DC Comics
John Ostrander, writer
Manuel Garcia, artist
This issue of Aquaman is a fill in -- it interrupts the main storyline and subplots, and another writer and/or art team step in to give the regulars a break or allow them to catch up if they're behind. Fans tend not to like fill in issues simply because they are an interruption. This fill in is no exception in that it interrupts the flow of the story being told in Aquaman in the issues before and after this one. But Ostrander is a skilled enough writer that he takes pains to ease the interruption a little bit.
Aquaman appears on two pages of this issue that instead features the surviving members of the Others, the team Aquaman belonged to before the formation of the Justice League. In the recent fight with Black Manta, two of the team's members, Kahina and Vostok, were killed. The remaining Others -- the other Others, if you will -- are the Operative, Ya'Wara and Prisoner of War. Aquaman gathers these three to help track down one of the missing Atlantean artifacts -- a power glove -- lost in the Arizona desert, not a place easily accessible for Atlanteans. The search for the other missing artifacts is part of the main story being interrupted.
This issue also introduces Sky Alchesay, a young Native American woman of undetermined age, possibly Apache, although that also is not specifically mentioned in the story. Sky is a medicine woman with the ability to converse with the dead and some other unspecified abilities, as well as apparently being the inheritor of Kahina's former talisman, an Atlantean seal. It turns out that when the Others join forces with Sky and track down the missing power glove, it is in the possession of an evil skinwalker using it to try to break down the barriers between the Living World and the Ghost World.
Along with Sky, we are also introduced to her brother, Victorio, a local law enforcement officer on the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona. There is also Sky and Victorio's grandmother, also a shaman, and the person who taught Sky most of what she knows about being a medicine woman. We also get to meet Sky and Victorio's mother, although she died when Sky was small. Sky's abilities allow her to regularly converse with her mother, and we as readers could see the woman's ghostly image, although her words were not visible to us. Victorio doubts Sky's abilities are real and does not approve of their grandmother teaching the younger woman. We also hear a little about Sky and Victorio's grandfather and an uncle, both of whom prefer to follow Anglo ways to prosper in a white man's world.
Much of this issue is devoted to Sky and the people around her as she is the newest element and likely a new member for the Others, but Ostrander also fleshes out the individual personalities of the Others, especially Ya'Wara and the Operative, a bit more. When the Others first appeared, in the second story arc in Aquaman, there was some Internet chatter about a possible spin-off series featuring them if they proved popular enough. Here they are again, featured prominently in this fill in issue, and again in October's Aquaman annual No. 1, the story is supposed to center around the possible return of Vostok and feature the Others yet again. Rumor has it that sales on that upcoming annual will help determine if an Others ongoing series is in the cards.
I hope the team makes the cut. I know it is hard to make a new team of characters stick and find an audience sometimes, but these characters have proven themselves popular in the pages of Aquaman. Rather than the usual America-centric cast, this team offers a potential international flavor. Ya'Wara is from South America. While they are dead now, Vostok was Russian and Kahina was of Middle Eastern descent. Hopefully, they can be replaced by new members from other countries and cultures, as seems to be the case with the likely addition of Sky. That makes them unique enough to deserve a spot on DC's publishing schedule. There is still much to be explored with these characters.
