Writer: Steve Orlando / Penciller: Riley Rossmo / Colour Artist: Ivan Plasencia / Letterer: Deron Bennett / Collects Martian Manhunter (maxi-series, 2019) #1 - #12 / TP / DC Comics
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24th June 2020
The Pitch: Back on Mars, J'onn J'onzz was about as corrupt as a law officer can be, and when a reckoning comes for his entire society, he'll get a second chance he doesn't want or deserve!
The Martian Manhunter is not unlike the other alien refugee from a dying world we've come to know and love in mass media. Both he and Big Blue Boy Scout fight on the side of right, can fly and have at their disposal a staggering amount of power. Unlike Superman, however, he hasn't gone through the slightly shifting genesis stories that Clark Kent seems constantly inflicted with. On my shelves here at home, as I sit and write this, I count four Superman origin stories. So here we have a new beginning for J'onn J'onzz. This one posits some seemingly simple, yet wide-reaching ideas into the continuity of the man(hunter) from Mars, using those two magic words on whose back a million journeys are borne: 'What if?' What if J'onzz wasn't just a cop from Mars, but a corrupt cop? On the take, hiding his true self from his family? What if, in his corruption, he played a small part in the destruction of his home? What if we meet him at a time when hasn't come out to his human partner in his guise as John Jones? These ideas are minute adjustments, but they reverberate across the book like a basso profundo note, creating ripples, then waves, then tsunamis. Orlando and Rossmo create mirrors and similes in their characters so that their lives mimic each other in the way a Martian might mimic a human. Both J'onzz and his human partner, Diane Meade, have other identities. Both hide their true natures - J'onzz with his species, Meade with her sexuality. Both suffer from the potential fallout of small-town thinking and prejudices. Both are transfers from other places, J'onzz from, well Mars and Meade from a small town, where rumours could spread fast and like a fire, destroy lives.
The small town where it's revealed Meade has transferred in from might represent the small towns that were under threat from 'Martian' (read: commie) invasion in '50s America. Even the title of the book, identity can have a multitude of applications: identity politics, the surface identities of the flesh that Martians can alter and shift at will and of course, sexual identity. Diane's look plays with gender and straddles time periods to boot, her sexuality remains fluid because her thinking, like the Martians, is fluid. When people talk about being free-thinking, this is probably the lofty goal they have for themselves rather than the negative process that seems to be their actuality, at least if people's social media accounts are anything to go by. But even Meade has her prejudices and these are given full flight by the reveal of her partner's true self.
How does one manifest alien invasion when we live in a time when acceptance of the 'other' is front and centre in the global dialogue? When we're fairly sure that the Alien visitation narrative was just a smokescreen for illicit government aircraft experiments and that aliens don't exist. That there are no little green men? Orlando and Rossmo have the answer. They create an invasion of the mind and the body. This isn't alien abduction. It's alien transfiguration and transformation. In Rossmo's capable hands those transformations, once smooth and seamless in any media featuring the Martian Manhunter are now warped into levels of body horror I've not seen since me and a school-friend illegally rented Brian Yuzna's movie Society back in the late eighties. Screaming Mad George would be rubbing his hands with glee watching Rossmo's figures mutate and fold like cookie dough. Plascencia's colours give a sickening, jarring effect that suits the breaking of Martian society and the nauseating attitudes of some of the humans in the book. Bennet’s letters, meanwhile, expertly handle the mutating tongues and tones of the book's dialogue.
As the storyline bridges the decades-long gap between the alien invasions of '50s sci-fi and the outward-looking yet invasive nature of our naked now, the book itself bridges the gap between the hyper-dramatised nature of dialogue in comics of the golden and silver ages and the harder-edged comics of today. Pulp, but for the present. And it's the present concerns that the book feels most comfortable dealing with. Identity, race, infection, disease, memory (and the representation of memory and life) versus the actuality of life lived... even for twelve issues, this is a comic jam-packed with ideas. But Orlando segues beautifully between them. Rossmo's art is terrifying, giving full vent to the horror that engulfs Mars and making even us 'human' folk look extreme and alien. Martian Manhunter: Identity is itself the first wave of an invasion. It's here to storm the beaches of our ideas and assumptions about identity, origins, morality and heroism. To abduct us, prod our narrow minds and send us home again, this time better for the exposure to new ideas and ways of thinking. If you want to tackle the prejudices of a society, you have to do it person by person, institution by institution. Inject new ideas into their bodies. Welcome to the new ideas, the new mindset and most of all, the new flesh.
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