Action Comics #1042 (June, 2022)

At the abandoned Casino Riviera, the new Faceless asked an oozing green mass on the floor, "Who the hell is J'Onn J'Onzz? Or is it Rita Gonzales today? Or perhaps Albert Schmidt? Who is it you see when you look in the mirror? What is left when your body can hold no form? Do you know? Does anyone?" Most of the story is devoted to J'Onn's absence of self, a partial refutation of the Ostrander series where the multitudes of assumed identities and dutiful time spent with the League are a distraction from the Martian's inability to move past the death of Mars and fully manifest a true, evolving self while living on Earth. Meaning he's been spinning his wheels since at least the end of the Giffen DeMatteis JLI in 1992.

Faceless sent Professor Hugo to fetch the "naplam blood," but the Alien Atlas nigh-instantaneously pulled himself back together, turned invisible and intangible, flew across the room, then stood in place in solid form so that Arnold could bump into him. Just so's you know that none of the villains ever stood a sliver of a chance. The Manhunter then orders the fledgling Vulture chicks to run in their highly reflective featureless golden masks that couldn't ever be confused with the Helm of Nabu. While bashing the adult Vulture committee and Faceless, the Sleuth from Outer Space noted that he'd bested the neuron scrambler by moving his brain to his tongue, biting it off, and reforming. I wasn't on Twitter (more later,) but if the message boards were still up, I could have audibly heard the cries of "overpowered."

After the initial defeat of Vulture, they spent years rebuilding, watching Manhunter from the shadows to eventually exploit some weakness. Because J'Onn only ever lived a ghost of a life, he supposedly had no loved ones to imperil, so that his only vulnerability was his amassing of foes in the years since. So Vulture exploited that by enlisting... only the ones from the old Showcase Presents economical black & white reprints... and Dr. Trap, I guess. Oh, and Faceless is just some guy, I think? A lot of the male characters from this strip look enough alike that it could maybe be that researcher guy at the police station from an earlier chapter, but they make a point of his being "no one," so probably not. I don't care enough to check anyway.

Cops busted in to bag the perps, but the Manhunter bolts to spend the day hanging out with... Zook and Gwen from the museum? J'Onn commits to spending more time being himself with his... friends... like the little girl fan he just met and the random lady that escorted him to a crime scene? Like Harry Callahan at the end of the first of five movies spanning 17 years, J'Onn disposes of his police badge. Did we ever figure out which cop he was in the first place? And his throwing it in the garbage could have been a meaningful critique on police violence, which isn't a topic in this story, so treating it like refuse was merely circumstantial?

"A Face in the Crowd: Part Six" was by Shawn Aldridge and Adriana Melo. I had the option of covering the penultimate and final chapters of the Martian Manhunter serial more or less back-to-back, but wanted to give each installment room to "breathe." Then I got into a fight with a bot on Twitter, who then locked my account, and I refused to budge on anything related to the matter for two months. I was so sick of everything that I was thinking of scrubbing the entire Diabolu Frank identity and moving on with my life. I'm still probably going to delete the Twitter account and just fold any further promotion of this blog into the Rolled Spine Podcasts account, but one of the things I wanted to do first was completing the coverage of this serial.

The other reason I held out was because this story wasn't very good. As fan service, it made me very happy to see so many moribund concepts foundational to J'Onn J'onzz's original solo strip finally recognized and deployed in modern continuity. I believe that I already referred to this story as the Alien Atlas' "Hush," which sucked as a narrative but sang as a showcase for Jim Lee to draw Batman characters. Except Melo isn't Jim Lee, and the art takes a tumble in quality on the final entry. By burning through the old rogues in rapid succession without offering much in the way of revitalization, it simply reinforces the notion that they are disposable and unworthy of further consideration. Any future writer is robbed of the opportunity to shock an audience that "X" has returned after half a century-plus, deadlier than ever. "X" already came back in that Action Comics serial, and they accomplished squat.

Also, like Ostrander, the writer calls something a Zook that has no real similarity to the Silver Age character named Zook. To continue an analogy, that's like introducing Stephanie Brown as the new Bat-Mite. One is a human girl and one is a super-powered otherdimensional imp. There's not a parity there, just mutual diminishment. The little girl by definition can't be the thing she's named for, and the thing that still isn't getting screen time is at best suffering a trademark infringement besides. You can't announce that we're getting a sundae and hand us yogurt. That's just not even what you said you were going to do. Yogurt isn't ice cream drizzled with hot fudge and sprinkled with chopped nuts... maybe some whipped cream and a cherry? Even if there's a little cherry at the bottom of the yogurt, who do you think you're fooling?

I'm used to being disappointed by Martian Manhunter stories, robbing me year after year of motivation to continue blogging and otherwise championing the intellectual property of a soulless, clueless corporation for no reward whatsoever. It was nice to see the familiar faces and names dropped. Wasn't much else to it, however. Also, the part where he forms a fist in the middle of his chest to throw a punch? Blech.