Move Over Superman: The DC Universe May Have Found Its New Strongest Hero

When you ask who the most powerful superhero is, the go-to answer for most would be Superman. He's the most famous superhero there is and across his almost century-long existence he's been depicted with practically every power you can think of. It helps that Superman's most obvious power is his strength and invulnerability. Short of some green kryptonite, little slows Superman down, and in some stories he's even powerful enough to move whole planets.

But might there be a DC Comics superhero even more powerful than Superman? A leading contender is Aquaman. (Yes, really.) Arthur Curry's powers have historically been reduced to breathing underwater and talking to fish. But his strength and endurance is, under certain writers, comparable to Superman's; Aquaman lives under the ocean and to account for the sea pressure, his skin is extra-tough.

The recent "Aquaman" issue #12 by Jeremy Adams and John Timms shows how versatile Aquaman's ocean-themed powers truly are. The issue is a tie-in to the fighting tournament-themed crossover event "DC K.O." and in this round, it's Aquaman versus Hawkman. The fight takes place in a desert canyon, which would seem to put Aquaman at a disadvantage ... until he calls up geysers of water from deep underground. "Humanity lives, only because the water recedes," declares Arthur. Later, Aquaman pulls from the water inside Hawkman's body. That's right, Aquaman's a bloodbender; remember that blood also flows through Superman's veins, too.

Current DC lore is that Aquaman is connected to an elemental force called "The Clear." Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" introduced "The Green," the elemental force that connects Earth's plants. The Clear, introduced in a later "Swamp Thing" story by Mark Millar, is a counterpart to the Green. As the Clear flows through Aquaman, every bit of Earth's oceans and ocean-life is his to command.

Aquaman has traditionally been regarded as a lame superhero and a target for parody: see "Family Guy," "The Boys" (specifically the character of The Deep), "Entourage" (with a fictional James Cameron-directed "Aquaman"), etc. Counterintuitively, Aquaman's starring role in the 1970s-80s "Superfriends" cartoon franchise is what sank his reputation (pun intended), because he showed little ability beyond, well, talking to fish.

Aquaman's current portrayal as one of DC's stone-cold badasses isn't an ironic reversal of fortune. Writers are very aware of Aquaman's reputation and so go out of their way to make him look cool or hardcore. Take the late Peter David's "Aquaman" run in the 1990s, where Arthur lost a hand and received a harpoon prosthetic. David's long-haired Aquaman was the aesthetic template for filmmaker Zack Snyder's metalhead take on Aquaman; to play the King of the Seven Seas, Snyder cast ripped 6 foot 4 Jason Momoa, then most famous for playing barbarian king Khal Drogo on "Game of Thrones." Momoa always looks like someone you do not want to screw with and that impression counterbalanced Aquaman's poor reputation.

In 2011, prolific DC writer Geoff Johns took over both "Justice League" (where Aquaman appears) and "Aquaman." Johns' stories feel particularly self-conscious about Aquaman's reputation; "Justice League" #4 has an epic hero shot of Aquaman walking along a harbor boardwalk, summoning great white sharks to devour Parademons flying overhead.

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That scene (drawn in epic blockbuster style by Jim Lee) makes "talking to fish" look like a pretty awesome superpower. Stan Lee famously said that any one superhero can win any fight if that's what the writer imagines, and recent Aquaman writers have let their imaginations shine with his powers.