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Aquaman and the War against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene by Ryan Poll (review)

2023; Comics Studies Society; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ink.2023.a916795

2473-5205

Comics and Graphic Narratives

Reviewed by: Aquaman and the War against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene by Ryan Poll Brianna Anderson (bio) Ryan Poll. Aquaman and the War against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene. University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 268 pp, $30.00. Click for larger view View full resolution Aquaman has long been regarded as nothing more than a B-list superhero at best and a laughingstock at worst. Beloved characters like Batman and Superman regularly star in feature films, but the King of Atlantis didn't get a leading role until Jason Momoa dazzled fans in the 2018 Aquaman movie. Scholarship on Aquaman also remains relatively scarce. For instance, a search on Google Scholar for "Wonder Woman" returns 1.65 million sources, while "Batman" yields over 200,000 results. By contrast, as of November 2023, Google Scholar lists only 3,600 results for "Aquaman." In Aquaman and the War against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene (2022), Ryan Poll counters popular perceptions about this often overlooked and seemingly "worthless superhero" by arguing that recent iterations of Aquaman serve as productive lenses through which to examine systemic environmental violences and injustices caused by human actions (1). This monograph is the first publication in Encapsulations: Critical Comics Studies, a new series from the University of Nebraska Press. Each short volume in this interdisciplinary series provides accessible and concise "close readings of carefully delineated bodies of comics work with an emphasis on expanding the critical range and depth of comics studies" (ix). Accordingly, Poll focuses most of his analysis on a relatively narrow canon of work: Issues [End Page 294] #1 to 25 of The New 52 Aquaman. DC Comics published these issues between 2011 and 2014 as part of their groundbreaking The New 52 project, which aimed to attract new comics readers by rebooting 52 superhero comics series. Writer Geoff Johns collaborated on the first half of The New 52 Aquaman run with penciller Ivan Reis, inker Joe Prado, and colorist Rod Reis. These issues later served as the basis for the 2018 Aquaman film and contributed to growing interest in the aquatic superhero. Moreover, Poll contends, The New 52 Aquaman offers "multiple, critical allegories that help make visible how, in the Anthropocene, the Global Ocean has become a site of an unceasing colonial-capitalist onslaught causing slow and systemic death in all Ocean regions" (33). Issues #1 to 25 develop these allegories by visualizing the numerous ways humans have disregarded, exploited, and desecrated the Global Ocean. Environmental issues like pollution, species extinction, and whale hunting figure prominently in these issues, confronting readers with the gruesome and often unseen consequences of human carelessness. In addition to highlighting these problems, Poll argues that Arthur Curry—also known as Aquaman—challenges traditional power hierarchies between humans and nonhumans through his mission to unite the surface world and the ocean. Poll writes, "To see the Oceans and land as one—to decenter the terrestrial bias that structures normative epistemologies and narratives—is a radical ecological and activist project … that critiques all forms of hierarchical thinking that reign on the surface world, from capitalism to racism" (6). To examine Johns's reimagining of Aquaman as a disruptive eco-activist, Poll deftly weaves close readings of the comic with scholarship from ecofeminism, critical Black studies, queer theory, posthumanism, Indigenous studies, and other critical discourses. Each of the four chapters examines a different narrative arc in The New 52 Aquaman, proceeding in chronological order from the beginning to the end of Johns's run. Chapter 1, "Deep in the Trenches: Monsters, Humanism, and Ecological Allegories," provides the most explicitly ecocritical analysis of the series. This chapter examines the comic's opening arc, which centers on fearsome creatures called "the Trench" that emerge from the depths of the Mariana Trench to prey on humans. Arthur discovers that the Trench have been driven to the edge of extinction as human-made toxins wipe out their food supply, and they've surfaced to gather food for their dying offspring. Poll reads the plight of the Trench as a multilayered ecological and social allegory for past and present injustices. Most obviously, these creatures serve as monstrous...