J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter made his first appearance in a back-up story in the November 1955 issue of Detective Comics (#255), one of the homes of Batman. In that particular tale, he is accidentally teleported to Earth by an elderly scientist who almost immediately dies of shock when he sees what he has done. The alien, trapped on Earth, decides to use his superb martian powers to fight crime until the time that martian technology catches up and is able to bring him back to his home planet. He has incredible martian morphing abilities and disguises himself as a human being and takes a job with the local police force as Detective John Jones.
So far, as I've been reading along in the collection, I've taken note the importance of how either identity or role play out in these comic stories. The first story involved Superman and Batman playing out a role-reversal as Superman loses his powers and Batman gains super powers. The second tale I blogged about dealt with the frontier hero Tomahawk disguising himself and posing as the villain as a use of subterfuge. Then with John Jones, there's the whole idea that there is someone amongst us, hiding, who is unknowingly, yet incredibly, alien.
The Martian Manhunter was literally a manhunter in his early stories. He was one of us, hunting down criminals. Rarely did he revert to his original martian form. It's important to note he appeared, along with Batman, in DETECTIVE comics. It wasn't until the dawn of the new sleek and sciece-based super-heroes, like the Flash and Green Lantern, that J'onn J'onzz started fighting crime as his super martian self, not as a disguised human. He was then seen flying around his city protecting it like Superman.
The Martian Manhunter is a creature of duality. He is Batman, the detective; and he is Superman, the alien powerhouse. He just happened to be super-heroing at the right time, being one of the only seven super-heroes appearing in DC Comics in early 1960, that he got to become a founding member of their super-hero team, the Justice League of America.
DC was worried, at first, that having Batman and Superman appear in too many of the JLA stories would overexpose them, and so used the Martian Manhunter as a substitute Superman, and Green Arrow in for Batman. However, as the 1960s moved on and the big two started to appear more and more often, it made those other two a bit redundant- and in the case of J'onn J'onzz, he fell entirely off the comics radar. It wasn't until the mid 1980s that he significantly appeared again, as a sort of a respected, elder amongst super-heroes.
"Escape from the Stars," first printed in Detective #228 (Feb 1956), is one of his earlier tales, printed at a time that comics weren't doing super-hero so much. As I read this story, I kept in mind some of the 1950s(ish) political and cultural subtext of the time. The House of Un-American Activities. The golden-age of television. The written works of James Baldwin. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The alien movie genre: War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Godzilla. I think so many of these concepts can be applied to an alien being transported to a land he does not belong to, however, I think I may be elevating the comic material just a bit! Anyway, that's in my mind when I think of the Martian Manhunter...(although Darwyn Cooke gets him spot on in his series "DC: The New Frontier," which I MUST spotlight here in my blog- as soon as I get a new copy or get access to all my comics and books in storage...)
In this tale, John Jones is told to get a lead on some thief, Alex Dunster who has eluded the entire police force, his super-self included. He uses his powers to find him but is discovered because Dunster was using a super-giant hearing aid to hear Jones walking through walls!
Jones has to start over, but soon his manhunt leads him down a dirt road to a cabin (because its in the middle of the woods that the most amazing scientific discoveries are made as you can see...)
The machine that first brought him to Earth!
He has a chance to get back home!
But his nobility and a simple little glass test-tube destroy his hopes!
No way!!!! That's how we got stuck with the Martian Manhunter...
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