And so, the first half of the Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths revisionist history of DC published in 1986 is mighty concerned about Oa, prehistoric Earth, World War II... all those other places I mentioned. Without a comprehensive reread though, no mention of the planet Mars, or any of its denizens. Moving into the second half, they still devote a lot of pages to WWII, and a little bit of the post-war years. The one true Earth was still a cooling mass, however, so from there we leap to Task Force X and the conception of Aquaman. That famed rocket from a doomed planet had been launched in the first volume, and finally landed in a corn field near Smallville. A nigh-adolescent Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down, which gets a bit hinky with the relative ages of the DC Trinity. Phantom Stranger, Captain Comet, and the creation of Princess Diana arrive next. Well, one figure does fall between Comet and clay baby Wonder Woman...
Warrior J'onn J'onzz, exiled into the parched Martian desert, was teleported accidentally to planet Earth by the famous Professor Erdel. This Manhunter from Mars knew the time of heroes had not yet come, and so remained in hiding, disguising himself as a police detective until, at last, he could allow the world to know of his existence.There's a lot to consider there. Firstly, that was two sentences. I choose to offer long, sometimes tortured sentences as part of my personal expression, so you might call me hypocritical for pointing that out-- but dang! Next, the fact that in a rare instance of DC offering mixed caps in a canon story, only the Js are capitalized. Okay, I might be "considering" too pedantically. How about how the late Silver/early Bronze status quo begun with"...And So My World Ends!" seems to still be in place, with that "warrior" bit in particular pushed back against by the 1988 retcon? We're also in a vague pre-heroic age, with the best marker being the conception of Raven on the next page. The creative team on this book had come up with that character to be a member of the New Teen Titans, and the book's artist was presumably working out how his Wonder Woman would also debut in her late teens/early 20s in her new history. Therefore, at the time of publication, it would be fair to assume Detective John Jones was around in the late 1960s. Couldn't be much further back than that, if we want to keep Superman and Batman around 28-30 years old. While a handful of stories alluded to a further period setting, it would be another eight years before parity with his initial date of publication was established in Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #0.
This was now the Silver Age of heroes, and some of the greatest who ever lived banded together to fight evil on Earth and throughout the stars. Inspired by the wartime exploits of the famed All-Stars and the Justice Society, these young heroes took the name the Justice League of America.Because John Byrne's Man of Steel had already rolled out, we knew that Superman would be excluded. Pictured as the core line-up were J'onn J'onzz, Aquaman, Barry Allen, Batman, and Hal Jordan. A scale Ray Palmer Atom was placed just outside the framing of this team inside the old badge logo of the JLA, with the floating heads of Oliver Queen and Katar Hol on either side. Not a bad guess, but this line-up was never properly executed in the comics. The Caped Crusader was eventually excluded, at least as a founder, though he inevitably engaged with the JLA early and often in this retcon. DC eventually settled on a quintet in 1988, capped by Black Canary.
N:TAS DCU: Z'Onn Z'Orr: Santurian 9-6-11
In this version of the Martian Manhunter's origin, J'onn J'onzz was ambushed, convicted of trumped-up charges by an all-Pale jury, and sent into exile. J'onzz's absence allowed Mars to die, and despite Blanx's motivations, it's hard not to see their final battle amidst the ashes of the red planet as a clash between the sole remaining representatives of two races. The Justice League of America helped round up the evil Pale Martians, and turned a blind eye to J'onzz's use of lethal force against Blanx. John Jones had been a paragon of white authority, working under a similarly hued police captain and alongside a blond haired, blue-eyed patrolwoman. Blanx was a paler shade of white though, practicing prejudice with self-interest of the sort that the Love Generation was loudly condemning at the time. I suppose this was the beginning of J'onn J'onzz as Israelite, as Native American, as last chief of a race largely wiped from the cosmos.
In a story from 1977, a friend of J'onn J'onzz appeared to be assassinated on the alien world Mars' survivors settled on. Rather than make the obvious assumption that one Desert-Dweller had killed another, J'onzz leapt to the wildly inaccurate conclusion that it must have been one of the super-heroes on Earth who knew of Mars II's location. Bad plotting and a desire to use a lot of guest stars surely played into his logic, but one has to wonder if it was just easier to blame another species instead of looking to his own people for the guilty parties, which is exactly where they were eventually found. The "assassination" turned out to be a misdirection to push a Desert Dweller army into massacring a blue-skinned people who inhabited the planet and seizing their superior city. Not a progressive sounding bunch, these Desert Dwellers. A similar ruse was used in 1984 to launch a war against the Earth, which the Martian Manhunter helped route. However, there was a good deal of distrust between the Alien Atlas and his former allies in the Justice League, likely fueled by J'onzz's tendency to run around battering people and making insane allegations against them. There was a lot of tension revolving around people's relative "Martianness," and J'onzz was ultimately abandoned by his people as they left Earth in shame.
In 1984, a cousin for J'onn J'onzz was created in "Jemm, Son of Mars," whose self-titled mini-series made ample use of the previously mentioned Bronze Age history of Mars. An editorial clash saw Jemm shift setting to Saturn, but the core story remained the same. White-skinned Saturnians were still sociopaths, while Red Saturnians were warmongers who feared and loathed them. Saturnians added some rather unhealthy sexual prejudices as well, with misandrist White females enslaving weaker men. A later retcon reunited the Saturnians with Mars, making Saturns' races cloned colonists of Mars, Red for Green, White for White. The typically pacifistic Jemm has been repeatedly manipulated into conflict with J'Onn J'Onzz, who was mostly understanding about the matter, although he did decide to have intimacies with Jemm's fiancé. The Saturnians defer the Martians as superior beings, which J'Onzz also took advantage of rather than dissuading.
From around 1985 until 1996, the Martian Manhunter was treated as being essentially the only Martian. In 1988, all Martians appearing in earlier stories were revealed to be figments of J'onzz's imagination planted by a psychic suggestion to deal with the trauma of living through a destructive plague. J'onzz learned that he had a wife and child, both of whom had green skin. Previously, the only two females linked to J'onzz in a romantic capacity had also been green-skinned.
In 1997, the old racial war was revisited with a vengeance, as monstrous White Martians were introduced and made a bid for Earth. Besides being bestial in form, the White Martians were portrayed as universally racist, sadistic, and generally amoral. The one exception, introduced nearly a decade later, was the heroine Miss Martian. M'gann M'orzz chose to a appear as a Green Martian because of the broad hatred of her people, and has continued this charade for years, despite her true race being known. While a "good" White, a future version of M'orzz revealed that she would eventually embrace her race and vicious White leanings. Miss Martian did not care to hear this, and chopped off her future self's head before indulging in an identity crisis with signs of emerging schizophrenia.
J'Onn J'Onzz had spent years mourning the absence of his people, but that did not stop him from mind-wiping the White Martians, imprisoning them, and merging temporarily with an entity called Fernus in a bid to exterminate them. In the "One Year Later" period, J'Onn turned against the Justice League to protect a group of murderous Green Martians, until he found out that they were really White, and they were never heard from again. J'Onzz also waited years before having any sort of direct contact with M'gann M'orzz, and has largely maintained that distance. Only in the non-canon cartoon Young Justice has there been a portrayal of genuine sustained warmth between the two, although Miss Martian appears to be a Green Martian and niece to J'Onzz in that series.
What we have here is a failure to communicate a positive direction for racial politics in the Martian Manhunter's neck of the woods. All White Martians are pure evil, aside from a couple of "good ones." All Pale Martians were Nazi goons, while White Saturnians were all kinds of creepy messed up. Red Saturnians weren't much better, just weaker, and most Green Martians were either massacre bait or knee-jerk violent reactionaries. The one yellow-skinned Martian was a killer outlaw, and J'Onn J'Onzz hasn't had a healthy relationship with any of them since 1968. J'Onzz did deign to have a fling with the White Saturnian 
When J'onn J'onzz first took human form in 1955, it was as a white man. When he killed off the John Jones identity in the early '60s, he eventually took on the role of Marco Xavier, another white man. After decades away from Earth, upon repatriating here, he reestablished the deceased John Jones identity while serving on a calculatedly multicultural team. It wasn't until the late '90s that creators flirted with other races or genders, none sticking for long. In animation and live action, African-American actors have tended to portray the Martian Manhunter, the 2012 direct-to-DVD cartoon Justice League Doom introduced a black John Jones, and New 52 DC Comics may follow suit. While I've tended to be critical of DC's dumping decades of continuity in an attention grab, J'Onn J'Onzz could benefit mightily from this new beginning. There were numerous isolated pockets of continuity in any given decade of publishing that rarely connected as any kind of whole, and the stuff that did carry over was often naive demonizing along racial lines. I sincerely hope that when we do finally get to know the Manhunter from Mars in the New 52, someone will have given thought to the greater scheme of Martian history, and will offer a more nuanced approach to the races of the red planet.
Post-Racial DC Comics?
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