Aquaman, Vol. 2: Amnesty

Aquaman returns to its regular continuity, and its mostly a good story about homecoming, with a bunch of exposition about the history of Amnesty Bay and a number of guest characters. The segments with Arthur himself are good, with some Lovecraftian themes (and some rather indirect references to the game Call of Cthulhu) and even the big fight scene at the end showing more of the collateral than such things normally do. Aside from the flashbacks with Arthur, the scenes with Mera are less interesting; she seems to be stalling for time, and arguably, so is the comic. Black Manta is back with a big robot in tow, but that's obviously set up for the next volume and isn't very interesting on its own. This makes the story less interesting than that in Vol. 1, but it gets us back on track, as was needed after the lengthy sojourn elsewhere. I'll give it 4 for DeConnick's writing and the high-quality artwork, more than for the plot.