Deniz Camp and Javier Rodriguez’s Absolute Martian Manhunter is really undeniable on the back of the sheer volume of choices they’re intentionally making within the work. Each facet of this book exudes a feeling of having been considered and deliberated over, including the fantastic lettering of Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.
The choice to circumvent the use of a typical house-style foundation and instead build the book on the traditions of mid-20th century postmodernism and science fiction which readers might not be familiar with puts the book much more thematically in the vein of creators like Alan Moore and some works of Grant Morrison, rather than most Big Two contemporaries.
DC
“What happens in your head also happens.”
It’s no surprise after the first issue, but Camp and Rodriguez are supremely uninterested in the violent conflict often standard in superhero comics. In this issue they bring readers right back to the question which opens the series, “Why do people do the things they do?” The “Martian Vision” which is introduced at the end of the last issue is expansively used in this issue to help John and the readers understand what is going on with individuals throughout the world of the series. It’s clear that Camp believes understanding what’s going on in folks’ heads can help answer the question they’ve posed with the series.
What some readers might not expect is that Camp quickly delivers some answers through the prolonged conversations between John and “The Martian.” Whereas many postmodern works wrestle with the unanswerable nature of these problems which hound society, Camp moves the series into a metamodern space, which is both comfortable wrestling with the non-traditional nature of contemporary problems, but also seeks to answer the questions around them with a certain level of definitiveness.
The style he uses to do this is particularly striking as he blends the language of postmodern sci-fi, such as the “Martian” describing Martian vision as a “nonsense sense,” modernist procedural terms and contemporary slang like “bad vibes,” and “brain rot” in order to help readers rediscover issues they’re intimately familiar with.
This is the same thing he’s doing when he substitutes ’50s and ’60s UFO religions for modern conspiracy theorists. He creates proximity and distance at the same time, which clarifies. The reality is that Camp isn’t solely interested in investigating simply what other people experience and the idea that lots of different folks have things hard, but he wants to hone in on why ideas that develop into harm develop in the first place.
He’s really slick with it, too. On the surface, he’s telling readers exactly what he means, but he’s also creating thematic connections in the background which are really useful for understanding the concepts stated explicitly. Even the genre choice is quietly meeting the reader in a place wherein they already view the world as complex, unanswerable and frankly scary. Camp is then challenging the reader to see these situations differently, to see them with martian vision.
Martian Vision is only beginning
It can’t be overstated how much Rodriguez’s colors contribute to the success of this issue. First, they’re simply beautiful. Second, they contribute to the sense of wholeness within the work, and its commitment to the sense of time and genre that inspired it.
Psychedelic colors are so heavily associated with the same era as UFO religions in popular culture that if they had been absent, there’d be a lack of unity in the work. Lastly, they’re such intuitive tools in storytelling. Despite the fact that it’s clear Camp and Rodriguez are having long, complex conversations about how to implement color and what it will symbolize throughout the work, readers get an experience which is incredibly smooth to digest.
For example, color often acts as a tool to create and solidify a sense of difference which is necessary to be understood or overcome for the readers in the book. At other times, it communicates the complexity inherent within human beings, and how even in the worst of circumstances no being is monolithic.
Rodriguez’s work in this book is about finding ways to bring the inner world of people out into the open for John and readers to see. As a byproduct of that the so-called objective view of the world is often obscured in some form or fashion. This recontextualizes every interaction and how drama, excitement and conflict can be produced in this series. In a similar vein it also allows this creative team to tell stories which honor people and stories which might often be forgotten.
When John and the “Martian” come across a group of folks who are dying in this issue, instead of being contextual collateral as they would be in so many stories, Camp and Rodriguez offer readers insight into the dying thoughts of these people. Every loss in this way is a human loss and raising the stakes of what would be banal, mundane violence in many other superhero comics. Lives are lost, not simply bodies.
In general, Rodriguez’s choice to mirror the way he depicts a person’s inner life the same as the way he depicts the outside world is a robust refutation of individualism. Camp’s script is incredibly clear that this book views the way people individually suffer as symptomatic of communal pain, therefore readers see individual and communal pain depicted in vastly similar ways. The language of the book simply communicates to the reader the existence of complexity and pain.
See people clearly for first time
There’s nothing else like this coming from the Big Two. Camp and Rodriguez seem to have asked themselves not simply how to tell a great story, but how to move the medium forward. This metamodern narrative engages with the way we as a reader engage with the world, and is distinctly in conversation with us. Here is where we come to find the antidote to a brain rotter; here to the Martian Mind****er.
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