{"id":80,"date":"2006-10-21T20:04:20","date_gmt":"2006-10-22T01:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dilettantes.code4lib.org\/2006\/10\/21\/the-sad-legacy-of-aquaman\/"},"modified":"2006-10-21T20:04:20","modified_gmt":"2006-10-22T01:04:20","slug":"the-sad-legacy-of-aquaman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/2006\/10\/the-sad-legacy-of-aquaman\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sad Legacy of Aquaman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Growing up, watching &#8220;Superfriends&#8221;, it was easy to ignore Aquaman.  After all, I was probably more into Marvel Comics and wasn&#8217;t really into swimming all that much.  He seemed a little pathetic in my 7 year old mind; basically everything had to be contrived to accomodate his powers.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, I wasn&#8217;t alone.  He appeared an episode of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.adultswim.com\/shows\/robotchicken\/\" target=\"_blank\">Robot Chicken<\/a>&#8221; about a group of super heroes (Hulk, Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, etc.) sharing an apartment, a la &#8220;The Real World&#8221;.  Aquaman was portrayed as an effeminate wimp, pushed around by Superman and the Hulk and ridiculed for his &#8220;super&#8221; powers.<\/p>\n<p>This morning I was reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/critics\/content\/articles\/061016crbo_books\" target=\"_blank\">an article in the New Yorker<\/a> about Thomas Paine, and Aquaman made a rather unexpected appearance there:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Thomas Paine is, at best, a lesser Founder. In the comic-book version of history that serves a  our national heritage, where the Founding Fathers are like the Hanna-Barbera Super Friends, Paine is Aquaman to Washington\u2019s Superman and Jefferson\u2019s Batman; we never find out how he got his superpowers, and he only shows up when they need someone who can swim.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Somewhat related to that, during a layover in Cincinnati on my way back from Ottawa, I learned that <a href=\"http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?hl=en&#038;lr=&#038;client=safari&#038;rls=en&#038;q=cincinnati%20union%20terminal&#038;btnG=Search&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;oe=UTF-8&#038;sa=N&#038;tab=wi\" target=\"_blank\">Union Terminal looks suspiciously like the Hall of Justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Growing up, watching &#8220;Superfriends&#8221;, it was easy to ignore Aquaman. After all, I was probably more into Marvel Comics and wasn&#8217;t really into swimming all that much. He seemed a little pathetic in my 7 year old mind; basically everything had to be contrived to accomodate his powers. Apparently, I wasn&#8217;t alone. He appeared an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","category-super-heroes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}