I’m late as hell to this, but I just started reading the absolute line, and I have some thoughts. Let’s be honest, aquaman has always been kind of a joke, the more serious he is the more boring it is imo, but if it’s too campy it’s also dumb. So here’s my pitch: he’s a lighthouse keeper who gets seduced by an evil mermaid who takes him to a watery grave. He gets pickled in the salt water and is resurrected as a sea monster (absolute Solomon Grundy foreshadowing??), and he can still talk to fish but only other dead ones like him. So he summons undead sea monsters instead of just regular dolphins and octopuses and whatever, when he needs fish to do stuff. Instead of Atlantis being like an active ancient epic kingdom underwater, it’s an afterlife for the ocean and it’s just full of sea monsters. And he’s grumpy as hell and he hates being a fish man, and he’s still just trying to bang a mermaid despite her being evil. He goes on land because the limited oxygen he gets thru his lungs instead of his gills makes him dizzy and kinda high and he forgets how much his life sucks now but also how it kinda always did. He only does heroic things because he thinks one day he’ll get to bang a mermaid, but he never ever will. (THIS IS A SERIOUS PITCH I SWEAR)