Exactly! I wouldn't even mind Aquaman jokes if they were at least something other than the same old "oh, Aquaman's lame". *Yawn* Boring.

Entourage has done a decent job (in the episodes I've seen, which isn't all of them yet) of not being too boring. Vince's reason for not wanting to play Aquaman was because he didn't want to play a superhero at all, not because it was Aquaman. And the costume was making fun of Hollywood and not just Aquaman.

I will say one thing in Aquaman's defense- his wife is REALLY hot.

I've always thought I could write an awesome Aquaman series.

If you want to see Aquaman get some respect, read "Ragnarok", by Rebecca Borgstrom, part of her ongoing "Hitherby Dragons" site. It's sort of like a webcomic -- she even did stick figure fill-ins one time when she was at a con -- except that it's all text, no pictures. It's one of my very favorite things on the web. Anyway, "Ragnarok" is the story of, you know, Ragnarok...with the Super-Friends taking the roles of the Norse gods.

It seems to be Aquaman Day on the comics webcolumn circuit. http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/tony/ (will no longer be the current link to this column as of Tuesday) goes into Aquaman's lack of respect too.

Aquaman's main problem seems to come from Superfriends, where characters were stripped down to be more different from each other. Forget that Aquaman is probably the third strongest Leaguer after Superman and Wonder Woman. Or that he's probably the third fastest after Flash and Superman. (Aside: being #3 also kinda sucks in general, too easy to forget he's even on the list.) They just focused on talking to fish, and swimming, because those were the things he did that no one else did.

One of the high points of the Detroit JLA was that Aquaman really got to show how he was a heavy hitter. Sure, J'onn outclassed him in a lot of areas, but tended to focus on his telepathy and shapeshifting back then, so Aquaman was the team brick.

It seems to be Aquaman Day on the comics webcolumn circuit. http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/tony/ (will no longer be the current link to this column as of Tuesday) goes into Aquaman's lack of respect too.

As I said, until I'd already started writing my post, I hadn't realized they were talking about him in Entourage, either. I guess I'm just a slave to the Zeitgeist.

The other reason that Aquaman came off badly the the Superfriends era was the fact that the writers had a strictly enforced rule against the superheroes ever punching one another. Most of the other heroes had a way around this (Superman had heat vision, Batman had batarangs, Wonder Woman had the lasso, Flash could do the mini-tornado thing), but Arthur couldn't directly do anything at all really, and could only indirectly act in fairly contrived circumstances.

The Aquaman is lame thing is major part of the Reality: Metropolis segment of Seth Green's Adult Swim show: Robot Chicken. It was on again last night (Adult Swim's new shows go through a lot of repeats).

The jokes aren't funny because everyone is doing them. Who needs talent to complain about Aquaman? The same thing happened long ago to the "I've fallen, and I can't get up." If you saw the commercial on TV, you laughed and told all your friends about it and it was funny. And it was still funny when comedian mentioned it at first, but it quickly became stock. Why see a comedian to get the same laugh you get from your buddies? Especially when it was obvious talentless folks were using it to get their only laugh.

When I was in high school, the cool kids would quote the best stuff out of SNL (back in the days of the 2nd classic cast - Hartman, Carvey, Lithgow, Miller, Hooks, Brown, etc.) When the dorks start using the same references, you knew it was time to move on to new material. The Aquaman jokes will disappear soon for the same reason.

I think it doesn't help that he is, like, a guy who is at his more powerful while he is in the ocean and when he is not, one has to wonder "dude, why are you out here beating up crooks when you should be in the ocean?" Most super-stories are set on land and often in cities. While he is strong and tough his reason for being on land always seems weird, to me. I like how the Dini version of Aquaman came out in the early Batman/Superman animated series. There he was the king of the sea and a pseudo-eco-terrorist (back when it was okay to be a terrorist as long as it was for a good reason). He was mysterious, dangerous and his focus was on the ocean and the harm being done to it.

I liked Waid's two versions. The "Kingdom Come" version was fine because he was this old king who ruled 70% of the world so who cares what goes on in the middle of America so go away now. I can dig that. I liked his JLA Year One version, too. He addressed the whole "fish out of water" aspect of the character really well, I thought. He even addressed my "why is he out of water so often?" bit, as well, though if they made a running re-start with that series, I could never see why he would be a mainline character but still a cool extra attraction.

If we are going to make fun of comic book characters, I want to poke at the lame Wolverine-wanna-be Gambit. Granted, being an old-school Claremont/Byrne fan from the early 80's I want my X-Men how I remember them but I never did see what the point of this character was or why he was so popular. Eh, he ain't no Aquaman, that's for sure.

Gambit is popular because he's a dashing rogue.

Nah. Gambit was popular because he was a proxy for fans who wished that they were dating Rogue.

That doesn't explain his popularity before the two were linked.

I've never liked Rogue, almost certainly because of the way her accent is played as a substitute for her personality, but I'll confess that I liked Gambit in the first couple issues he showed up in, when he was running around with a de-aged Storm and appeared only to be a minor supporting character. I started getting confused when he was still around a year later; surely Claremont would get bored of this one-note character after a while.

I'll second fil's suggestion that Aquaman's biggest problem is that he's really a heavyweight underwater. I mean, hell, he can control anything under the sea. When you can make a pod of whales crush your enemies just by thinking about it, you're really damn tough; on land, there's only so many applications for this otherwise fantastic ability, and the JLA is mostly a landbound operation. Namor doesn't seem to have this problem - he appears to operate as well on land as he does in water - but then again his powers are a lot more generalized (fast swimmer, fast flier, super-strength) and therefore less impressive in what is ostensibly his own element. Aquaman is a victim of over-specialization.

Aquaman may also get less respect if it's more widely known that he currently patrols a city known as "Sub Diego." Lame, Mr. Pfeifer. Lame.

Sounds like the Aquaman humor is one of the currently popular easy jokes. I'm sure somebody will eventually go back to the old "Batman and Robin are gay" bit.

The "catch phrase" type of comedy usually annoys me. I just made that term up. It's when lots of comedians of little talent are doing a riff on the same joke, which usually just consists of imitating something funny. I remember a few years ago when it seemed like every comedian had to do a Crocodile Hunter impression. I got why it's an easy joke, but it gets really old the umpteenth time you see a guy do a bad Australian accent and pretend to get mauled by animals.

Fil is certainly right - Aquaman fits best when he is being heroic in a setting where his strength lies. Yet for long was it that this was not done? Or worse, it was attempted, but the setting and story were not established in a way that made people care?

Namor suffers to a less degree than this because his anti-hero role is so engrained and Lee/Kirby did an excellent job providing Atlantis with personalities in FF Annual #1.

I think many characters suffer from this effect. Writers simply don't know how this character is different and uniquely appealing, and put him into the same stock situation any hero could be in.

It's certainly doomed all the shrinking heroes - how does one make Atom, Ant-Man, or similar heroes important? It can be done, but takes a lot more work than it does to write Spider-Man stopping a mugger. Writers who try to often try to add an extraneous element to the shrinking concept (Ray Palmer is the Justice League's science expert) or simply artificially recreate the mugger situation (and wonder why the reader is not impressed by the threat of sub-atomic muggers).

Doug, this is even funnier to me because I had already started writing an entry on Aquaman-type characters for superhero gaming on my game design blog (feel free to check it out here).

I think both Fil and Chris raise excellent points, but I also think that part of the problem for Aquaman is that he's been re-engineered, especially personality-wise, so many times and in a fashion that seemed to scream, "This is a lame character we're desperately trying to jazz up!" That certainly can't help readerdom in general to consider the character on the same level as Batman or even Flash or Green Lantern.

I think that the Atom suffered from this as well, although I agree that the JLU take of presenting Atom/Ray Palmer as one of *the* scientists in the group has helped to rehabilitate the character in a way (it also helps that a bunch of characters who used to be very competent scientists in the Silver Age, such as the Flash and Superman himself) no longer are.

Ray Palmer also played extremely cool in Ostrander's Suicide Squad as a sort of rogue agent/super spy kind of guy...which is an amazingly good fit for a guy who can shrink and run along telephone wires to his destination. Very cool stuff. When in context of gigantic hero types who can crush planets, though, it is tougher to manage. I think the environment that people play in makes all the difference and this could be a failing of "supergroups" that try to get everyone involved. Most super-groups never make a whole lot of sense for characters who have established storylines of their own. Why Batman would ever want to work with the JLA makes little to no sense to me. Same with Aquaman. Fantastic Four made sense due to a shared history. Same with X-Men or Suicide Squad where their origins as a group are more important than the individual members. But Justice League, Defenders and Avengers always struck me as an attempt to bring a bunch of popular characters together even if they have no reason to do so. Granted, I love them when put together by Giffen/DeMatteis because, well, they have fun with it but otherwise they make little sense. Taken that way, Aquaman has little or no reason to be among the JLA unless there is some deal involving the sea. Which makes it hard for his own book because for me it is hard to get jazzed about underwater adventures because it usually plays out like land-based adventures...only underwater. It would be cool to see some writer take this character and do something special with him.

"It's certainly doomed all the shrinking heroes - how does one make Atom, Ant-Man, or similar heroes important?"

And in Ant-Man/Wasp's case, it isn't even a power unique to them - apparently, anyone can use the 'Pym Particles' to shrink or grow.