For twelve issues, Deniz Camp and Javier Rodriguez have been dismantling and rebuilding the concept of the superhero comic. Absolute Martian Manhunter #12 comes to us not as a typical genre finale, but as a final brushstroke on a masterpiece of phycological horror. It’s the culmination of a year-long interrogation of free will, identity, mental health, fatherhood, and how “bad ideas” can shape our universe.
What separates this finale from other cosmic endings is the same thing that has made this entire story so audacious: the art and narrative demand interaction from the reader, not just passive observation.
One of the core tenets of this book is bringing the invisible battle of intangible concepts into an overtly human story. By the end of this issue, the biggest surprise was how hard the emotional beats hit, and I found myself really rooting for the human aspects of this story. Ideas, forces, fields, time and reality itself are at play (or at war) here, but it still all revolves around Bridget holding John in her arms.
DC
With that in mind, if you were expecting some clarity or a bland deviation from the pure exuberance of this book, you will be sorely disappointed. No matter how you read it, Absolute Martian Manhunter operates on a conceptual level. It remains a dense, claustrophobic, yet deeply human exploration of the binary conflicts the series championed: green vs. white, life vs. death, fate, vs. free will.
Excuse my tangent, but I see this book as having some sort of relationship or connection to Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men over at Marvel. Obviously, the projects that make up the Absolute Universe and the Ultimate Universe have similar goals: to be something different, darker, and perhaps more creator-led, than the mainline universes while still maintaining a connection to them. Both of these books stand out from the other books in their respective lines, in that the art deviates from the “norm” so much that it seems to place them in their own universes. As with X-Men, Absolute Martian Manhunter doesn’t cross over to the other books too much, because the art style bleeds into the narrative style.
None of this is a bad thing. The creative team in this book managed to carve out a corner of the DC universe that remains untethered to any expectations.
Issue #12 is a journey, a bit of a cluster at times, and (somehow) a new experience, even considering what we’ve already seen in the rest of the issues. It seems to wrap up the whole run in twenty-some pages, or at least summarizes it’s aesthetic and narrative goals. Things have come to a tipping point; for John and the Martian, it’s live or get off the anti-life pot. As he lays in his wife’s arms, Despair-the-Zero makes his final moves, leaving the world to break apart at the seams as a conga-line of evil crosses the earth.
In this sequence, avid readers and comic buffs get their due: brief glimpses “behind the curtain” of Darkseid, or God, as he’s called here. We also get to see the other heroes in the Absolute Universe and the way in which the events of AMM might be affecting them.
The art is as wonderous and surreal as the other 11 issues, but it does have a different feel in this issue. I can’t say exactly how, but Rodriguez really makes every single line more impactful than before; every floating shape or blown-up corner or reality carries weight and purpose. As the narrative comes to its explosive conclusion, so does the art. This dreamlike world of AMM is ending and Rodriguez has the difficult job of shocking us out of our sleep.
DC
As we come to the end of such a fantastic, unique book, we’re left wondering what’s next for our green friend and his redheaded companion. There is word that John and the Martian may have a hand in assembling the heroes of the greater Absolute Universe, similar to how his characters is often seen leading the Justice League in the mainline universe. Fingers crossed that the quality and style of AMM bleeds into the other books as well!
As wonderful as this final issue is, it isn’t a perfect ending. One gets the impression in this issue that the styles employed in this book might not have been sustainable past 12 issues. There are a few repeated ideas, but in a book that throws ten philosophical concepts at you at once, they don’t stick out. It’s apparent that this last issue is supposed to overwhelm the reader a little bit—this isn’t a minimalist take on the character.
Like some kind of drug high that never lets you down, this book is firing on all cylinders until the very end. We only get a short breath of fresh air in the final few pages to see John as he is, potentially happy—or, at the very least, prepared to take on whatever horror shows up in the Absolute Universe next.
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