Borrowing pretty heavily from the 2018 Aquaman movie starring Jason Momoa, Mera: Tidebreaker is a young adult graphic novel from DC's woefully short- lived DC Ink imprint. If you're expecting the traditional princess Mera from a water filled extra-dimensional world, you better stick to Silver Age floppies. Here, Mera is still royalty. Only now her kingdom of Xebel is subject to the rule of Atlantis. Betrothed to a prince she does not love, Mera seeks her own path, which she hopes is like that of her dearly departed mother: as a fierce warrior and benevolent ruler of her people.
In order to win her father's favor, Mera heads to the surface world in order to locate and kill the fabled exiled prince of Atlantis. Mera immediately finds him. Only Arthur Curry is nothing like she expected. He's kind, generous and just so gosh darn handsome. As Mera waits for the perfect time to commit regicide, she finds herself falling for the Atlantean as Arthur has no idea about his underwater heritage. Now with agents of her father coming to the surface in search of Mera, the princess of Xebel must decide to follow her destiny or her heart.
Tidebreaker was a good story that could have been great. Writer Danielle Paige, crafts a classic love story between the children of two rival kingdoms and she executed it with a totally modern interpretation of the Aquaman mythos. I didn't feel like Paige didn't do her homework in writing this teen graphic novel. She deftly digs into the rich history of these DC icons. It's only that the formula seemed off-kilter.
There's very little humor. Okay, don't think there was any humor. Lots of melodrama. A fair smattering of drama. Lots of romance. Some action and adventure. Yet, any character that you'd feel might be a potential source of comic relief just isn't funny. Plus, things are pretty tame in a book recommended on Amazon for readers in grades 7-9. Yet then 3/4th of the way through this book, Paige throws in a fairly big swear. Not an F-bomb. But also kinda unnecessary based on how smoothly things had been since that and thus after. It's those little quirks that throw a perfectly good read off balance.
At least I cannot complain about the art. In fact, Stephen Byrne actually manages to fix a pet peeve I have about photo-shopped artwork. In a few scenes, instead of drawing different characters that look uniform, the artist copies and pastes the same image to make it look like a swarming army of underwater warriors. But instead of leaving them to all look the same like some artists have done to an annoying degree, Byrne actually tweaks each character to be just a tiny bit different from the rest. I appreciate such touches in modern day comics that tend to see artists taking sloppy shortcuts.
I also loved the minimal palette of colorist David Calderon. The fiery orange hair of Mera stands out in a book full of muted grays and an assortment of hues based on sea foam green. For someone like myself who has partial color blindness, the look works to great effect and was greatly appreciated.
This book debuted way back in 2019 when DC execs thought that Mera was going to become a film franchise darling. And she almost did for a while. That's until Amber Heard was essentially cancelled due to her explosive history with then husband Johnny Depp came to light in a scandalous defamation trial. Once Heard was all but removed from the 2023 Aquaman sequel, plans for Mera to lead the DC Universe as the next Harley Quinn went up in a poof of smoke. That's probably why this book ends with the promise of a sequel and yet 5 years later, we've got bupkis. It's almost indicative of the DC Ink and DC Zoom imprints. Both had such promise and then DC turned their back on it. Thankfully, their line-up of planned stories that seemed so amazing, still saw the light of day. Even if it has taken half a decade to see all those dreams become realities.
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.
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