I think Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis are knocking it out of the park with this Aquaman run. I never thought I would actually be reading an Aquaman book, and the fact that I’m both reading one and taking it seriously seems like a minor miracle. They’ve convinced me that Aquaman can be a compelling protagonist, and every week where this is one of my picks I find it to be one of, if not THE most, purely enjoyable books in my stack.

So take it with only a grain of salt when I say my main thought after finishing this issue was “Hurm.” Despite the awesome-as-all-hell cover art of Aurthur shish-kabobing his arch nemesis’ head in a tide of blood during a thunder storm, this is mostly an issue about people discussing their feelings. I get that not every issue can be super powered beings throwing each other through trucks, but these purely transitional issues that merely serve to take the story from point A to point B never cease to be a bummer for me.

Reis is an amazing artist, but unfortunately he isn’t given anything THAT interesting to draw this time, which makes his art…well…not that interesting. We get a splash page of a character we don’t know making a grand entrance that’s just kind of shrug-inducing, and a two-page spread of Manta’s archaeological dig site that looks great, but seems there mostly to take up an extra page. The one standout image is a series of panels showing Aquaman diving out of a cargo plane into the ocean, which briefly shows the heights Reis is normally at in this book. One other minor nitpick I have with the art is a moment where there are two identical panels right next to each other; it always irks me when comics do this.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a series I look forward to reading, and I love the ongoing story of this underground Atlantian Justice League, this is just a dull issue. You should be reading this, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a worse jumping on point.