Hey! You Got Your Conan In My Aquaman!

Apparently, there's some hoo-ha over Kurt Busiek's upcoming Aquaman revamp, in which it's retitled Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis, doesn't feature Orin, and will feature a swords-n-sorcery vibe, complete with trusty henchmen (like the shark and the wizard in the picture here) going on quests and such.

Well, then.

Reactions in the Comicsblogosphere range from outraged (here), to funny (here), to apathetic (right here). I don't think I've seen anyone actively rooting for this change, but there are a number of people certainly willing to give it a chance.

(Side note: quit hatin' on Scipio. Anyone with that much passion for a character --- much less Aquaman --- deserves a pass when said character gets apparently shafted. I shudder to think what would happen if they suddenly announced Vibe: Sword of the Ghetto.)

And by the way, I'd like to praise DC for finally giving us comics bloggers a new catchphrase.
Sword of (fill in the blank here) is the new "Are you retarded? I'm the Goddamned (fill in the blank here)".

I'd like to point out that I don't give two shits about Aquaman on any given day, nor do I particularly have anything against him. He's just one of those heroes that's...there, you know, because DC has to have an underwater hero, and I think that if he weren't wearing such a loud orange shirt and green pants all the time then I wouldn't notice him at all.

That said, I think Kurt Busiek is ideally suited to heroic fantasy (if his Conan work is any indication), and Butch Guice is someone who has impressed me recently with his work on JLA:Classified. So I think the talent's there to make this work, even though my first reaction to this is "lame".

And as it's been said before on other sites much more educated and frequently updated than this one, we have exactly one piece of art, a title, and a Newsarama interview with Busiek on which to base our judgments.

I understand how long-time Aquaman fans (both of them --- har!) would be pissed at this turn of events. They didn't connect with the character because he was an underwater Frodo, they connnected because...well, you'll have to ask them, because I'm not one of them. But you get the picture. I know I'd raise holy hell if they canceled the Avengers, took the soul out of the classic characters I'd come to know and love, replaced them with a "kewl" new team and completely changed the focus of the----oh, Bendis, you FUCKER!