GREENS UNDER THE BED

Greetings, carbon-based soilpigs. Well, it seems like it’s time once again for me to seize you roughly by the philtrum and drag you downstairs to the BARGAIN BASEMENT OF DOOOOOM. As promised in the previous instalment, the basement has gone green – and I don’t mean environmentally friendly, given the tarlike fumes currently exuding from the… unpleasantness. No, it means another showcase focusing on my favourite seven-foot extra-terrestrial: the delightful and pine-scented J’onn J’onzz. This week, we’re going back to 1992, for the three-issue prestige-format mini MARTIAN MANHUNTER: AMERICAN SECRETS. 

Even among aficionados of the Alien Ace, this series seems dimly remembered. Certainly, it doesn’t have the experimental flair or character-defining authority of the DeMatteis/Badger series, nor the gravitas, scope and general bad-assery of the 1998 Ostrander/Mandrake ongoing series (of which more at a later date…). However, it’s an intriguing and unique title in its own right. Written by Gerard Jones (Justice League, Green Lantern) and drawn by the late Eduardo Barreto (Birds of Prey, Marvel Knights and various licensed properties for Dark Horse), the book places J’onn in the period setting in which he first appeared – 1950s America.

The story follows J’onn (who mostly appears in his human guise of Denver PD Detective John Jones) stumbling into a murder case that, via a vague and increasingly bizarre trail of clues, leads to a sinister conspiracy (which I won’t spoil here). Along the way, he teams up with a young girl in peril and an Elvis analogue by the name of Preston Perkins, meets a retired Golden Age adventurer, visits Vegas masquerading as a mix of Colonel Sanders and Colonel Tom Parker, wanders into a creepily idyllic white-picket suburb that’s not all it seems, and even heads to Cuba, where he encounters Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

At times, American Secrets seems like a game of ‘How many 1950s references can we cram into three issues?’ We also get a rigged game show scandal, Leave it to Beaver, jukebox payola, Bobby Kennedy, McCarthyism, J. Edgar Hoover, monster movies, Mad magazine, etc., etc. Even J’onn’s first-person narration is written in the hard-boiled Raymond Chandler style. Check out the opening monologue:

“He reached for me as the bullet broke his breastbone. Who else could he reach for? He’s a stranger. I’m a stranger. Not just strangers to each other, but even bigger strangers to the cold stone eyes of the city. He’s a beatnik. I’m a Martian.”

 HELL YES. I AM BUYING THAT.

As it turns out, the diabolical conspiracy uncovered by J’onn represents mainstream American culture of the 1950s – the forces of consumerism, conformity, capitalism, of the numbing panacea of bland entertainment, of the fear of an alien other. And it takes precisely that alien other to stand against it. J’onn even suggests that Martian society was a truer form of Communism than has ever been seen on Earth – given that the popular culture of the 1950s sublimated fear of Communists into fear of aliens, this arguably puts him in the unique position of being both an allegory and precisely what that allegory represents. He is indeed a threat to the prevailing culture, because he seeks the companionship and warmth that that culture denies him. In the end, J’onn finds his own path, neither Communist nor capitalist, but as a subversive, counter-cultural figure, as befits his outsider status.

In #3, J’onn meets and has a conversation with a retired member of the Justice Society. And here’s where it gets pretty interesting… but it requires a bit of historical context. After the end of World War II, superhero comics, including the Justice Society (in All-Star Comics), were severely on the wane. Publishers turned to Western, horror and romance books, with Action Comics and Detective Comics being pretty much the only caped titles left standing. Further blows were dealt to the industry by Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, a treatise of moral panic about the violent, occult and sexual content of the era’s comics, which eventually led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Most folks would have you believe that the resurgence of the superheroes, the Silver Age, began with the first appearance of the Barry Allen Flash in Showcase #4 (1956). However, J’onn J’onzz appeared almost a year before that. There is a case, therefore, for saying that the Silver Age began with the first appearance of the Manhunter from Mars in Detective Comics #225.

Aaaaanyway. So he meets the Justice Society member, and they chinwag, over an old issue of All-Star Comics, about the sense of boundless optimism that gave birth to the Golden Age heroes, how this went sour after WWII, how the heroes vanished, how a new age is coming. It’s framed in terms of the Red Scare, but the entire conversation is also a thinly veiled account of the real-world comics history of this period, with Wertham in the McCarthy role. It’s a brilliant and unexpected metatextual interlude, serving to reinforce J’onn’s status as the first hero of the post-war era. It also ties into an underlying theme of the story – his isolation. This is post WWII and pre-Justice League. As far as post-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity is concerned, J’onn is not only the last Martian, not only the only alien on Earth (as far as he knows), but the only costumed hero of his time – both in his fictional reality and, pretty much, in ours. As one eyewitness says, upon seeing him transform into his green form and soar into the sky: ‘I didn’t think there were any of your kind left.’

One problem with the series relates precisely to J’onn’s history and where this fits into established continuity. Among other things, as laid down in the DeMatteis mini (see last week’s column), J’onn didn’t find out about his true Martian form until he was a member of the JLI in the late 1980s. Here, however, we regularly see him in his slenderised stringbean shape. Given that the 1988 series is the basis for much of his character, American Secrets can probably be regarded as out of continuity and non-canonical –consider it an Elseworlds or a What If?, should such things matter to you. 

Finally, mention must be made of Eduardo Barreto’s art, which combines a modern approach with a heavily evocative sense of period. His clear, forceful, if slightly workmanlike Romita Sr-esque style is equally well suited to the book’s two default settings – 1950s detective pulp and B-movie sci-fi/monster flicks. However, his rendering of J’onn in beetle-browed Silver Age superheroic form is sometimes oddly clunky and out of place, which you could read as an expression of the protagonist’s awkwardness and alienation, if you were being charitable and pretentious. There are some real moments of visual genius though, including some brutally visceral, sinew-tearing fight scenes and an amazingly bold (and funny) sequence with minimal dialogue that reprises the same point-of-view shot over 24 panels. There’s also a strangely familiar profile shot of J’onn sitting in a seedy apartment watching TV – clearly the inspiration for the similar, iconic sequence in The New Frontier.

I must confess, when I first read this back in the day, it did little for me. For one thing, the MM purist in me was aggrieved by the callous disregard for JJ’s scant continuity. For another, the covers are unbelievably crap – they’re not only badly designed, but all three are EXACTLY the same except for the colour scheme and an ill-advised vintage cheesecake pin-up. However, revisiting it now, it’s a really satisfying read, a lot meatier and more ambitious and multi-layered than I remembered… a prime candidate for rescue from back-issue bin purgatory.

That was long. Thanks for reading. Have an imaginary Oreo.

(originally published on The Big Glasgow Comic Page)