Aquaman #45: Setting Sail!

Holy crap! I was down on this series last issue but my goodness I’m genuinely shocked and impressed at how incredible this issue is! Kelly Sue Deconnick has proven herself worthy of the hype surrounding her on this title this issue! It’s kind of funny that the majority of the issue takes place in an alternate narrative detailing the dawn of gods, which was just phenomenally rendered by artist Robson Rocha and the rest of the art team.

It was so hard not to reveal the end of this issue as it is pretty weird and interesting, I am hoping Arthur and Callie’s relationship (platonic as far as I can tell) comes into play later. I’m really excited to see what comes next from this latest oceanic big bad, so interesting!

The art from Robson Rocha, Daniel Henriques and Sunny Cho is jaw dropping on multiple levels, with the splash page of Namma’s monsters fighting the old gods was a real highlight, so unbelievable! Alternatively even relatively tame panels like the credits page are just great, killer art all around. We even got a little Kirby Krackle on one page! Just great.

I am a little confused by the pacing of this series as a whole, with the first two issues being just so much slower than this one. I also am not sure what exactly drove Arthur and Callie to sail off in the first place, I didn’t notice any kind of real motivation being mentioned unless I missed something last issue. Just an observation.