I remember being 11 years-old when the first episode of Justice League premiered. This was the first time I’d seen many of the heroes that would become staples of my comic reading future: Green Lantern, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash. But there was this teal-colored martian that I didn’t know existed until that moment. He was something I’d never seen before with his telepathy, shape-shifting, intangibility, and off-putting presence compared to the other alien on the team, Superman. But while Martian Manhunter became a staple of the show and comics since, it wasn’t until Absolute Martian Manhunter by Deniz Camp, Javier Rodríguez, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou that he felt just as strange as that first episode over twenty years ago.

John Jones is a lucky man. He’s the only survivor of a bombing and only has some relatively minor injuries as a result—only some brain swelling and some bumps and scratches. But then there’s this smoke he keeps seeing. It’s not regular smoke either—it’s colorful and seems to emanate off people in thick enough waves that John is able to inhale it and see that person’s entire life unfold in front of him. Maybe this is just part of the concussion from the explosion. Or maybe when he was laying in the rubble of that exploded building, something came to him that saved his life, but took space in his mind.

There’s oddity and there’s novelty—the latter can wear out fairly quickly, but the former can stick around in a reader’s mind while they try to parse through what they’ve just read. Absolute Martian Manhunter establishes itself firmly in the former as this interpretation of the character is more akin to a stand in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure than the stoic alien we’d grown accustomed to in cartoons. But then that’s why this interpretation works so well—it’s unlike what we expect from this character and so the novelty of the alternate universe fades quickly to be replaced by the curious oddity. We’re compelled to read because we truly can’t know where this version of the character can go as it lets go of so much of canon’s baggage and expectations. It’s reminiscent of the pre-Vertigo days where writers were given silver-age heroes and told to do what they wanted. We can find a new way to care about a character that’s always been reader’s periphery due to nostalgia, but give him something more that makes him feel like a new character.

Camp, Rodríguez, and Otsmane-Elhaou have done something that no other creative team has done for Martian Manhunter as a character since the Justice League cartoon introduced him to a new generation of readers or since John Ostrander gave him an affinity for Chocos cookies. They’ve created such a radical reimagining that this doesn’t quite feel like the same character, but still maintains some strands of DNA. And if this keeps one the best aliens in DC’s canon relevant, then maybe we do need to see him spun into something stranger more often. 

Get excited. Get smoky.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, & 651) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.