Bermuda, September 1941
Once upon a time, in a mysterious triangle of the Atlantic Ocean, on a hurricane battered bit of rock, a boy was born. The island has many names, and isn’t terribly large, but it is part of the Bermuda archipelago. The baby was born to a British submariner and an island beauty. Her skin was dark and beautiful, a blend of many hues and shades, like her heritage, a deep blend of the many strains of humanity that at one time or another had made The Islands of Bermuda their home. The young sailor grew up on the shores of the Thames and dreamed of an endless expanse of ocean. The girl grew up on shores of sand, always waiting for what the tides would bring. Their love was every bit as wild and tumultuous as the sea, but every bit as deep.
Their love was not to last. After surviving many daring underwater raids and sneak attacks, the sailor’s sub was caught in open water surrounded by German u-boats. The battle was valiant but futile, and the sailor and his mates never rose above the ocean waves again. Unknown to him, back on the shores of Bermuda, his wife was pregnant with their unborn son. When the commander of the base delivered the sad news, she wept for the brave father who would never know his son.
That fall, an ordinary healthy baby boy was born and took his first breath of salt tinged air. His first cries echoed across a stormy sea. He was a striking newborn: not overly large, but well formed and possessed of the same gorgeous skin of his mother. But atop his head was a wild tuft of golden hair. One of his eyes was dark, deep brown, the other was grey and blue, like the shades of the ocean, tossed together. His mother named him Arthur Curry, after his father.
Little Artie grew and thrived on the ocean, only dimly aware of the larger conflict that spanned the world around him. He was as often under the waves as on them, diving and swimming as strongly as any fish. However, as he grew into a bigger boy, he often grew sick and weak. His muscles failed him, and soon he could neither swim nor walk. The military doctors could not discern the cause of his affliction, and flew in experts from around the world. Never had a little boy had more love and attention, growing up among sailors he had more uncles and big brothers than most boys could ask for. He became their little mascot, and given how much time he spent in the water, the sailors had nicknamed him AquaBoy. The origins of his condition was never conclusively identified, but the result was clear. Artie’s muscle mass, and most of his bone structure, had partially liquified. He could not move or stand simply because he had nothing to stand on or move with. It was a grizzled old salt who proposed what would be Artie’s salvation: an aquatic environment. To protect his skin from over saturation, Artie was fitted with a suit. He was placed in a pool of water. Buoyed by the water, Artie could move with only the barest of movements, and the water held him up in a constant embrace. AquaBoy swam again, and the water became his forever home.
The old salt continued to look after Artie, who learned and grew like any other child. The salt, having a keen mind, devised an exoskeleton for Artie to help support his soft frame and to amplify his movements so that he could swim and move with greater ease. Living in an aquarium was a lonely existence for a boy, though the sailors joined him whenever they could. One day a orphaned dolphin wandered into a Bermuda bay. Worried that without a mother she would die, the sailors placed the dolphin in a tank and fed her. Someone then had the idea to bring Artie to the dolphin, and from then on they were never parted. He named her Sula. She would would propel him around and gently float beside him when he slept, and they played together. Spending every second in each other’s company gave them a bond and a communication that few companions of a single species could ever hope to replicate, let alone one aquatic, one terrestrial.
Arthur, on achieving his teenage years, not only surprised every medical professional by being alive, but astounded everyone with his brilliance and his mental agility. Being unable to travel, the experts in many subjects and fields came to him. By the time the AquaBoy became a man, he was one of the best minds in the world. He had been relocated from a small pool in a small building to a large complex with many areas and with outlets to the sea. Sula, herself only in her young adult years, had an passageway that led into the open ocean from the main aquarium in which they both lived. This was added after Arthur’s insistence, his caretakers feared she would leave and either be killed or never return. But Sula showed no signs of ever wanting to abandon Arthur and into adult life, they remain inseparable.
Into the 1980s, Arthur continued to astound those who cared for him. At this time chronologically in his forties, he still resembled a young man. Some attributed this to his lifestyle, but using the newest medical technology, his genes were sequenced and examined. Arthur’s main condition, a gelatinous skeleton, remained a mystery and was blamed on a mutation. But a side effect was discovered: Arthur aged at almost half the rate of a normal human. By fifty he was genetically closer to twenty five. Sula, however, remained a completely ordinary dolphin. Though well into her sixties, she was nothing more than a prime example of the species. Sometime around their combined sixty-second birthday, she defied some odds of her own by finding a love of a dolphin kind and later that year she gave birth to pair of calves, one male and one female. She had apparently mated with a false killer whale as her offspring were identified as wolphins. Arthur named them George and Gracie. As they grew, they formed the same strong bond with Arthur that their mother had. Aquaman seemed as happy with his aquatic family as they were their human companion.
As the world entered the 21st century, Sula died at the old, even for a dolphin, age of 70. Arthur, meanwhile, was still in his thirties and was becoming extremely interested in current events on the American mainland, mostly in the dark, crime filled Gotham City and just outside of Metropolis, in a small town called Smallville.
a simple man 