Dolphin (character)

Dolphin is a DC Comics superheroine.

Dolphin's true name is unknown - even she cannot remember it. The only garbled information about her past, contained in Secret Origins #50, depicted her as a human little girl, fallen overboard from a cruise ship she was travelling on.

Secret Origins

Doomed to certain death by drowning, was saved when a mysterious alien race took her from experiment about the creation of a humanoid race able to live underwater, gifted by gills, webbed fingers, and a body superhumanly (although not at the superhuman levels of the similar hero Aquaman) strong and resilient to deep water pressure. Those experiments granted her an enhancement to her lifespan, slowing her aging process.

After escaping from the underwater laboratory, actually deserted even by the alien race that started the experiment, Dolphin, taken too young to rember anything of the surface live, adapted herself to live as a sort of little mermaid, finding in a drowned ship her tradmark short blue-jeans and white shirt, and living a lonely life, until the day an oceanologist crew saved her, now a young woman, from almost certain death, during a battle with a dolphin-killer shark.

It took to them, especially from a young female doctor in the crew, try to establish a contact with the aquatic maiden, even taking her for physical exams on their ship. Her lack of contact with any member of the human (or Atlantean) race, left her mute, able to understand almost completly spoken language, but, at least in short times, unable to master spoken language. When the the doctor, who having herself a mute friend, suggested to learn the maid, now dubbed Dolfin, the American Sign Language, Dolphin managed to explain herself, tell some bits of her story, but also expressed her wish to return to her undersea life.

The Crisis Years

It seems at a certain point in her life Dolphin finally mastered spoken language, especially when she started having contact with the superheroic community, but never left behind her elusiveness and shyness. Even if no more mute, she always tried to speak the less possible, only if strictly necessary.

Dolphin has stayed mostly on the fringes of the superheroic community, although she was a member of the Forgotten Heroes for a while, and fought alongside them during the Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Meeting Aquaman

During the Zero Hour events, she met Aquaman, and took part in the battle against Charybdis, a villain interested in the aquatic powers of the two heroes. When Charybdis, after robbing Aquaman of his telepatic powers, stuck Aquaman's hand in a pool of water teeming with piranhas, Dolphin, until that moment silent and somewhat inert, was forced to shot the madman, and take herself Aquaman (and his wounded sidekick, Aqualad, to Atlantis for being cured by Vulko.

She then became a support character in the Aquaman comic book, and soon she won the heart of an Aquaman now bitter and harsh than before... with all people, except of her. Aqualad also soon displayed some affection with the cute sea maiden, that with the passing of time dropped some of her shyness to show an energic but sometimes bubbly and naive personality.

It was only in issue #25 of Aquaman v3 that the reader knew something more about her the freedom from the alien race, and her staying in Atlantis: Kordax, the villainous son of Cora and Dardanus, ancestors of the Atlantean Race, a green scaled human-fish hybrid with powers similar to the Aquaman ones (it was said that the fair hair and the telepathy of the Atlantean King were "the marx of Kordax"), had secretly set her free, and mind controlled her to infiltrate in the royal court and enact his revenge. Dolphin was freed by Kordak mind control by her strong will, and her romantic involment with the king of Atlantis grew to became true love.

She now slept abitually with the king, even wearing his clothes... until Mera, Aquaman's wife, returned by her exile in another dimension, the Netherworld. In the same period Garth, the former protegè of Aquaman known as Aqualad and now dubbed Tempest, returned from his magic studies with increased powers and confidence, and with a kiss he won the heart of the cute siren of the seven seas. They enjoyed an happy relation, with Aquaman's blessings, until the day in which the girl told Tempest of her pregnancy. The young was shaken, and very suprised (in fact, they seemed to had sex only one time), but after some esitation he finaly accepted to marry his girl in a rushly ceremony open to all Garth's friend of the Teen Titans.

Starting a family life

Her family life started as an happy one: they were happy, and they had a son, called Cerdian by Aquaman in honor of a surface nation conquered by Atlantis. But when the family responsibilities overwhelmed the couple, and a new elite of Ancient Mages rose in power taking control of Atlantis, exiling Aquaman and openly despising his former friends, Dolphin, now confined in her home with his "collaborationst" husband, seemed to lost her smile.

She also forced Garth to take a choice: his heroic activities or his family. That strained their relation to a breaking point in which Garth is unable to confort her wife, and Dolphin seems to have lost all the spontaneous and ovewhelming passion who had before for him.

Whenether the fall of the Mages Elite, and the new rise of Garth in the Atlantean ranks will made Dolphin again proud of her husband, leading her to reignite a spark of love in her heart and the light of a smile on her lips is another thing that must be seen in the pages of Aquaman v5.