When I first saw the Martian Manhunter in Detective Comics 277 (March 1960), I was unaware of certain facts.
I was, after all, only five years old in January 1960, the month that issue appeared on newsstands.
I didn’t know that this alien crimefighter did not ordinarily tackle costumed villains in the five or six pages allotted to him each month. This issue’s foe — the light-dazzled criminal mastermind Mr. Moth — seemed to have stepped right out of Batman’s rogues’ gallery of obsessive criminal eccentrics.
Nor did I know that John Jones’ career as a public superhero was only four months old then, even though he’d been fighting crime on Earth since 1955. But he’d been doing it secretly, using his power of invisibility.
Then, in The Unmasking of J’onn J’onzz (Detective Comics 273, Nov. 1959), a yellow-skinned, purple-caped Martian criminal exposed the superhero to an anti-crime formula that robbed Martians of their ability to use any of their many other superpowers while invisible.
Outed as a superhero, the Martian Manhunter was now visible enough to join the Justice League of America when it debuted three months later.
The Manhunter’s powers had evolved anyway. In this issue, he defeated Mr. Moth by surreptitiously “vibrating his hand” in a manner that caused a bunch of colored lights to whirl around the criminal’s head in a pattern designed to disorient him.
Huh?
Seems like a remarkably arcane and overly elaborate thing to do. The writer might have simplified matters somewhat by using the Manhunter’s previously demonstrated telekinetic powers. But by then, J’onn J’onzz was starting to settle into his role as a sort of green Superman. Early on, in addition to invisibility and telekinesis, his more varied powers had included telepathy, precognition, intangibility, and shape shifting as well as super strength, super speed, super vision, super hearing, and more.
For a long time, he couldn’t fly, but propelled himself aloft with his super breath. He could easily extract gold from seawater, project “space lightning” from his eyes, shrink to three inches tall, and “increase Earth’s gravitational pull a thousand-fold” with his “Martian will.”
The Martian Manhunter was quite a formidable fellow, as long as nobody struck a match.
However silly the story, I was immediately taken with this green-skinned, blue-caped champion, and was thrilled to see him on the cover of The Brave and the Bold 29.
My grandfather used to read comics to me, and I remember pointing out to him that this Justice Leaguer was the same weird hero we’d seen in that Batman comic two months earlier.
But my grandpa didn’t remember.
He didn’t care about superheroes. He just cared about me.
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