"[13] Everett's antihero would eventually battle Carl Burgos' android superhero, the Human Torch, when in 1940 Namor threatened to sink the island of Manhattan underneath a tidal wave.
[21][22] Namor returned in Fantastic Four #4 (May 1962), where a member of the titular superhero team, Johnny Storm, the new Human Torch, discovers him living as an amnesiac homeless man in the Bowery section of Manhattan.
[29] Some of the later issues of this Sub-Mariner series are notable for having been written and drawn by the character's creator, Bill Everett, shortly before his death; as well, they reintroduced a now-older Namora, and introduced her daughter, Namorita Prentiss.
[33] The 12-issue maxiseries The Saga of the Sub-Mariner (Nov. 1988 – Oct. 1989) provided a retrospective of Namor's past adventures while tying up loose plot threads and resolving contradictions that had accumulated over the character's decades of published history.
This series followed Namor as CEO of Oracle, Inc., a corporation devoted to reducing pollution, particularly in the oceans, and provided the stage for the return of the 1970s martial artist superhero Iron Fist, who had been presumed dead.
His mother was Emperor Thakorr's daughter, Fen, and his father an American sea captain, Leonard McKenzie, of the icebreaker Oracle; they had fallen in love and married aboard ship while she was, unbeknownst to him, spying on the human intruders.
[48] After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US officially joining the war in 1941, Namor formed superhero team the Invaders, alongside Captain America, Bucky, the original Human Torch, and Toro.
[56] Prior to Namor's first battle with the Avengers, he comes across a group of Inuit worshiping a figure frozen in ice; someone whom the Sub-Mariner vaguely recognizes from the past just before hurling said monolith into the ocean during an outburst of rage.
[82] During the "Secret Empire" storyline, Captain America puts Namor into a position where he is forced to sign a peace treaty that for a time enabled Hydra to access a fragment of the Cosmic Cube stored in Atlantis.
[86] He lends the support of Atlantis to her cause and works with his fellow mutants in the battle against Cassandra Nova as she manipulates national powers against Homo superior on a global scale,[87] once more donning the colors of X to resist a nanorobotic sentinel attack.
[93] After battling cybernetically augmented dolphins sent by the Roxxon oil corporation, Namor sits brooding in an undersea tavern, musing on the decline of his kingdom and repeated aggression from the surface world, and considering giving in to the hunger for war.
Taking the bartender's words to heart, Namor uses his lingering psychic link with the Phoenix Force to summon it back to Earth, promising to set galaxies ablaze in exchange for the power to defeat the Avengers.
Namor flings himself at Okun, hoping to surface and use his airbreathing abilities to gain the upper hand, but realizes that the tunnel he passed through to reach the Vodani was in fact a portal to another world, and he has unwittingly cast them both into the vacuum of space, where he is only saved by the unexpected intervention of the Silver Surfer.
[95] Namor, in conjunction with his colleagues in the Defenders, battles against Nebulon, a demon-empowered entity who has hijacked a cosmic train that burns planets as fuel, and has directed it to Vodan and ultimately towards Earth.
[97] In addition to incarcerating the criminal Hydro-Man to siphon his hydrokinetic powers which explained how Namor got the Sea Blades to side with him, Atlantean technicians have been fabricating a bomb to target human DNA.
The Agents successfully develop a new power source to prevent Pan's citizens from being displaced, and the dragon is safely returned to Atlantis, but abruptly goes berserk upon arrival and attacks the underwater city.
Bill Everett, in his first Sub-Mariner story, described the character as "an ultra-man of the deep [who] lives on land and in the sea, flies in the air, [and] has the strength of a thousand [surface] men".
[111] His strength diminishes slowly the longer he is out of contact with water, though an extended period on land does not result in his death, as it would for a typical Atlantean, and his power is retained in full as long as he keeps himself wet.
[120] Said recipient would study up on the lore of Atlantis's mythical, mystical background and discovered a hidden treasure cove pertaining to numerous magical relics in the ocean deity's possession.
[121] Other powers include that of physical transformation, such as changing a human into merfolk, firing destructive energy beams, commanding the creatures of the brine to act on its wielders behalf, as well as influence both weather and the tides of the world to do their bidding.
[122][123] Like all weapons and reliquary crafted by and for the Olympian Pantheon, such as Heracles' Adamantine Mace, the trident is composed of indestructible metal belonging to the gods, able to battle against multiple enforcers of the Thor Corps and their legions of Mjolnir hammers without taking any damage.
Richard Fink of MovieWeb called Namor a "fan favorite for years," writing, "The character has a long rich history in the comics and has had dealings with The Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, and many more.
In Ultimate Fantastic Four #24, the eponymous team is surveying the ruins of Atlantis and finds an estimated 9,000-year-old tomb containing the hibernating Namor – an imprisoned Atlantean criminal, considered the worst villain of his time.
[202] Kaufman was developing the film the next month when he revealed it would tackle environmental issues by depicting Namor as having "bad feelings" towards the land residents of Earth over ecological concerns.
[204] In June 2001, Universal Pictures entered negotiations to gain the rights for Namor, with then Marvel Studios President Avi Arad and Kevin Misher set to produce the film.
Avi Arad said the film would be an "epic underwater tale of majestic fantasy", which Marvel described as following the adventures of Namor as a prince from Atlantis who is a "half-human/half-amphibian" and a "troubled rebel with a short temper" and has helped humans and fought them over pollution.
[208] By July 2004, Marvel and Arad entered negotiations for Chris Columbus to direct the project, and he signed on as director and producer of Sub-Mariner by that December, developing it through his production company 1492 Pictures.
[223] In November 2022, Marvel Studios executive Nate Moore confirmed that they cannot make a standalone Namor film since Universal still holds the character's distribution rights, similar to the Hulk.
[224] In March 2023, Citigroup financial analyst Jason Bazinet felt Disney may try to include the distribution rights to Namor, along with Hulk, in any potential sale of the streaming service Hulu to Comcast, the owner of Universal Pictures through NBCUniversal.
This caused her and the rest of Yucatán's people to develop blue skin and grow gills that restricted their ability to breathe air on the surface, forcing them to relocate underwater and establish Talokan as a new civilization.