Every comic book reboot has its poster child. And no one in their right mind would argue that Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta‘s current run of Absolute Batman isn’t the most popular series in DC Comics’ down-and-out Absolute Universe. Like anything Batman, it has the lion’s share of variant covers, reprints, and a revamped rogues’ gallery that only gets wilder with every new issue. Hell, it even has an animated series in the works.
While Absolute Batman is the clear favorite, Absolute Martian Manhunter is the people’s princess. And rightfully so. Not only does it have a premise as intriguing as the Caped Crusader’s run, but its art direction feels positively out of this world.
Of all of the comics in DC’s Absolute Universe, Absolute Martian Manhunter, written by Deniz Camp and illustrated by Javier Rodriguez, reads like an acid trip. The story opens with John Jones, a federal agent rushing back to work way too soon after surviving an explosion at a coffee shop. Life starts looking really weird after Jones’ near-death experience. He starts seeing the repressed, impulsive, and intrusive thoughts of everyone around him. Jones is seeing a lot of “bad vibes” in the cultural melting pot of Middleton, Colorado.
These thoughts manifest as colorful plumes of smoke emanating from people’s heads like incense trails, which Rodriguez routinely outdoes with dazzling, lava-lamp-esque page layouts and color splashes. Turns out, Jones’ mind has been invaded by the aptly named Martian Mind****er, a green alien squatting in his mind palace and trying its damnedest to integrate with the way we speak. As Jones’ new partner in crime, the Martian Mind****er warns him of the danger coming from beyond the stars, threatening to upend his rocky marriage and humanity as we know it in one fell swoop.
What makes Absolute Martian Manhunter an easy recommendation for comic book fans is its levity. It’s not one of those long-running series where you have to double back to another issue in another series to grasp who anyone is or what’s going on. It tells a relatively self-contained story within 13 issues. If anything, the series acts as the perfect launching point for folks curious to see what the Absolute Universe’s stripped-bare version of the Justice League has to offer. Camp and Rodriguez’s slice of the Absolute Universe is a clandestine, psychedelic neo-noir tale with its finger on the pulse of social, political, and interpersonal dread.
Like Absolute Batman‘s unabashed look at today’s political strife, with all the subtlety of breaking a Nazi’s arm in a gnarly double spread, Absolute Martian Manhunter‘s particular bag of capital-T themes zero in on real‑world anxieties about borders, belonging, and state power. What the comic critiques about our own living hell, which only gets worse when the series’ big bad has denizens of Middleton running around, acting on their worst impulses like it’s The Purge, is rivaled by the pure visual synesthesia of Rodriguez’ trippy page layouts.
If I had to single out my favorite part of Absolute Martian Manhunter, it’s how interactive the entire run is. Every issue—usually right at the end—includes a “Martianvision” page. It’s the most Captain Underpants flip-o-rama gimmick I’ve ever seen in a mainstream comic, and honestly, that’s part of its magic trick. By holding a Martianvision page up to a light source, a double-exposure overlay of the corresponding page appears, creating a neat aberration effect to cap off an issue. It’s the same accidental discovery every comic reader has made at least once on a particularly sunny day, but here it’s deliberately designed to make readers ooh and ahh. It wowed me every time. And that nostalgic, tactile interactivity gets even wilder as Absolute Martian Manhunter nears its cataclysmic conclusion.
You can check out all 12 issues of Absolute Martian Manhunter wherever comic books are sold.
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