The Fisherman
1925 - An unknown fisherman off the Bahamas catches a strange creature, recently broken through from a parallel dimension. The parasite takes control of it's new hosts mind, and begins to attack other ships, terrorizing and killing their crew in order to create fear to feed the 'elders' that it worships. He becomes known as the sailor's tale "The Fisherman".
1945 - The Fisherman attempts to terrorize the Blackhawks, stalking them across their island before he is finally caught. His human host is killed, but the parasite that controlled him is able to escape into the open ocean, surviving by taking different weak-willed hosts across the decades.
26 years ago - The Fisherman claims a new host with much stronger will, former black market smuggler Cameron Telford. The parasite's influence is diminished, and he becomes one of the best thieves and smugglers in the world.
21 years ago - The Fisherman becomes an operative of Kobra.
19 years ago - The Fisherman is hired to capture Arthur Curry. He is defeated, and swears that he will get his revenge.
17 years ago - The Fisherman enacts his plan for revenge, capturing Arthur Curry and kept on land. He is saved by the arrival of Oliver Queen.
15 years ago - The Fisherman is recruited by William Asmodeus Zard to join his Injustice Gang as a foil for Arthur Curry. He is badly injured and falls into the ocean, where Cameron Telford's host body dies and the parasite is forced to hibernate to heal.
10 years ago - The Fisherman returns as the parasite finds a new Atlantean host body, now completely in control. He begins to stage terror raids against Atlantis, capturing dozens of it's citizens to farm for their fear. He battles Arthur Curry, now using the full spectrum of his alien strength. Ultimately Arthur is able to defeat him, removing the parasite and keeping it contained in Nuidis Vulko's labs.
Most superheros have their own catalog of villains; we've actually organized our site around some of those catalogs. There's generally some major A-list villians, and then a longer list of less memorable B-listers, and so on. For some characters, their list of bad guys just isn't all that deep, so even when you're looking at their B-list villains, you're already seeing characters that are so obscure, we just don't have a reason to include them.
The Fisherman is probably one of the most prominent of Aquaman's B-listers, but he just didn't have a huge impact on the larger story, so we were going to leave him out of the timeline until we found ourselves looking for an Aquaman villain to put in our version of the original Injustice Gang. We weren't sure just what we would do with him to make him interesting. That is, until we discovered one particular comic...
The Fisherman is probably one of the most prominent of Aquaman's B-listers, but he just didn't have a huge impact on the larger story, so we were going to leave him out of the timeline until we found ourselves looking for an Aquaman villain to put in our version of the original Injustice Gang. We weren't sure just what we would do with him to make him interesting. That is, until we discovered one particular comic...
Our Fisherman StoryThe Fisherman's first appearance was in issue #21 of the original Aquaman series in 1965. Like a lot of those old stories, it wasn't really written around the villain, but instead it was about the strange sci-fi shenanigans that befell Aquaman and his family. In this case, the mysterious new villain had stolen a 'growth formula' that effected Aquaman, making him a giant, and then miniaturizing him. The Fisherman was a weird figure through the comic. Most Aquaman villains all seemed to wear some form of diving suit, and he was no exception. He was entirely brown, but did have some sort of weird organic elements to his mask/helmet. Remember that for later, it will come up.
This was pretty much the last appearance of the Fisherman for a good long while, but he reappeared in the mid-seventies for a few multi-issue Aquaman stories in his own comic or in Adventure Comics, and afterward he would occasionally appear in different corners of DC, be they in the pages of Blue Devil or Green Lantern Corps. He never really DID much... he was just a dangerous criminal that would crop up and do violence and need to be stopped by the heroes. He notably never earned himself a real name. He was always just The Fisherman. Also, that strange mask helmet seemed to have evolved over time to a deliberately droopy cloth cowl, although there are times it would hang in such a way that it's little 'eyes' would appear to replace his regular eyes. It's a tiny detail that clearly didn't matter at the time... but remember that for later. |
in 2006, after Infinite Crisis, all of DC's series were reset in the divisive One Year Later time jump. Aquaman's series was renamed Aquaman; Sword of Atlantis, and now featured a new hero, Arthur Joseph Curry, an entirely different guy who also just happened to have ocean-based powers (this time derived from experiments performed by his father, which coincidentally is the regular Aquaman's original origins). It was a fairly short run that is, I believe, completely wiped from canon at this point, but does feature some very interesting ideas by the always great Kurt Busiek.
Midway through the series, we see the Fisherman dead in the Gotham morgue after being shot during Infinite Crisis. He is given a name, finally, but we learn that whoever the guy on the table is, he's way too young to have been the original Fisherman... when suddenly his cowl lunges out with a tentacle and attacks the coroner. It turns out that the entire time the Fisherman has been an enemy of Aquaman, he was actually an alien parasite taking over different human hosts. It was a WILD idea that played out over only a few issues. |
Our Fisherman StoryThe idea of the Fisherman parasite has been referenced as recently as the 2021 series Future State, so this concept has, impossibly, actually made it's way into the main canon. It was depicted as being some sort of lovecraftian horror, and honestly, if we can find some way to make that work, that's the sort of lunatic comic concept that we want to find a way to use.
We first want to establish that the parasite has been on earth for some time, so we introduced it all the way back in the earlier timeline, where it terrorized the open seas. This gives the name 'The Fisherman' some context as a a sort of sailor's boogeyman. In modern times, we do want him to be more of a smuggler and criminal, but this was actually explained in canon as a unique, more willful host (we gave him the name given to the Fisherman in the Gotham morgue). After some time challenging Aquaman, we give him one final story fully manifesting as the alien entity he is, allowing this bizarre anecdote of a character to come full circle. |