YMMV / Aquaman (1994)

• Broken Base: The beard and hook hand. Some prefer the clean cut look, while others prefer his bearded, Viking/pirate look. Some people prefer the beard but find the hook hand a step too far.
• Funny Moments:
  • Sharks, as it turns out, are forgetful ditzes.
  Shark 1: [seeing a hole Aquaman cut in a net to help them out] It's true. Look, he has cut a hole in it.
  Shark 2: It's a very nice hole.
  Shark 3: Yes, let's look at it some more.
  • Issue 10 has many sea creatures passing on a message to Aquaman that the Old One, an ancient shark, is dying and must see him. By the time Aquaman reaches him, Old One forgot what he meant to warn him about.
  • In issue 13, Aquaman learns that the realm Thanatos occupies is a reverse purgatory where those who are deemed evil enough go free, while good people are detained until they become sufficiently evil. Cue Arthur shouting "Do I look like I could ever be evil?" while brandishing his harpoon hand with a threatening look on his face, as Dolphin, Mera, and AJ refuse to answer but roll their eyes.
  • In Annual #3, Arthur gets captured by some goons who threaten him with an Exact Time to Failure about his one hour outside of water weakness. He melodramatically fakes his death, then ponders who comes up with this stuff when they throw the 'body' overboard.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Annual #4 is a tie-in to the Ghosts crossover event where the dead came back for a night to haunt the living. Orin the First talks sense into Shalako and fights off past conquerors, Garth and Tula have a conversation about life and death as she's glad he's finally moved on from her memory, and there's a Black Comedy comic relief section about a wife who killed her annoying husband and finds he's returned. And then there's Arthur, who sees Arthur Jr., who keeps asking him "Why?" throughout the entire night, and finds out just as the ghosts begin to fade that what his son wanted was a hug. He embraces Arthur Jr. and tells him he loves him just before he disappears.
  • In issue #26, the Sun-Eater eating the sun in an adjacent comic meant water began to freeze over even in tropical areas, making it hard for fish and mammals to breathe. Aquaman does his best to help everyone he can, with fish flocking to him in fear, but by the time he reaches the dolphins, he finds Porm—his adoptive mother, who raised him from infancy—was brutally murdered by Demon Gate. While later issues show she's able to communicate with him from the spirit world, his anguish on finding her body is gutwrenching.
  Aquaman: "Vengeance?" My god...She was the most gentle soul in the seas. She taught me the way of things. She...
  • Annual #3 has a story where Aquaman finds one of his childhood dolphin friends, Nera, has been captured and put in a tank to illegally test a sonic turbine propulsion system that's lethal to sea life and damaged her sonar. While Aquaman is able to rescue her, her sonar was so damaged that she's unable to return to open waters and is forced to live at a sea rescue center.

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