Comic review: Martian Manhunter #1- Event Quality ‘Threat’ Book

Writer: Rob Williams
Artist: Eddy Barrows
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 17th June 2015



I enjoyed this book. It had a very professional structure to it, screenplay quality, like it was pitching for a television series. The art was very good as well, top end event quality good, and the main protagonist was shown to be a man in a moral quandary, fighting against his programming, fighting against what he is supposed to do, knowing that what he is supposed to do is wrong.

I love this guy.

All top quality comic book stuff, so you can’t complain too much about it, as even if you dislike it, you have to acknowledge that this is a very competent and well put together product. The narrative though at it’s core is a threat based story, so although it might seem complex at first, it really isn’t, and the solutions to the threat are the same as they always are in superhero comics. Normal people are helpless victims, they need outside agencies to protect and save them, and that’s where the superheroes come in.

That’s the one assumption that bothers me the most about superhero comics, the idea that people are always victims, that they need saving, and that they can’t save themselves. The idea is insidious mind control, and it’s pushed by all spectrums of political control, from monarchy to communism to democracy. It’s all pretty much the same thing, and based on the same assumptions. You don’t need your own farm. That’s what supermarkets are for. You don’t need your own education. That’s what schools are for. You don’t need your own guns to protect yourself. That’s what the cops are for.  You don’t need anything of your own at all. That’s what government is for.

Do you see how it works?

So when people read comic book after comic book with superheroes saving helpless victims from various disasters (it’s unspecified ‘terrorists’ in this book) it plays into the cultural programming of learnt helplessness. The idea being that we don’t have to do anything for ourselves, that there’s always going to be some government sponsored agency that will take care of us, to protect us from all of the threats in the world that we are so helpless to protect ourselves from.

It’s not a great mind-set you know, and this is not my opinion. Democide is defined as, ‘Murder by government.’ In the past century our various forms of government have started to excel in murdering their own people. So continuing to rely on governments, or the outside agencies that work for them (as represented by superhero characters) in 2015? That’s probably not a good idea.

‘Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as "the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the term genocide, and it has become accepted among other scholars. According to Rummel, democide passed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century.’ (The Wikipedia definition of ‘Democide.’)

How many of their own people have governments murdered over the past century?

‘Let's start with a number: 262 MILLION. That's the number of unarmed people the late Prof. R. J. Rummel estimated governments murdered in mass killings he termed "democide" during the 20th century. "This democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century," he wrote.’ (reason.com)

The superhero genre is fun, but it’s dangerous, especially when it portrays those in positions of authority as protectors of civilians, when the truth is very often the opposite. Those in positions of authority do not serve the people, they serve their masters, and their masters are government.

Perhaps that’s the one change that comic books need to make before they move forward and evolve the paradigm of dependence upon government authority that is currently caging humanity, and stopping any genuine hope, change or progression?

Martian Manhunter #1 is a fine comic book. It feels big-time, and that surprised me. It read like a Geoff John’s Justice League book, and it looked like one as well. That’s a huge compliment by the way. Everything was there, in place as it should be. Great art, interesting characters, a moral dilemma for the main protagonist and a cleverly constructed script. It was all very good, but that one problem remains. The problem being the idea that humanity is weak, helpless and needs to be saved.

Is it a structural problem, a problem that cannot be resolved without completely tearing apart the entire superhero genre itself? I don’t think so. All we need is less saving the world ‘threat’ plots, less dependence on outside forces, and an acknowledgement that human beings are not as weak and powerless as governments want them to be.

Mainstream corporate comic books buy into the lies of our time. They ignore truth, and promote the authority of government. They promote the lie that we are free people because we have a corrupted version of corporate democracy, a pathetic sham of freedom and choice owned and controlled by corporate/banking interests and protected by their career obsessed friends in the mainstream media.

It’s so easy to ignore truth. It’s so easy to buy a comic book, to enjoy the cool, and to not think about it any deeper than that. People need to stop with the adoration of the cool, they need to get beyond the deliberate ignorance and they need to get with reality. You can’t hide from reality forever. Sorry, did you think that life was just fun and games, that you can do whatever you like, just as long as you are doing what you are told? Sorry, but the laws of the universe don’t let us get away with that kind of behaviour. Sooner or later it’s payback time. You might ignore truth, but truth will not ignore you.

But how to change, what needs to be done? If you care, and most people don’t, read on.

Real change starts with a no, and a refusal to follow immoral orders. Soldiers and cops and other servants of the state unquestioningly follow orders, they are not good people, as morality plays no part in their decision making process. They are ordered, they obey, like a dog obeys. This is a truth that people don’t want to hear, and it is a truth that is born out by the facts on democide that I have included above.

We need to recognise real heroism. Real heroism is refusing orders when you know that they are morally wrong. America has real heroes. It has whistleblowers like Bradley Manning, but when was the last time that Bradley Manning was even referenced within the pages of a mainstream comic book? Do you know why he isn’t mentioned? He isn’t mentioned because he was a US soldier who told the truth, he saw that what was happening was wrong, and he spoke up about it. That is true heroism, speaking truth even when it is not in your best interests to do so.

“When the persecution of an individual (Bradley Manning) who has exposed an evil is pursued so ruthlessly and yet the evil itself is studiedly ignored, all of us know that there is something very wrong with the way that our society is conducting itself. And if we do not protest in the strongest terms about what is being done in our name, then we become complicit.” (Alan Moore)

Humanity needs to wake up to truth, and it needs to look at itself in the mirror, however uncomfortable that might be. Comic books play their role. Governments need threats, just like comic book narratives need threats. In comic books an outside threat is used to push the narrative, to create tension, excitement, drama and action. Threats are used in our own world in order to justify wars, a restriction on freedoms and all kinds of totalitarian, Orwelian new world order government policies.

Where did you think ISIS came from?  Why are they running around in US vehicles and using US weapons? Why are they being promoted in the mainstream media, and given free publicity like they have the best PR people in the world? Threats legitimate state control, and that is why states will always manufacture new threats in order to justify their positions of authority, or domination over our lives.

As superheroes characters are often little more than stand-ins for government order followers, the parallel should be perfectly clear. Both entities (comics and governments) are dependent upon permanent new threats, and both entities are more than willing and able to create their own threats to push their individual narratives. What they have more in common though is the idea that these threats cannot be handled by normal people, that people in positions of authority need ‘special powers’ in order to deal with these threats. In comic books it’s superheroes who save you. In the real world, it’s a gang of murderers, liars and thieves called government.

Real change is not going to be easy. You are not going to be able to watch your television and vote for it. It’s time to demolish false heroes, and to recognise uncomfortable truth. Superheroes will continue to work as stand-ins for government control, and the corpses will continue to pile up, just as before, as long as we ignore truth, ignore reality and pretend that comic books are just a bit of fun that we don’t really have to think too much about. Threats can be real, but who is creating the threat, and why have they created it in the first place? That’s a good place to start, and a good place to end as well, and that’s where I will finish off this review.


Rating: 8/10 (Fine book, but it’s just another threat narrative that portrays humans as helpless victims, in need of rescue by government sponsored heroes)