Martian Manhunter's Powers

It was noted in a recent post at Comics Should Be Good that the Martian Manhunter's powers were quite extraordinary and that they kept growing as needed by the plots. So here's a look at what J'onn J'onnz could do.

We learn about his first power in the very first panel featuring him:

He can change his appearance at will:

His mind over matter ability comes in handy:


Two powers are hinted at here, but not stated:

He can make his body insubstantial, and turn invisible. Of course, you can argue that the invisibility power is simply a use of his ability to change his appearance. Making his body insubstantial is a power that has many applications in the stories. For example, he often uses it to walk through walls or to let bullets pass through him.

This power is a bit problematic:

Note that he is not just seeing into the future, as the text states. He's seeing into a future that no longer exists. Indeed, in the story, Jones has to intervene to make that future come true.

Here's one that I'm going to call foul on:

Martian molecular hypnosis? That's really just mind over matter, as Jones admits in a later panel.

There are numerous other examples of the writers using ridiculously convoluted language to describe his powers, when really they are just applications of some of the abilities already discussed. For example:

Retracing thought processes is just an application of mind-reading.

Of course, you can make similar arguments about a lot of the powers, so it can get a little arbitrary. For example:

Is he flying? Or just using an application of his mind over matter ability? I'll go with flying here, but obviously that's a judgment call.

Here's a pretty straight-forward power:


The first of his awesome eye-powers makes its appearance:


Figuring out what to call some of the powers can be tricky. I guess we should call this one "near-invulnerability":

And this probably qualifies as microscopic vision:

We learn a little bit more about the source of J'onn's powers here:

Here's a power that didn't get used often:

But if he can teleport himself anywhere in the world, couldn't he also teleport himself back to Mars?

Another judgment call:

He can change his size, and in this case, I don't think from the context that it's just changing his appearance.

This one's really complicated:

Nullifying the Earth's gravity sounds like flying, doesn't it? Still, walking on the water implies something a little different, and it's such a cool and unique power that I can't resist including it in the list.

That's it for the first ten stories (Detective 225-234). I will return to this post and add more powers over time.

Here's the list so far: Mind-reading, changing his appearance at will, mind over matter, making his body insubstantial, invisibility, the ability to see possible futures, flying, super-sensitive hearing, X-ray vision, near-invulnerability, microscopic vision, teleportation, changing his size and walking on water.

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Silly Panel Saturday

You gotta love a gang that's so superstitious they have to remind themselves what not to do. And yes, the Martian Manhunter uses their fears against them.

Inspired by this post at Comics Should Be Good.

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Thank You For Not Smoking

You can't help thinking that the Martian Manhunter would have a much easier time of it in today's virtually smoke-free society than back in the puff-a-holic 1950s:

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Detective #288

On the most obvious level, this issue is part and parcel of the horrific "monster of the month" era in Detective Comics that characterized a good part of Jack Schiff's tenure as editor of the Batman family of magazines. And make no mistake about it, that's the primary (and exceedingly silly) plot.

The story starts with a lightning bolt hitting a pool of chemicals causing a strange transformation:

The bit about life arising from chemical wastes is probably inspired by the movie, Godzilla. Batman and Robin encounter the creature and their initial attempt to defeat it reveals that it is more powerful than it looks:

So by this point in reading the story, I'm already yawning at the transparent absurdity. But then something interesting happens. The creature heads towards the house of an old actor who's become wheelchair-bound. Batman moves to help him, while sending Robin to the town to get help.

The actor is somewhat fatalistic, until he sees Batman in trouble:

And in town, Robin discovers that the only official around is a mere clerk, who doesn't think he can handle the crisis until:

There are quite a few Batman and Robin tales from the Golden Age that follow this pattern, and they are among the classics of that era. While the stale art and the monster focus prevent this story from reaching those heights, the subplots did make it quite a bit more entertaining than I expected.

The third subplot involves a bank robbery featuring an ingenious method of escape:

"Nothing can stop us now," is of course begging for trouble, and the creature flies into the blimp, grounding it. Batman and Robin capture the crooks, and help the clerk calm the local citizenry, then electrocute the creature. And in the end:

The Roy Raymond story (one of the last in that long-running series) sees Roy solve the case of an heiress who has been cursed with the gaze of Medusa, causing anyone she glances at to be turned to stone. Of course, it's all a plot by a guardian to steal her inheritance.
The Martian Manhunter story is rather bizarre. MM's good friend Larry Loder has fallen for a swindle. A bunch of crooks sold him some treasure-finding inventions, with which he hopes to pay back the investors who lost money with him earlier. And when you see the inventions, it's not hard to believe that he's a pretty poor financial advisor:

J'onn takes pity on him and makes the inventions seem to work. But it turns out that this was stage two of the crooks' con job:

So the Martian Manhunter makes sure that the final invention works in such a way that the crooks are caught by Larry. The reward money ensures that Loder will have enough funds to pay back all his investors, who presumably reinvested the funds with him in a bagful of magic beans.

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Joe Friday from Mars?

This is an excellent post on one of the under-rated characters of the Silver Age of Comics.

John Jones was very much like Detective Sergeant Joe Friday, with a bit of Phillip Marlowe and a science fiction twist. Like pulp detectives, crooks routinely got the drop on Jones in the second act, roughing him up to add tension before the final turnabout.

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The Martian Manhunter Part II--Key Issues & Events

In Part I of my post on J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter, I discussed some of his early exploits and powers. In this post I'll focus in on some key Detective issues in his history.

First, obviously, is Detective #225, where MM makes his first appearance, discussed extensively in the prior post.

In Detective #246 we are given our first introduction to lovely redhead (later blonde) Diane Meade. She is a trainee police officer but also the daughter of the Police Comissioner. As a trainee she makes Detective Jones miserable, since she's always asking questions about his methods, and he can't reveal he's using his Martian powers. At the end of the case, Jones muses to himself about the sparkle he noted in Diane's eyes when she looked at him.




A pretty interesting ending to the story, eh? Remember, this is about 1957, a period when race relations were a major issue. Although J'onn is not black, he is "colored", and he certainly has some black-appearing features. I may be reading a little too much into that--sometimes a Martian is just a Martian.

In the early adventures, J'onn J'onzz mostly worked in his human identity, changing only to a Martian appearance while invisible. However, in Detective #273 he was forced to reveal his Martian identity, when a criminal from Mars kayos him with a gas that prevents him from using his Martian powers anymore while invisible. Since he must be visible to fight the Martian crook he appears in public in his Martian costume.

Note: In all probability this sudden restriction on J'onzz's powers was necessitated by his upcoming admission as a charter member of the Justice League of America. Detective #273 came out in November of 1959; the JLA's first adventure was in Brave & Bold #28, Feb-Mar 1960. Since the stories in the JLA would be focused on the characters as superheroes it was necessary for the Martian Manhunter to come out of the closet.

In Detective #275, Diane Meade finally returned. This time she was portrayed very similarly to Lois Lane, eternally suspicious about whether John Jones was secretly the Martian Manhunter. She appears in #282 as "The Girl with the Martian Powers" and in #284 as attempting "The Courtship of J'onn Jonzz". After that she becomes more or less a regular, appearing frequently, if not in every story.

In Detective #301, two significant events happened. First, Detective dropped the third feature story, expanding the size of the Martian Manhunter story from 7 pages to 12. And second, J'onn J'onzz returned to Mars for the first time. This may also have been partially caused by his exploits in the Justice League of America, which regularly traveled to distant planets; it was becoming a little hard to believe that J'onzz could not make it back to Mars with the help of his JLA buddy Superman.

A major change in the feature came with Detective #311, which introduced J'onzz's other dimensional buddy Zook. Zook had some wild powers of his own, including the ability to change his temperature from freezing cold to boiling hot, and to change his shape at will. He could also read minds with his antennae. Although able to talk he was portrayed as having the mind and affectionate nature of a small child.




As the picture above hints, Zook was something of a cloying, saccharine character. Although similar to the pets that many DC heroes had at one point or another, there was really nothing quite like him.

Detective #326, the last issue to feature the Martian Manhunter, introduced the Idol Head of Diabolu, a transparent plot device that guaranteed continuing stories. The idea was that once opened, the Idol Head would release an evil upon the world every full moon. This of course guaranteed monthly adventures for the Martian Manhunter, who would have them in a new location as the lead feature in House of Mystery, starting with that comic's issue #143. In addition, that issue saw the apparent death of John Jones, thus cutting him loose from the detective job.

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