Sweet Sixteen September

Today marks the sixteenth birthday of my Martian Manhunter blog, and besides getting out weekly posts for most of year fifteen, I've also been quietly putting together a modest slate of new posts to celebrate throughout the month of September. At least the weekdays. We'll see if I can pull together the weekends as well, but no promises. Anyway, I'm sure for anyone who visits here that it's hard to miss that this was a daily blog for many years, whereas there are quite a few wilderness years with next to nothing, and my investment in both J'Onn J'Onzz and DC Comics in general has withered with time. I have a stockpile of art commissions, more from slowly developing jam pieces over years colliding with blogging apathy than an actual plan, which I intend to get out there for the character's 70th anniversary in 2025. In the meantime, I piddle with covering material that I have physical copies of that I'd like to purge, and to keep the blogging seat warm until I maybe fully retire from this game after the big seven-oh.

Since I'll also be posting blog links on Twitter (forever Twitter, toadies,) my otherwise increasingly infrequent visits will ramp up there, but haven't yet. Randomly, Martian Manhunter was trending, at least in my timeline. There wasn't a particularly clear reason why this had occurred, so it's probably some for of tailoring to me (I did mention the scarcity of my log-ins,) but several of the tweets (I said TWEETS, Elon) got me to thinking. I used to do a lot of "deep thoughts" posts in the daily days about the essential nature of the character, what he means in a literary sense, or do his shared universe, and so on. Because of my disaffection, I haven't done that sort of thing in a long time-- arguably a couple of reactionary podcast episodes, but probably something like a decade since any proper writings (I scanned back to 2015 before giving up.) But I have some thoughts that feel like they go beyond tweets, so let's see what we come up with.

One suspect instigator is a tweet about how focusing on the alien aspects of Superman is bad for the character, and what people really want is a clean living Christian from Kansas, and pushback against that. Obviously I'm paraphrasing with bias, but it also reminded me of that moronic "objectively good vs. bad art" hot take that was going around a few days ago. Why yes, that clown does indeed have an excessive amount of Pepe the Frog images in his media section-- however did you guess? Was it the thread on Ayn Rand being one of those "good artists?" Of course my own preferences run toward highlighting Superman's alienness, as evidence by my devoting decades of my life to considering the main character to whom those qualities were transferred. The Post-Crisis Martian Manhunter has basically been the Silver Age Superman, and if he struggles to find a place at DC now, imagine how much worse it would be if Superman repossessed those aspects? But one of the main people arguing for the "Superman as immigrant" over the "blood and soi--" er, "nativist" take also made a reference to the importance of Superman's having Jewish creators reflecting their specific immigrant experience. Which absent the greater context, I mistook as referencing J'Onn J'Onzz's Jewish parentage. That gave me pause.

J'Onn J'Onzz's creation is credited to Joseph Samachson, the son of Russian Jews, but also Jewish Silver Age Superman editor Mort Weisinger likely had a major hand in that (especially given that the Manhunter from Mars name and basic premise were stolen from other creators, as was Mort's way.) The artist Joe Certa was credited as co-creator, and the etymology of "Certa" is ambiguous (Italian? Polish? Latin?) Those credits are largely moot though, because the driving creative force behind Silver Age Manhunter from Mars stories was Jack Miller, a noted Anglophile with a rather goyish name. If you go back and read those stories, they're a lot more farm boy than immigrant. In fact, it's hard not to see J'Onn as zealously acclimated. His initial WASP looks shift to something more stereo-typically Irish as his strip progresses, and his first major act upon coming to Earth was assuming the appearance and role of an authority figure. Not only is John Jones a cop, but J'onn J'onzz is too. So many '50s & '60s stories revolve around the Manhunter investigating newly emerging extra-terrestrials and forcibly deporting them. When his fellow Martians show up, J'onn has two modes: how can I use them to get off Earth, and failing that, how do I at least boot them off-world? As a white guy, there are terms for people who embrace the status quo and defend it to the detriment of their own people and country of origin, but I'm not allowed to use any of them.

Another possible trending provocation was speculation on several possible "starring" roles that Giancarlo Esposito might have discussed with James Gunn before the strike. He was Ryan Daly's pick. Not to be ageist, but 65 is a bit long in the tooth to be starting in that role, even if it's all mo-cap CGI. I'm not saying no so much as prove me wrong.

Yet another option, in a rare break from declaring his every move to be perfection, fans seem to willing to at least consider that Martian Manhunter's inclusion in Zack Snyder's Justice League was ham-fisted, ruined a pivotal moment involving Lois Lane, and is also a really lame stinger. I'll add that a lot of related tweets show images of the Snyder Manhunter and the Arrowverse Supergirl one, and man, when the CW outshines you, you're flying too close to Jossity.

Most probably though, the culprit was Martian Manhunter VS Silver Surfer (DC VS Marvel) | DEATH BATTLE! This is part of a popular YouTube video series produced by Rooster Teeth that pits fictional characters against one another. Since his introduction, Silver Surfer has been a top tier cosmic entity within the Marvel Universe, complicit in the destruction of countless worlds. Martian Manhunter is an amateur detective who has been known to cower in the face of candlelight. The Alien Atlas has an impressive power set that looks good on paper, but he's also a jobber who can't hold down a solo series and folds anytime the story requires a more essential JLAer to look imperiled. Wizard Magazine also did this one decades back, and the results were no more in question then. The video still does acommendable job of weaving a cogent narrative out of Manhunter's multitude of retcons, and is a love letter to his power potential.