessor Arthur never had to.

Aquaman's relationship with his greatest threat and source of conflict is also vastly different, given Manta is his father. And Manta’s own relationship to Aquaman is transformed drastically, as is his perspective, which creates a new ‘status quo’ and foundation for a world of Aquaman stories that complicate and evolve the whole enterprise.

This group of new Aquaman creators push Aquaman forward into a new age and era, truly modern, with messy, human characters, rich character dynamics, and broad-strokes archetypal material being replaced with rigorously worked out specificity. And while that occurs, simultaneously, we’re seeing bold evergreen visions of the classic Arthur Curry Aquaman, which peel away from ‘continuity’ and other expectations or baggage, ditching ‘superhero’ for ‘ethereal avatar of the oceans’.

One can only imagine where the world of Aquaman goes next. But hopefully it will continue to be as vibrantly varied and diverse as it has been allowed to be in recent times. Jackson, Black Manta, and Arthur’s stories can keep evolving and tread upon new, complex grounds from here on out. There’s great foundations laid here for the future, to build onwards. But perhaps we can also be surprised by that which is not here, which also evolves and moves us forward in ways we can’t yet foresee.

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Want to hear more about the changes in Aquaman? Check out this recorded interview with Ram V about Aquaman: Andromeda.