I know what some of you are still thinking: "Aquaman? Shoot, I ain't afraid o' his punk ass. King of the Sea? You mean, Chicken of the Sea. Sure, he's tough when he's got all his boys backing him up. But one on one, I'd slap him down like a red-headed stepchild. And, I ain't afraid of that hook, neither--I'm gonna break it off in his a-yass, I tell you that right now!"

I'm sure the villain Power Ring must have thought exactly the same thing in JLA: Earth 2. It's a perfectly reasonable assumption, I suppose, when you're wielding what's probably the most powerful weapon in the antimatter universe.

But what you have to understand is that there's far more to being King of the Seven seas than commanding the vast resources of Atlantis. To be a king, you need the highest degree of self-confidence. To be a leader, to be decisive, to act when necessary in that arena, you need to feel absolutely sure of yourself. Otherwise, you couldn't rule a day shift at Wendy's, never mind fifteen thousand submarine states.

A person who has this feeling of self-confidence will bite the bullet in a crisis, like in the case below, and do what needs to be done. Here, the entire planet is in danger as the Crime Syndicate of Amerika attacks Washington D.C., and Aquaman has to help deal with one before he can help with the other.

To paraphrase Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, if Aquaman's got a world to save and you're standing in his way, then one way or another, you're getting out of his way.

That type of steely-eyed resolve would make even Chow Yun-Fat drop both his glocks in amazement; the way my jaw dropped the first time I saw this page. The same way it drops whenever the elements of a particular scene are combined in such a way that it immediately gets to the heart of the matter.

Often, these scenes don't just come out of nowhere. Ideally, that sort of scene is the inevitable result of a chain of events and it's the point through which everything must pass before that chain progresses. It may involve a character's facial expression, a gigantic explosion, or be as simple as a quiet, dialog-free panel. It doesn't have to be a splash page, or involve the old ultraviolence, or have anything to do with the Dark Phoenix. But what it will often do is reward you for paying attention.