It’s Time to Wake Up- Absolute Martian Manhunter #1 by Deniz Camp & Javier Rodriguez

Absolute Martian Manhunter #1 starts with a bang, both literally and figuratively.  The very first image by Javier Rodriguez shows a man (our hero John Jones) caught in an explosive blast.  A cup of coffee, a cup saucer, a spoon, and some of the hot beverage hang in the air around him.  Jones’s head tilts to one side because of the blast, teeth clamped together, one eye squeezed shut while the other is wide open. A mixture of three colors- orange, yellow, and blue— encircle his iris.  His collar is ripped apart by the force.  The one question on this page that writer Deniz Camp asks us is “Why do people do the things they do?”  So far, we’ve seen four Absolute titles— Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, and Flash (with Green Lantern coming right up) but at the start, none of them have felt like Camp and Rodriguez’s premiere issue.  None of them have announced themselves with a bang like this issue does.  As reimaginings of old characters go, this update of the Martian Manhunter feels quite radical.  This feels like something new.   

This story has a familiar feel to it.  An FBI agent gets caught in a blast; his superiors and his wife don’t want him anywhere near the developing case.  “You’re a witness, not an investigator,” his boss tells him.  And if you’ve seen any kind of cop show or procedural, you know how ineffective that kind of warning can be.  So of course Jones starts investigating, talking to the suspected bomber’s mother, neighbor, and best friend.  He’s an agent trying to figure out why people do the things that they do.  He’s trying to put it together.  But there’s something else; there are these nagging thoughts in the back of his mind, almost like he’s reading other people’s minds.  He knows that the doctor who examines him is distracted because he’s thinking about his cheating mind.  He knows that a rival agent calls Jones “the Martian” behind his back.  He knows that the bomber’s neighbor isn’t lying about her near-daily cannabis use.  And then there’s the colorful smoke that’s hanging everywhere in the air and coming out of people’s bodies that only Jones notices.

It’s as if that blast knocked Jones out of synch with the world around him.  Rodriquez uses that to draw the world around Jones not as it is, but as he’s sensing it.  Comics are visual; we see the page, the words, and the drawings to take in the story but Rodriguez and Camp are trying to overwhelm our visual senses to get us to experience this comic with our other senses.   Rodriguez is a masterful storyteller but his use of color here takes his storytelling to another level.  As Jones moves through his life, most of the colors are muted, darker, and duller colors to signify the duller and mundane portions of this life.  But there are these intrusions of color that now invade his senses, in the smoke that’s hanging everywhere and follows Jones around.  Eventually, even the sound that accompanies the smoke that overwhelms Jones. These colors have texture, smell, sound, and even taste to them.  It’s like the blasts shook something in Jones that’s slowly waking up and making him experience the world in a way that he’s not ready for yet.  

Other Camp books like 20th Century Men, The Ultimates, and Assorted Time Crisis ask us how we see the world around us.  20th Century Men and The Ultimates explore the differences between what we’re told the world is and what the world actually is.  And there are elements of that in Absolute Martian Manhunter #1 but this issue treats it more as an awakening that’s fighting Jones.  “I stay awake all night, trying not to think… of the smoke… of what’s waiting for me in it…”. Jones senses there’s something not right here, that the world is changing around him and he’s fighting it even while he’s trying to figure it out.  It’s not that he can’t sleep; he doesn’t want to.  So instead, he’s standing outside in his yard, sucking on a cigarette and breathing out green smoke into the night air.

This comic book wants to break you down and overwhelm you.  Thanks to those previous Absolute books, you may think you know what this one is but Deniz Camp and Javier Rodriguez make those other books look like they’re not even trying to do anything new or fresh.  Camp and Rodriguez’s mission with this first issue is to knock you out of your comfort zone just as John Jones is knocked out of his.  Each page of this comic comes from someplace than just another old DC comic that featured a big, green Martian.  Rodriguez reshapes the world around Jones, opening new doors of perception even as Jones tries to keep his head down and just shuffle through his life.  But that’s not what the voice in the back of his head is telling him to do or what his senses are letting him do.  And as superhero comics go, that’s not what Camp or Rodriguez want us to do either.  Why keep reading the same old stories over and over again of the rich kid, the princess, or the farm boy?  The Martian Manhunter is an old character but that doesn’t mean he can’t be new again.  This isn’t a superhero comic.  It’s a wake-up call.