Llyra has a baby. It’s a clone baby I think. There’s a bunch of clones running around. Her clone baby becomes an adult quickly and is now Llyron, a rival to Namor for the throne of Atlantis.
(It’s not really Namor’s kid.)
Why does almost EVERY Namor series have to involve people trying to take him down as king? Atlanteans hate Namor more than Latverians help Doctor Doom.
Anyway, fights and bloodline and kingdom stuff that doesn’t matter ensues. It’s all done well. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, though, and it’s really hard to care AGAIN when Namor’s rule is threatened.
The interesting twists here: Llyron manages to stop a “staged” sea monster invasion of the surface world–including Giganto….
…And as gratitude, the U.N. accepts Atlantis as a member nation and legitimizes Llyron’s rule.
Which puts Namor on the run.
He now has a band of allies with him: Stingray, Tiger Shark, Tamara Rahn, Triton, and Andromeda. There’s six of them and they are all underwater characters, so they go by the band-name “Deep Six.” I kind of like that.
The Avengers track Namor down to hold him accountable for his crime, and we get Deep Six vs. Avengers. That’s cool. The fight ends with a “can’t we all just get along” conversation. (Why didn’t it START that way? Because then we wouldn’t have had the cool fight.) The teams then go their own ways.
Meanwhile, Russian criminals kidnap Abomination’s widow and put her in a submarine. No, Abomination is NOT dead. But in the mid-’90s, everyone thought everyone else was dead. And if they weren’t believed dead, they were replaced by future versions of themselves. Or clones.
The Deep Six rescue Abomination’s widow while Namor and Abomination fight.
At the end of #59, Triton blows up the Russians’ nuclear sub–but is missing after the explosion.
Namor goes looking for him, with Andromeda, and instead finds Bloodwraith.
They fight until he stabs Namor with the Ebony Blade and steals his soul.
Andromeda fights Bloodwraith in the “real world,” while Namor–trapped in the sword-world–meets the Golden Age Black Knight, Marrina, Victoria Bentley, and others who were stabbed by the Ebony Blade. Bloodwraith eventually also stabs Andromeda.
Meanwhile, Triton has been taken by a doctor (who is possessed by Morgan Le Fey) who has a magic sapphire, and uses it to control both Triton and Bloodwraith.
Eventually, Namor escapes the Ebony Blade world and fights Morgan Le Fey, as well as Triton and Bloodwraith who are under her thrall.
As the story unfolds, we learn that Morgan le Fey caused the sinking of Atlantis, way back in olden times. Now, she’s trying to raise it back above water.
That means Atlantis is rising. And so, we are set up for the main event.
Here’s the last panel of issue #62, which closes out the series.
There’s a LOT going on in these issues–enough that I could have posted on each individually or made smaller groupings, but the story all flows together. It’s solid–for Namor, it’s very good (his solo books usually suck). His “death” at the hands of Bloodwraith allows for something of a career retrospective, too, so it’s a good way to close out this comic.