You know what was the funniest thing for me while reading my comics? Okay, for the majority of the issue Aquaman is talking to his brother about recent developments involving Atlantis. The entire time his brother is in the shadows and we never see him. And yet….WE SEE HIM ON THE COVER! There is no mystery here! His outline in the shadows matches perfectly with Ocean Master on the cover. That made me laugh so hard because of how stupid this conceit was.

When it comes to the actual issue, I have to say it was alright. Nothing really blew me away. I did like the opening pages involving a previous Aquaman (his great-grandfather) getting attacked by old-timey sailors. If the whole issue was that I’d probably would rate it higher. As it is, we just get an introduction to Ocean Master and hopefully Geoff Johns can make him not a laughing stock as his previous iteration.

Pete Woods and Pere Perez are not what I would call a great replacement for Ivan Reis. I know we’re gonna get Paul Pelletier next month but boy it would have been nice to see him now. I can tell that the pages involving old Aquaman and present say Aquaman are different styles but I honestly can’t tell who is who. It also doesn’t help that there are five inkers (one being Perez himself) doing this issue which makes each page be wildly different from one another. It’s a mess of an issue but I can’t say it is downright terrible. Let’s just hope Pelletier can be a much more worthy successor to Ivan Reis…God I wish he was still on here.

While this is a prelude to this tie-in story to Justice League, I can’t say I would recommend this issue. Nothing is wrong with it on a technical level but you could easily just skip this for the coming issues next month. Considering I’m going to remember this issue for the idiotic use of shadow for a character already revealed on the cover then you can guess outright how I felt about this particular issue.