This new ongoing sucks!
It’s Avenging Son vs. undersea Drac Pack
By Byron Brewer

Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner – whether waxing poetic Silver Surfer-like amid the conchs and coral of a blue lagoon or blabbering Hulk-like in the midst of terran battle – has always been one of my favorite heroes (or anti-hero, as we used to call the Avenging Son in the 1970s).

When I first met Subby, he was still under the creative pen of Roy Thomas with beautiful artwork by the great Gene Colan, who draws the best people I have ever seen. I had only known the Sub-Mariner through those 1960s Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons and thus to come into the middle of an arc in which Leonard McKenzie, Namor’s father, was discovered to be alive was quite shocking!

Poor Namor (“Roman” spelled backward, btw). As long as I have known him, he has lost whomever he placed his trust and love in: Dorma, Namora (we thought), his mother Fen, his father, Betty Dean Prentiss and, during the Civil War, Namorita. As wrestler Jeff Jarret often says, “The list goes on and on!”

Now, having used the tiny wings on his feet to fly into the company of the Uncanny X-Men, Namor is about to be forced to make that choice again in his new ongoing title, Namor: The First Mutant, by Stuart Moore and Ariel Olivetti. When our merry mutants are confronted with a deadly vampire (?) threat, the Scourge of the Seven Seas takes matters into his own hands on a mission that just may bring down the entire might of the vampires on their heads and, in the process, destroy what is left of Atlantis.

What he thought was a fable to scare Atlantean children is coming to terrifying life in the form of a newly-discovered race of undersea bloodsuckers. As Namor once had to decide between wife and country, his choice now involves with whom to stand: Atlantis or his new mutant allies?

One of the greatest discoveries I ever made was the wealth of Sub-Mariner strips from the 1930s and ‘40s written and drawn by the real undersea master, Bill Everett, and reprinted in a number of Marvel publications during the 1970s and ‘80s. After Namor was spun out of Tales to Astonish and into his own title, I became a rabid fan who was even more fanatic when Everett started handling writing and drawing chores on the last few issues of that mag before his untimely death in 1973. Some view Bill’s artwork as sparce and simplistic, but if you look at the ripples of his underwater scenes, the lushness of his ocean bottoms, the bold stroke of his inks (one of my favorite art teams on Thor was King Kirby with Bill inking) – we are not talking Don Heck here, folks!

I like the fact that this Namor ongoing, which conincides with the launch of a brand new X-Men title, will fall under the Curse of the Mutants event. That fact (and the book’s not-so-subtle secondary subtitle, The First Mutant) seems to indicate that the grandson of Tha-Korr will continue to be a presence in that corner of the Marvel Universe where X marks the spot for the foreseeable future.

I cannot wait to see where the unknown team (to me, at least) of Moore and Olivetti are taking our water-breathing mutant prince and what future suffering is in store for Fen’s favored son. I will be waiting anxiously, and I wish them best fishes.

Imperius Rex!

Namor: The First Mutant arrives in stores August 25!