I've never been overly enthused about this character. He's always struck me as a complete dick.
Yeah, Namor is always portrayed as having an arrogant sense of superiority to every other character he shares adventures with. He has a disdain for humans, and seems to feel a racial superiority to humanity.
Except for Susan Richards, with whom he always wants to slip the hot beef injection.
To me the quintessential Sub-Mariner artist is Bill Everett, and despite reading Bill Everett stories from the time I began reading comics in 1972 (starting with FEAR 10, Oct 1972), I was unaware at that time in the pre-internet days that Everet had died.
Everett unfortunately died very young in 1973, at the age of 55. He was working on the last of about a year's worth of SUB-MARINER stories for Marvel at the time of his sudden death.
I think I liked Sub-Mariner best in the Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR issues, and some later appearances by artists like Perez, Buckler, Giffen, Golden and Byrne.
There was a 1988 12-issue
SAGA OF SUB-MARINER series by Roy Thomas and Rich Bucker, that despite being all-encompaassing in explaining Namor's continuity and having nice art, I found rather dull.
Reading the issues the character appeared in during Byrne's FF and ALPHA FLIGHT runs, it's ambiguous, but I always read it with the notion that he cuckolded Reed Richards.
So, yeah, something of a dick.
