MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Writer Geoff Johns had arguably one of the most famous runs of DC’s Aquaman title in 2013. Arthur Curry, the titular hero and King of Atlantis, had previously been derided as a second-rate, low-powered hero without a compelling backstory or link to any serious subject matter. Geoff Johns changed all of that with an Arthur Curry who draws from the most obvious source material presented to the half-human, half-Atlantian king, that of the other—and perhaps more famously celebrated—King Arthur. While Johns drew from the Arthurian mythos as a whole rather than any one specific textual rendering of the legendary King of the Britons—save, perhaps, Sir Thomas Malory’s text via Johns’s title—the Atlantian King Arthur is confronted with an Arthurian return, a Mordred-like figure, a courtly betrayal, and a “final battle” for the kingship just as his namesake is in the many accounts of the famous British king. Johns complicates the established Arthurian cycle in Death of a King, however,in this collected edition of Aquaman #17-19 and #21-25, Johns introduces a rival Arthurian figure which I have termed the “Dark Arthur.” The Dark Arthur figure is a returned Atlantian king of old who sees his realm in peril, but instead of leading his people to salvation, his murderous rage sparks a war between those who follow him and those who seek to embrace the peaceful future of King Arthur Curry. The dual Arthurian figures of Johns’s writing are pulled straight from his larger concept of his mythic sourcetexts, and I argue that, to fully understand the Aquaman presented in these pages, the reader must be fully aware of the Arthurian figure and its literary history from which Johns draws.