Aquaman #51 Review and **SPOILERS**

Aquaman and Li’l Manta

Writer: Kelly Sue DeConnick 

Pencils: Robson Rocha 

Inker: Daniel Henriques 

Colorist: Sunny Gho 

Letterer: Clayton Cowles 

Cover: Robson Rocha, Daniel Henriques & Alex Sinclair 

Variant Cover: Josh Middleton 

Assistant Editor: Andrea Shea 

Editor: Alex Antone 

Group Editor: Brian Cunningham 

Cover Price: $3.99 

On Sale Date: August 21, 2019

**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**

Hey everyone! It’s Reggie, here to review some more Aquaman comics after a three-month stay in the hospital. To keep things exciting, I haven’t read the two issues that came out in the interim. But that shouldn’t matter, right? Let’s see if I can hop right back on the water taxi and read my review of Aquaman #51, right here!

Explain It!

So this looks like a tie-in with this “Year of the Villain” business, for which I did not read the inaugural issue(s). I gather, however, that Lex Luthor has died, and his holographic ghost is going around to members of the Legion of Doom to offer them their sincerest desires. Which is a pretty nice thing for a ghost to do. Especially the ghost of Lex Luthor. One might think that there’s something up Lex’s ethereal sleeve. So in this case, Luthor offers to bring Black Manta’s father back from the dead, and give Black Manta a gigantic mech suit that I hope will look really cool in action sometime in the near future. 

The rub is that this information came in the form of a rather bloated epilogue, which wouldn’t be too bad of a bait-and-switch if the rest of the issue wasn’t so dull. It worked fairly well for me, in that it caught me up with a few things I missed over the last couple of issues: Aquaman is hanging around with Black Manta’s good-guy son, Jackson; they’ve got some of the Elder Gods with ‘em and they plan to build them a retirement home; Mera is planning her wedding, an marriage arranged for political expedience, but is stalling for Aquaman’s late arrival. For someone who hadn’t read the last two issues, it was a nice little catch-up. But I expect that more regular readers of the series felt like this issue was running in place. 

Rocha and co. treat us to some nice sequentials, particularly during a long scene in which Arthur and Jackson walk and talk.  Clearly the forward motion of this story was hijacked by tying into this “Year of the Villain” business. But it was still a solid piece of comic book storytelling, and if you’ve spaced on the series for a little while, this could be your ingress. Whether what follows will be worthwhile remains to be seen.

Bits and Pieces:

Things stall out for an issue while this “Year of the Villain” business gets shoehorned in, but it’s not an altogether offensive little pause. It’s also not terribly exciting.

7.5/10