That’s idiotic enough but somehow 10% of the citizens in Atlantis manage to survive the sinking and are suddenly able to breathe underwater! There aren’t enough exclamation marks for that sentence so I won’t even try. There’s the bland loving wife and bland loving children scene that’s so phony and movie-happy-family (“Daddy, daddy, I love you!” - retch) that I couldn’t believe is still being trotted out - but then that’s the level of laziness in Johns’ writing these days so I shouldn’t really be surprised - and then something happens and he decides to SINK THE CITY. Then we get his ridiculous backstory from when Atlantis was still above the sea. He comes out of nowhere and is instantly a major threat to Arthur and Atlantis. And I don’t mean in terms of intentions, I mean the way his character is constructed. I don’t even know where to start with this garbage. And then it doesn’t matter anyway because Orm gets off of death row somehow. There’s a whole subplot about a trio of characters - Swatt, Murk and Tula - who try to bust Orm out of jail, and then it gets forgotten about.

Scavenger, a Russian dude in a sub, attacks Atlantis for no reason. So here are the “storylines” that happen in Aquaman, Volume 4: Death of a King: the first king of Atlantis - imaginatively called Atlan - reawakens, just because, and tries to take the throne back from Arthur for no reason. It’d be scrawled on a used McDonald’s napkin blowing about an empty carpark with a mostly-used up cheap biro and it’d read “Aquaman’s a hero. If I were to match Geoff Johns’ same level of effort and energy that he put into this book in this review, you wouldn’t even be reading it on the internet.

Aquaman, Volume 4 by Geoff Johns