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Someone was looking for a Garth reading list and I was going to pass along one that I saved from you, but now I think the post that I saved was actually just that sad Sonic post about reading Tempest (1996) again, which I guess my brain decided to consider a reading list?

gkdkj this picture?? to be fair this absolutely qualifies as my rec list

I also thought I had a reading list for Garth on here but I can't find it...I'll make a super quick one for you tho!! I'm probably missing some but here's a good place to start. Also sorry if these aren't exactly in order.

Adventure Comics #269 (First Appearance) I love Silver Age so I would honestly read all of it. If you don't want to do all that, here are some fun Garth stories: Aquaman (Vol. ) #17, #18, #23, #33 Teen Titans (Vol. 1) #1, #19, #28, #29, #44-53. Tales of the Teen Titans #45, #46, #47, #78, #79, #80, #85-88 Death of a Prince

For stories that are set during this era but published more recently, read Teen Titans: Year One and the 2008 Brave and the Bold #10 Crisis on Infinite Earths

Teen Titans Spotlight #10 Teen Titans Spotlight #18

Read all of Aquaman Vol 5. Stop at #9, and read Showcase '96 #1.

Resume Aquaman Vol 5 until #19. Read Tempest (1996)

Resume Aquaman Vol. 5. #36-37, #40-46, #55-56, #60-63 in particular but honestly just read it all at that point

JLA/Titans Read at least the first half of Titans (1999)

Justice League of Atlantis JLA #68-#75

Aquaman Vol. 6 #4-12 and #32-34

I am not going to suggest reading any of the New 52 or Rebirth Garth content because I don't like it. Instead, re-read Tempest (1996) and feel sad that DC fucked this character over.

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I love you

I beseech you for your Garth insight, wht personality of his do you like? Bc every version of him I've read is a little alienating to me (part of the reason why I prefer Jackson is bc Idk which Garth I'll get or wht even his backstory is now) so if I started to try and get invested in him wht stories or version would you recc?

Okay for absolute full disclosure here I’m currently getting into Aquaman comics chronologically. Primarily through the lens of Garth. And there are some things I had already read at some point, but in my current venture I’m just a little bit post-Crisis, so my knowledge of the Aquaman side of things in general is still relatively limited. 

But I can definitely talk about Garth.

First things first, absolutely anything featuring a man calling himself Garth from any point later than the year 2011 is a completely different person. I can say that with full confidence even having read, like, no more than 2 comics including the Rebirth iteration of his character. It’s just not the same guy on seemingly any level, which can definitely account for the alienation aspect, and it’s very disappointing.

But on the topic of OG Garth. Let’s discuss his personality.

Something that stands out to me immediately about Garth is that he is very emotional. (Apparently a common theme among the characters I like.) But more than that, he’s emotional in like a shockingly healthy way? He does not bottle things up, if something hurts or upsets him he makes it known, if he feels betrayed or disrespected by someone he takes it up with them, and he’s not at all afraid of direct confrontation if it’s warranted. 

But despite that, he remains consistently reserved, sensitive, and gentle, which is kind of a miracle among male comic book characters. He can have a temper too, but it only really comes up if something is stopping him from helping someone in trouble, or if he feels mistreated past a certain limit, and it never really feels like he’s lashing out unnecessarily. His continual willingness to stand up for himself in spite of his “softer” personality sticks with me.

And tying into all of the above he’s textually acknowledged for his talents in communication and later diplomacy, which, again, not usually traits emphasized in Superhero Men. This example is very cute:

Not that he doesn’t enjoy fighting. He definitely does. In fact, a few of his notable outbursts have been explicitly about his beef with pacifist philosophies LOL. Although he notably doesn’t go out looking for fights or starting them without good reason by any means. (I think this is a point of diversion between him and his imposter-self. Maybe. From what I’ve heard.) 

Now backpedaling a bit, part of why all of his fairly healthy emotional and communicative traits are so charming to me is that he definitely is NOT without his issues. Idk how much you know about his backstory but for starters, he was abandoned and left to die as a baby, initially thought to be due to an Atlantean superstition regarding his purple eyes, surviving (mostly) on his own for a while and eventually being found by Arthur. Due to this, as well as the ambiguous and changeable state of his relationship with Arthur (whether they see each other as friends, brothers, or a father-son duo is. Complicated to say the least. It’s almost like a Jedi-Padawan type thing if you’re into star wars LMAO), Garth is kind of a walking hotbed of abandonment issues, theoretically at least. Like I said, he’s pretty healthy when it comes to expressing his needs and feelings. He's definitely more well-adjusted than Arthur ends up being.

Loneliness and a lack of belonging/identity are also huge themes with him as well. This is why the Titans are so important to Garth, even if his responsibilities and limitations prevent him from being a consistent member of the team. During maybe the first period where he genuinely doesn’t know where he stands with Arthur anymore, he goes off on his own to seek out his (purple-eyed) people and try to find his parents to give himself some sense of personal identity and find out who he is--as it turns out, he has immense trouble relating to them or even being civil with them at points, and ends up feeling like as much of an outcast with them as he does in Atlantis, ultimately realizing that his identity and who he fundamentally is are things that only he can decide for himself! Go Garth!

Some other issues he deals with are general insecurity and anxiety--these are mostly shown within the context of the Titans, where he’s often the odd one out as an Atlantean and severely limited in his abilities and effectiveness outside of the water (i.e. nearly suffocating to death all the time.) At the end of the original Teen Titans, Garth quits the team because he felt so deeply inferior and useless to them that it was making him actually severely physically ill to the point of passing out multiple times and people genuinely worrying he was going to die. That is a lot of anxiety. Though he doesn’t have nearly as much insecurity when he’s in the water, he's still shown to be A Worrier, and Tula makes fun of him for being too vigilant or in his own head, unable to loosen up and so on. Also, in his very first appearance, he is deathly afraid of fish!!!!!

Now for recs. First of all, if you’re insane or plan on being so in the future, this is a link to a complete reading order, which is what I’ve been loosely following. More specifically, Garth’s first appearance is in Adventure Comics #269. I would also recommend Adventure Comics #270 and #278. It’s some of the cutest shit ever, but it has little bearing on his later appearances.

From then I would go to Aquaman v1 (1962). Specifically #17-18, #23, #25, #33 (Tula intro!), and #40-47 (this arc is really drawn out and silly and Garth’s segments are mostly separate from the rest of the plot so after the first one you can honestly just skip through most of it until you see Garth or Tula LOL). He’s also in Teen Titans v1 during this time, I would read the first issue and then skip to #19, #28-29, #30, #40 (kilt moment), #45-53. Also, The Brave and the Bold (2008) #10 is a very cute story that focuses on Garth and takes place during this era.

Sort of concurrent to the Titans appearances is maybe the first major Aquaman storyline which you can find as a trade paperback (on readcomiconline lol) called Aquaman: The Death of a Prince. Basically Arthur is put through a meat-grinder of facing a bunch of his villains back to back, being deposed as the King of Atlantis, losing Arthur Jr., and as a result, becoming estranged from Garth and Mera. This is where you also find the first real expansion of Garth’s backstory.

Then he pops up in New Teen Titans (1980) #23 and #33. Tales of the Teen Titans #45-47 + #50. New Teen Titans (1984) #6. And then Crisis on Infinite Earths happens wherein Tula is killed. It’s very minor and not worth reading the whole thing just to see that if you’ve never read it before. He sticks with the New Teen Titans (1984) team for a spell when almost everyone in the usual team is gone and/or going through a mental breakdown from #19-26 I believe, and the grief makes him very quiet and distant, but he breaks through it by the end. Basically right after that are the events of Teen Titans Spotlight #10 with a very odd psychedelic story where he has like a telepathic battle with Mento lol, and later in #18 of the same book. 

Congratulations, you are now caught up with me. This has also gotten disturbingly long, so I’m going to cut it off here. If you actually make it through all this and would like more recommendations for Garth past this point feel free to ask again. Or if you get sick of reading these older comics and don’t care about skipping ahead/potentially not understanding shit, he shows up pretty consistently in Aquaman v5 (and the excellent Tempest (1996) miniseries where he makes the moniker-switch takes place after I think #25 of that), and Titans (1999).

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Nightwing #91 - “The Sommelier of Death” (2022)

written by Tom Taylor art by Geraldo Borges

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The Atlantis’ Kaldur Protection Squad’

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Garth

Character 3/10

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Please Care About Aquaman With Me: Wrapping Up the Nineties

Welcome back to Poseidonis! This one is a long one, but I wanted to wrap up this era, so let’s just dive in, okay? (See what I did there?)

Last time, both Garth and Koryak attempted to overthrow Arthur, who banished Koryak and gave Garth a great big hug. Also, Arthur was officially reinstated as king, but Mera refused to go back to being queen since her marriage to Arthur is no longer valid under Atlantean law. The drama!

Our last installment coincided with the end of the nearly 50 issue Peter David run, which built most of the post-Crisis Aquaverse up from scratch. After a couple of fill-in issues, he’s replaced by Erik Larsen. Apparently there was a long and vicious rivalry between PAD and Larsen, which is a fascinating internet rabbit hole to go down (do you want to see grown men behaving extremely unprofessionally on very old message boards? google this shit), which may be why Larsen promptly throws out a lot of PAD’s toys and brings in his own. Some of them never do anything interesting ever so I won’t really be talking about them here. (I’m sorry, Lagoon Boy! I liked you in Young Justice!)

Also, we’ve reached the early 2000s, so the title of this post isn’t entirely accurate, but we’re closing out this run and will start fresh with the 2003 series, so…just go with it, okay?

Anyway, the Poseidonians almost immediately discover a hidden civilization beneath their own, led by King Noble (Larsen was not working overtime on character names). He and Mera are intensely attracted to each other, leaving Arthur jealous and sulky:

He tries to win Mera back by shaving and cutting his hair to look like he did when they were younger, but it’s not that easy:

Mera points out that their marriage is no longer valid under Atlantean law because of infidelity, and Arthur agrees that yes, okay, there have been “infidelities on both sides,” which…as you’ll recall, Mera was raped, so fuck you very much, Arthur.

Anyway, even if Mera isn’t impressed by Arthur’s naked chin and sad sack demeanor, someone else is:

Keep reading

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Please Care About Aquaman With Me: The Nineties, Part 3

Welcome back to Atlantis! Last time, Garth got hot, Koryak accidentally unleashed an ancient evil, and Poseidonis resurfaced from the ocean…sort of.

With King Thesily dead, Arthur’s…just sort of de facto king again? There doesn’t seem to be any kind of formal process here but everyone’s just listening to him and hey, he does have a rightful claim to the throne via both of his parents.

His first act as Basically King is to decide that in order to make up for the atrocities his people committed against the merpeople of Tritonis, they need to…be their slaves indefinitely. This seems perhaps an extreme solution to me, given that…slavery is also an atrocity…but okay. (I mean, they’re servants, but they aren’t permitted to leave, so…semantics.)

Koryak decides that since he led the people of Poseidonis astray, he should join them in their servitude:

Awww, they’re hugging! Uncomfortably, but it’s the thought that counts!

This leaves Poseidonis pretty empty - it’s mostly just Arthur, Garth, and Dolphin. A lot of other stuff happens here - Arthur’s dolphin mom is killed by fishermen, Black Manta sells his soul to Neron and turns into a weird manta monster, Arthur temporarily goes all lizardy like Kordax and then temporarily blind and also develops webbed fingers - but I hope it’s clear by now that I care exactly zero amount about the superhero part of this comic and only about the ridiculous soapy interpersonal drama.

SPEAKING OF WHICH. During Arthur’s various transformations, he increasingly displays a dark, angry side, which Dolphin grows increasingly uncomfortable with. But hey, you know who isn’t dark and angry, but in fact is a sensitive sweetheart who is also super hot now?

YES. THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.

Keep reading

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Please Care About Aquaman With Me: The Nineties, Part 2

CW: Sexual assault and suicide are mentioned but not depicted.

Welcome back to Atlantis! Last time, Arthur lost a hand, replaced it with a harpoon, and discovered his illegitimate son Koryak. Now he has returned to Poseidonis to find it in upheaval, with the king dead and the city destroyed by seaquakes. Koryak has stepped into the power vacuum and volunteered to lead the Poseidonians to somewhere more stable, while Arthur thinks they should rebuild:

Everyone follows Koryak…except for Dolphin, who stays behind with Arthur for horny reasons. They bang. It’s…look, let’s just say romance has never been Peter David’s strong suit and leave it at that, okay?

The mood is sort of spoiled when Mera shows up out of nowhere. She and Dolphin immediately have an extremely tiresome catfight - like, they’re literally pulling each other’s hair, it’s exhausting and sexist as hell. 

What the fuck. (Also please note that Mera is being positioned as a crazy bitch for…*checks notes*…being sad that her son died. All right.)

But wait! It gets worse!

Keep reading

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Please Care About Aquaman With Me: Everybody Has a Bad Time in the Bronze Age

Thank you for returning to my irregularly scheduled Aquaman micro-hyperfixation! Last time, I talked about the first 35-ish years of Aquahistory. Now we’re up to 1975 and comics have developed longer plotlines and gotten angstier and more melodramatic - and major characters are fair game to be killed off. Gwen Stacy died in 1974, but the death this post kicks off with is even more shocking.

CW: Child death, comic book sexism.

The very short version of the setup is that Black Manta has captured Arthur, Garth, and Aquababy. He puts Aquababy in a glass ball full of air (instead of water), which he will suffocate in after a few minutes, and Arthur and Garth in an arena to fight to the death. Once one of them dies, he’ll fill Aquababy’s prison with water.

So just to make this absolutely clear: to save his biological son, Arthur will have to kill or be killed by his foster son.

He doesn’t hesitate for a second.

I know we talk about Bruce being a bad dad all the time, but at least when Ra’s al Ghul tried to make him chose whether Tim or Damian would die, he offered himself instead. Arthur had that option here! And yet.

The look on Garth’s face here absolutely kills me and this is the comic that made me start going feral over the Aquafam. Of course absolutely zero time is spent on his emotional reaction to this, but the only father he’s ever known not only just tried to kill him - he made it clear that he doesn’t actually consider Garth his child. “That’s my son up there! My son!!” THAT’S YOUR SON DOWN HERE TOO, ARTHUR. The fact that he calls him “Minnow” while he does it (one of his two long-running nicknames for Garth, the other being “Tadpole”) makes it hurt even worse.

I think this moment, too, is why Arthur and Garth basically never refer to each other as father and son. On paper, they have a similar relationship to Bruce and Dick and Roy and Ollie, who acknowledge their father-son dynamics all the time. But despite Garth saying Arthur’s like a father to him in his very first appearance, after this, they just…don’t say those words. Arthur is Garth’s liege and his friend, but he is not his father.

(Mera is still his mom. He loves Mera so much.)

But wait! It gets worse!

Keep reading

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Please Care About Aquaman With Me: The Nineties, Part 1

Welcome back to Aquahell! Today we are going to begin to tackle the 90s. This decade is going to take several parts to cover because there are a lot of new characters and mythology introduced and also it’s bonkerstown. But it’s also the era that has me in my “makes no damn sense…compels me, though” feels, so I’m pretty excited. Also we are getting MY BOY KORYAK. *blows him an underwater kiss*

We begin with the short-lived 1991 series, in which the most important thing established is that Atlantis has really hilarious phones:

I love this so much. Yes, they have phones. Yes, they are attached to a giant switchboard like it’s 1925. Incredible.

That guy on the phone is King Thesily, who took over when Arthur stepped down from the throne last time. He is not super stoked about how everyone in Atlantis still likes Arthur better and Arthur does whatever the fuck he wants all the time, so he makes him an ambassador to get him out of town. Arthur continues to do whatever he wants and Thesily gets even crankier about it.

Also, there are FINALLY MERPEOPLE:

Keep reading

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Garth in Nightwing 91

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Garth exploring his memories regained from Rebirth, memories that include his own death and the existence of characters such as Aquababy could be really interesting.

Garth left the Titans in Teen Titans #19 to take care of Aquaman's son.

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Garth left the Titans in Teen Titans #19 to take care of Aquaman's son.

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is there a reason other than the tattoos being on the wrong side that you don’t like Garth’s rebirth design?

There are a few things tbh lol. First of all, the fact that they’re tattoos at all instead of scars…the scars served a purpose narratively, so the fact that they took that away but kept the visual is annoying. I’m gonna try to keep this to his actual design and not his character tho so I won’t go into that lol. Also them being on the wrong side is to incredibly stupid and frustrating I cannot get over it.

It’s clear they need the tattoos as a visual indicator tho, because his design is super generic and it’s really hard to distinguish him from any of the other black haired, blue eyed characters (his eyes are grey now, but not even that is consistent: another annoying thing when his purple eyes have been a major feature for his entire character history) Garth’s design hasn’t been super consistent over the years, but there are enough common strands that you can follow his character design over time pretty easily. it would have been so easy to simply give him his curly hair to distinguish him from others, like they did in the original TT comic. The long hair is clearly a 2003 cartoon/YJ leftover which is 🤢 whenever he’s drawn without the tattoos, he doesn’t resemble preboot Garth in any significant way which is just bad character design tbh.

I also don’t like that he’s wearing mainly blue. Again, a very clear cartoon tie in that makes him less recognizable to a comic fan. All the Aquaman costume redesigns are very bland imo and he genuinely looks like he’s just wearing like…generic soldier gear rather than a specific costume that he designed and intentionally decided to wear.

It’s like…if just ONE of these things happened, I would have been vaguely annoyed but probably get over it. It’s that they changed several significant character design details all at once, and not even in a good way, that makes it a bad design imo

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It’s very simple: giving Atlanteans cliche “fish-like” features like gills and webbed fingers is boring and I hate it but giving Atlanteans really weird non-human biology that isn’t apparent until it’s funny is peak character design

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Hi~ I was just wondering if you have any info or thoughts on Garth and Arthur's relationship? Or maybe where to look? I'm having trouble finding anything because I don't know a lot about the aquafam thank you! Also I love your blog

Sorry this has been sitting in my inbox forever lol

Arthur and Garth have a very complicated relationship. You really can’t reduce it to father/son because that really isn’t how either saw the relationship for a while.

From the jump, Garth chooses to be in Arthur’s life: in silver age, he opts to leave Atlantis so he can live with Arthur and post-crisis the story is that Arthur and Garth find each other out in the open ocean and decide to stick together. Garth is an orphan with no socialization and Arthur is a young man who, for much of the continuity, has animal socialization.

Arthur doesn’t adopt Garth. We know this because, although Garth does appear to act like he’s Arthur’s ward, Aquababy is regarded as Arthur’s only kid. In fact, Aquababy calls Garth his uncle. This mindset is confirmed in Death of a Prince where Arthur directly tells him that he is choosing Aquababy’s life over Garth’s because Aquababy is his son. Garth, who just learned about his own biological family’s origins, is hurt by this and it causes a major rift in their relationship.

From there, the two act a bit more like brothers for a while; Garth doesn’t really care about Arthur’s royal status so he has no issue calling Arthur out for doing stupid shit. Meanwhile, Arthur grows increasingly volatile and strains their relationship further. Enter Koryak: Aquaman’s biological son who is jealous of Garth, who he perceives as having the father/son relationship he never had. This isn’t how Garth perceived things, of course, but it lays some groundwork for later events.

Arthur’s ex hooks up with Garth and it’s not treated as weird. Garth also specially says he never had a father, so he doesn’t want his son Cerdian to grow up the same way. At the same time, Arthur is treated like Cerdian’s grandfather. Garth calls Arthur out for being too aggressive with him as a child, they both laugh it off. Garth let’s Arthur do stupid things because he thinks it’s a little bit funny. Drama comes up and gets smoothed over and then more drama comes up.

By the 2000s, Arthur actually refers to Garth as his son and he’s the first person Arthur wants to see after coming back from the past. At some point, Garth is named heir to the throne and takes over when Arthur dies. It’s an odd relationship that I don’t think either of them define; I don’t think Garth would be comfortable calling Arthur “dad” but he enjoys being called Arthur’s son. I don’t think Arthur realized Garth was his son until Garth was an adult, and then he looked back at his past behavior with a little bit of regret. I don’t think either of them would change anything.

As for where to start: if you want stories where it just kinda feels like Arthur is a 20-something who accidentally found a kid, read silver age. If you want really dramatic family drama, read Vol 5. Don’t read rebirth, it doesn’t exist ❤️

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ok so ive been reading up on garth and there's this part on his wiki that's really throwing me, so i thought i'd ask the resident garthspert if you know where it's stated/shown that atlan helped garth survive as a child and was the one who taught him to speak and stuff? sorry if its somewhere super obvious and i just missed it but ive been going INSANE trying to find it because there's no source on the wiki!! 😭 (also tysm for keeping the garthdom alive! im 100% getting into him bc of ur posts!)

GARTHSPERT PLSSSS

This is such a good question because yeah that’s not actually in any comic!! It’s in Devin Grayson’s book Inheritance, which is not something I recommend reading because it contains “jokes” made by characters implying disgusting things about mentor/sidekick relationships. I don’t think that book is technically considered canon anyway, though it does have a select few okay concepts buried under piles of shit.

However, the book does not say Atlan taught him how to speak. I’m not sure where the wiki got that from, iirc the implication is only that Atlan was low key watching out for him from afar to make sure he didn’t completely die. The comics just make it seem like his latent magic somehow kept him alive without going into detail. Garth 100% was on his own for the first 9 years of his life with absolutely no contact with another person. The assumption is that Arthur taught him how to speak in the same way Thomas Curry taught Arthur how to speak when they met (this continuity has a fully-Atlantean Arthur) but the comics totally skim over this part and we don’t actually see it happen.

The wiki is a good place to start but also there are some inaccurate/out of context info on there so take it with a grain of salt for sure!!