The Poseable She-Hulk

Geek Orthodox has an impressive gallery of She-Hulk action figures and statues. Some of them I'm envious of; others make me wonder about the kind of person who finds action figures sexy.

Not sure why this deserves its own post, but there you go.

Atlantis Journal: Make your own mermaid, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters movie, and the Beast from the Deep!

Mermaid Maker



Tons of fun if you're into, like, paper dolls and stuff. Which, apparently, I am.

Sigmund and the Sea Monsters movie



I looooooved this show as a kid. I'm about fifty-eight times more excited about this than I was about the Land of the Lost movie even before they ruined it with Will Farrell.

Now watch, they'll have Mike Myers play Sigmund. Please, oh please, Hollywood. Let me have just this one.

"The Beast from the Deep!"



If you're like me and don't want to hold your breath waiting for a good sea monsters story, Karswell can hook you up.

Adventureblog Theater: Loan Squids, Octopi in love, a collegiate sea monster, and a couple of mermaids (one of whom gave Fred Sanford heart attacks)

$quid

Never borrow money from a giant squid.



There's a feature length movie being made based on this short film and according to Robert Hood, it will show an actual, giant squid.


Oktapodi

Speaking of cephalopods and romance...



Stan the Sea Monster

...takes a walk around the quad. So awesome.



More Stan here.

Marina the Mermaid



Learn more about her at Never Sea Land.

Aunt Esther the Mermaid

I wish I was kidding, but I'm not.

Adventureblog Gallery: More mermaids and sea monsters

Mermaids



By Terry Taylor.



By Sarah Forrester.



And by Denise Richards.

Jasmine Becket-Griffith also has a lot of great mermaid art, but you have to go to her site to look at it. It's well worth clicking through though.

Sea Monster



By kimbar.

Locking down Aquaman

Aquaman illustration by Paul Gutierrez.

DC, on the other hand, is having a hard time figuring out what to do with its aquatic superhero. Last month at Toronto's Fan Expo, Dan Didio talked at length about the challenge of making Aquaman good. There's been one recent appearance of Aquaman in Final Crisis, but other than that: nothing since Kurt Busiek's undersea fantasy version failed to bring in readers. Didio says that's for a reason:

My problem with us is that we reboot the characters too much. What happens is that if a character doesn’t work, we go, “We got a brand new direction to put him in! We’re moving him into something new! We’re going to try something brand new and different! We’re going to throw everything out and start over again!” We make that mistake, but what that does is, it alienates fans.

Our biggest mistake is that we don’t continue and build on. What we should be doing is let it sit for a while and then come back with a good, strong story with what’s going on. That’s what Geoff [Johns] does. That’s Geoff’s secret weapon. He doesn’t throw it all out and start all over. He builds on what’s existed and makes it better. We get too worried about the minutia. All we should be doing is telling great stories with our characters.

What we’re doing coming out of Final Crisis ... is that we’re locking our characters down. We’re going with a good interpretation, and we’re staying with it. That’s why you don’t see Aquaman right now, because we want it to be clear what it is, who he is, and what he’s all about.

Artist Ethan Van Sciver also mentioned that we'd start seeing Aquaman again in the upcoming Green Lantern story Blackest Night. I'm not a Green Lantern fan, but I reckon I'll be checking that out.

Sub-Mariner: The Depths #1

Yet another example of why fantasy is better than reality. After spending so much time yesterday thinking about real-world Atlantis theories, it's nice to forget all that and just read about the cool version.

Not that Sub-Mariner: The Depths is going to be a conventional superhero story. In fact, the Sub-Mariner doesn't even directly appear in this first issue. I'm fuzzy on when the story is supposed to take place, but I'm guessing it's at some point between the Sub-Mariner's Golden Age stories and his reappearance in the '60s Fantastic Four comics. All the zeppelins moored to New York City skyscrapers in the story throw me, but a mention of a "1939 expedition" and a reference to the Red Scare suggest that it's got to be in the late '40s or '50s. Probably this is some alternate timeline to the regular Marvel Universe, if you care about that kind of thing. At any rate, most of the people in this world have heard of Namor, but think he's just a myth.

The Depths is all about an explorer named Stein who's made a name for himself by debunking famous myths. When another explorer named Marlowe - a man suspected by the government of being a Communist - disappears while looking for Atlantis, the Navy gets worried. If Marlowe's found Atlantis, they don't want him turning it over to Russia, so they hire Stein to go after him. Stein's eager to prove Atlantis (and rumors of its king, Namor) false, so he jumps at the opportunity.

The issue sets up this situation and creates tension on Stein's submarine by revealing that most of the crew firmly believes in Namor and his undersea kingdom. There's also talk about the Depths doing things to people's minds. "The deeper you go," one sailor says, "the more creatures start crawling outta the darkness." It's very dark and claustrophobic and scary. Much more effective than Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which also dealt with tension and possible mutiny on a sub.

Things finally build to a head until something attacks the submarine. Stein tries to take a look at it and can't believe what he sees.



And that's the one shot of the Sub-Mariner in the issue. The nice thing though is that I didn't miss him. I certainly don't want to read four more issues without the title character's appearing (and I hope even more that this world's version of the Sub-Mariner isn't just a manifestation of the Depths working on sailors' minds), but this first installment is a powerful, effective opening. And I tend to trust writer Peter Milligan to make sure the rest of the mini-series stays this good.

Kull of Atlantis

Know who else is from Atlantis whom I'd completely forgotten about?



That's what I get for putting all my Robert E. Howard eggs in Conan's basket. Kull: Exile of Atlantis collects all of Howard's Kull stories and now my interest is piqued. Subterranean Press has the Limited Edition version depicted above, but I'll make do with the paperback.

And the upcoming comic book series from Dark Horse. With covers by the unbelievably talented Andy Brase.



Kull's usually illustrated as a Conan clone, but that, my friends, is an Atlantean king.

Was Goliath an Atlantean?

I caught an old rerun of History's Mysteries tonight where they were talking about Atlantis. They presented a few different theories, but the first and most prominent one they pushed for was the Santorini one.

Well, most of the historians they interviewed actually pushed for the "Plato was just telling a Morality Tale" point-of-view, but they also seemed pretty excited about Santorini's being a major influence on the creation of the myth.

What I thought was interesting was that History's Mysteries wasn't as quick as Mystery Hunters to dismiss Santorini on the basis that it was pretty obviously a Minoan culture before the volcano erupted. When I watched that Mystery Hunters story, I sort of scratched my head when they said that it couldn't have been Atlantis because they found no Atlantean artifacts. What exactly - I wondered - do Atlantean artifacts look like?

History's Mysteries' take is that what we call Minoan civilization may have actually been Atlantean. Which is even more fascinating because of the link between the Minoans and the Biblical Philistines (including Goliath). Plato wrote that Atlantis sunk in part because the Atlanteans had given up their peaceful, utopian ways and had become warlike. Is it possible that these warriors scattered and that one of them - a nine foot tall giant - fought and was killed by the future king of Israel?

Well, probably not, but it's still fun to think about.

A couple of other theories History's Mysteries explored were that Atlantis was actually Troy and that maybe it's in the Caribbean near Bimini. They didn't present any convincing evidence for either of those, but I understand that the Sci Fi Channel did a special on Atlantis that likes the Bimini theory, so I'll try to track that down and watch it. The Bimini Road certainly is an odd formation.

The show also spent some time talking about Ignatius Donnelly's fanciful Atlantis, the Antediluvian World. It was an influential piece of research even if it involved a lot more speculation and mysticism than historical data. Donnelly believed that the Atlanteans were the ancestors of all the ancient cultures including the Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, and Egyptians. You can read the whole book online.

So now I'm torn. A couple of week's ago, I was into the idea that Atlantis became South America. Now I'm back to Santorini. I can see myself switching to Bimini with the right push.

The real problem of course is that I don't want any of these to be true. I want Atlantis to be at the bottom of the Atlantic and inhabited by fish people. Gimme the Sub-Mariner or Aquaman's Atlantis over Santorini and Bolivia any day.

Snowbird

I owe Fred Van Lente some thanks.

As everybody knows, I'm a huge Alpha Flight fan. But as much as I love it when my son shares my passions, I'm not about to push any particular interests on him. If anything, he's influencing my tastes. But thanks to awesome comics like Tiny Titans, DC Super Heroes, and the Marvel Adventures line, David's very much into superheroes right now. And thanks to Van Lente's Wolverine First Class, he's now also into Alpha Flight.

Or rather, one particular Alphan.



No, not Aurora. Though she's a favorite of mine too.

He's bugging me to dig out my old X-Men and Alpha Flight comics because he wants more Snowbird stories. I've held him off for a bit by buying the first Classic Alpha Flight collection, but that's not going to last me forever. I made the mistake of telling him about that one X-Men story where Snowbird turns into a real wolverine. He's not going to leave me alone until I read it to him. And I love that.

I've been meaning to talk more about Alpha Flight for a while now anyway, so this'll be another reason to find those boxes and start doing that.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)

A while back, Christopher Mills blogged about his experience with the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea TV series from the mid-'60s. I've never seen the show, but I did recently catch the movie it was based on when it was on cable. And I put off re-watching the Disney 20,000 Leagues to do it.

I'm not sure I made the right choice, but I did like Voyage for the most part. The cheesy Frankie Avalon love song they use for a theme doesn't fit the rest of the movie, and that's the least of the film's problems, but it's hard not to like Barbara Eden and Peter Lorre tooling around in an enormous sub with a possibly mad commander who's either going to save the world or destroy it.

In a plot timely enough that they've recently (and distastefully) re-released the movie in a "global warming" edition, Voyage tells the story of the Earth's rapid heating due to the Van Allen radiation belt's catching fire. The world's greatest scientists meet in New York to discuss solutions and two are given serious consideration. Dr. Zucco believes that the belt will burn itself out when it grows hot enough; Admiral Nelson disagrees and believes that only a nuclear explosion hitting the belt at just the right time in just the right place will snuff out the fire. The problem is that the solutions are diametrically opposed to each other. Zucco claims that Nelson's plan will trap the explosions in the Earth's atmosphere and destroy the Earth; Nelson says that if they wait for Zucco's solution to fail, it'll be far too late to implement the nukes as a backup.

Against the wishes of just about everyone on Earth - including his crew - Nelson takes his massive submarine, the experimental Seaview, to sea to get it into position. Thanks to the presence of a visiting psychologist on board, much is made of the stress of being cooped up in the sub for long periods of time and we begin to wonder who the strain is affecting more: the crew who don't want to be on the mission or Admiral Nelson for insisting on it.

The movie's supposed to be a tense, psychological drama but with an awesome submarine, an interesting crew, and a giant octopus. It succeeds on the setting and adventure. The Seaview seems like a cool place to live and hang out. I'm planning on watching the TV show now just so I can spend some more time on it. But the movie fails on the psychological level.

People act strangely all through the movie and it can't all be explained by stress, which - in spite of the psychologist's pet theory - doesn't explain how seasoned, hand-picked sailors can suddenly snap and become suicidal, mutinous saboteurs. Loyalties shift and motivations change all throughout, but it feels fake. For example, the Admiral's solution to the crisis is backed up by another famous scientist on board the Seaview, but everyone - including the sub's captain who supposedly looks on the Admiral like a father - concentrates solely on the Admiral's mental health, ignoring the scientist's input. And rather than do whatever they can to stop the crisis, military crewmen would rather desert their posts and spend their last remaining days at home with their families. I found all of the doubt and suspicion impossible to believe unless I gave in completely to the psychologist's theory, but we're never given a great reason to do that either.

I'm hoping that with a different plot though, the TV show will make better use of the great setting on the Seaview and be an enjoyable series. I'll let you know.

Bolland covers Zatanna for ongoing series?

Buried in this interview with Brian Bolland is a hint that he may be the cover artist for DC's upcoming ongoing series written by Paul Dini.

Asked about his upcoming work, Bolland replied, "I think there’s also going to be a Zatanna series that I’ve done one cover for." Now maybe I'm totally reading into that and wishfully thinking, but his specifying "one" cover makes me hopeful that there will be others. Because short of Adam Hughes, I can't think of anyone else I'd rather see do covers on a Zatanna comic.

And now, for no good reason: someone dressed as Zatanna.