Absolute Martian Manhunter 1: Martian Vision
DC’s Absolute Universe (AU) is a re-imagining of the DCU that I think takes pride in just how radically it refashions the traditional DC line-up of superheroes. That’s certainly the case with Deniz Camp’s and Javier Rodríguez’s version of the Martian Manhunter. Gone is the shape-shifting guy from Mars who assumes the human identity of a detective on Earth named John Jones. Now John Jones is an FBI agent who is somehow possessed by (or psychically “entangled” with) an alien force that can read minds, which is the essence of the “absolute perspective” that is “Martian vision.” What this looks like on the page is a groovy psychedelic burst of swirling clouds of coloured smoke with text that reveals various inner lives. The Manhunter him- (or it) self is rendered as a green Picasso face with a single big red eye and long rubbery arms. Yes, he’s Gumby. But he has no physical form that anyone can see and remains John’s imaginary friend.
He’s not even called the Martian Manhunter here but the Martin Mind****er. Because that’s what he’s all about. He’s not a superhero so much as an alien therapist with the reach of the Internet, operating like some concerned AI program able to read the minds of everyone in Middleton. “Why do people do the things they do?” John asks. MM replies in his typically disjunctive manner: “Traumatic quantities of pain damage despair! You I we are coming apart! Overexposure to fundamental reality results in anti-life spiral!” It seems the whole world is suffering some kind of psychic breakdown.
It’s nobody’s fault though because what’s really happened is that people have been infected with the mind virus of the White Martian. This is another alien force, opposed to the MM, that is turning people into homicidal maniacs. Together John and his Gumby parasite have to stop the White Martian, which I think they mostly do, though I couldn’t follow the story at all.
OK, it’s something different. Very different. Different enough to give you a headache. The feeling I came away with though is that there really wasn’t much story here. It felt like six issues of set-up, at the end of which I still didn’t think the idea had been properly introduced. If the style of it is your thing, I think this is creative to the point of being visionary and it’s incredibly original. At times I felt blown away. But in the end I wish it had been more grounded, with an actual story, and had made a bit more sense or been more coherent. Plus I hate almost everything psychedelic.
