hermit crab hours

I’m going to try to not repeat myself a lot, you can click the Absolute Martian Manhunter vol 1 tag link if you want my thoughts on the specific issues. In my latest full read of the series, I was after a few specific things: crucially, how does it read as a complete story? Because this was originally a 6-issue limited series, which was enlarged into 12 after staggering good sales on #1. I was curious if it feels like that; if the mid-book finale feels like the end of one story, and the rest feels like another one entirely.

I’m happy to report it’s not the case. Frankly, I couldn’t tell you this book was meant to only have six issues. Deniz Camp, Javier Rodríguez, Hassan Otsmane-Elhauou, Sabrina Futch and Katie Kubert have delivered one of the most consistent books I’ve read by this company. Those are some of the most talented names in the current industry, and this should go on top of each of their resumés as an example of the kind of thing only they can bring to the table: the kind of storytelling, pacing, art, coloring, lettering, organizing and editing that only people working near their peak can manage to deliver for over a year.

Most of this conversation will relate to Camp and Rodríguez’s contribution, because the art and the writing are so intertwined as to be basically the same thing. So I just wanted to make sure to say everyone’s names that contributed to what makes this book so special up above. If you’re new to their work, please look them up and support their projects.

I think what makes this book so consistently good is the fact that the themes introduced in issue 1 carry all the way to issue 12, and never stop being addressed. The main theme of Absolute Martian Manhunter is the different levels of human connection: how do we communicate with one another? How do we know who our friends are, and who are our enemies? Why do people do what they do? Why do people hurt some and love others? What is the meaning behind horrible actions that seem random?

The book’s exploration of the concept is structured in a thesis-antithesis structure: John Jones and The Martian, signifying hope for a better world and the journey to loving and being loved, encounter several versions of the evils of rampant nihilism, signified by the White Martian and its cronies. This is a book about the fact that society is collapsing all around—the “toxic build-up of bad vibes” is a real, horrifying state of affairs that, by the end of the book, quite literally starts cracking the sky open.

Thematically, it means we constantly refute the idea that some people don’t deserve a second chance. In practice, it means John and the Martian are always facing against the worst of mankind, and offering empathy and compassion instead of violence whenever they can. Right away, The Martian describes what he does as several verbs: hunting, killing, saving, redeeming, healing. All of these verbs get explored as metaphors, rather than their literal meanings.

“Killing”, specifically, means something very different from the norm here. It’s the Jungian death, the Tarot’s 13th card— transformation, the ripping of dead skin, the breaking of the chrysalis that you have to go through in order to become something new. It’s a second chance. Middleton is the town of second chances, and everyone here deserves the opportunity if they accept the open hand the John and the Martian offer.

This level of empathy and faith in the human spirit only really hits because at no point does Absolute Martian Manhunter imply either of two things: it never implies any of this is easy, and it never implies everyone will give a shit. In fact, it’s a recurring theme in the book: second chances take work, but they’re the most natural thing in the world.

Anyone is capable of change, but not everyone is interested in it. The Martian is a being capable of dispelling all illusions, comfortable or otherwise, through Martianvision: the absolute perspective which can show things as they truly are, show people for who they truly have been all their lives, and usually, that means it’s primarily a tool of context. The Martians, both the Green and the White one, are “literal metaphor”— contradictory thought-shapes of emotional meaning, who act on the world through their avatars.

When John utilizes Martianvision, he’s, in effect, detoxing himself from the barriers between him and others. He’s interacting with people in their purest form: he’s touching their hopes, their fears, their good and bad ideas, and the road they took to whatever situation they find themselves in. John is overwhelmed by this throughout the whole book, and it’s never something the reader truly expects him to get fully used to. Because being empathetic is obviously one of the most difficult things in the world.

To showcase how alien the concept is, Rodríguez draws and colors the work of a lifetime. Emotions, people, the world itself; everything is rendered in trippy, bright colors and shapes: some pages are more of an inkblot test than classic comic book illustrations. It’s easily the book’s greatest strength— while the character of Martian Manhunter has had trippy visuals in the past, this is far beyond anything ever associated with it. This is an insanely powerful visual identity, and future artists will struggle to match it, likely forever.

More specifically, the main visual conflict of Green vs White carries many of the more abstract scenes. Green means safety and bounty, it means a green shoot coming out of the dark, it means ‘go!’. Every time you see the specific shade of green associated with the Martian in the book, you’re bound to fight his red eye somewhere, omnipresent. It really sells the idea that this isn’t like other heroes; in fact, this is barely like any form of life.

In fiction, “alien” usually ends up being code for “kind of different but still recognizable”, speaking in a certain affable, elitist way, and, depending on the story’s tone, unpreoccupied with human life. The desire to make eldritch abominations a la Lovecraft, that do not consider humans alive more than humans consider pebbles alive, has eventually codified itself into characters with the kind of presence that, quite frankly, I think anyone can understand. Something uncaring, dark, even childish in how nonchalant it is about things that matter a lot to us. Billionaires with tentacles, really.

The Martian is the antithesis of that idea, as well as being one of the best depictions of something decidedly not human I’ve seen in a while. Language does not come easily to him, and all of his lines are built around synonyms. Every line the Martian speaks has multiple meanings, because he’s not trying to speak to anyone, he’s trying to convey abstract thoughts that John barely has any experience with himself.

Other things have tried this, of course—Control’s Board of Directors has pretty much the exact same speech pattern, for instance. But the elaboration of the bit by making the Martian also just be everywhere, transforming it into every part of the environment, of the character designs, of the balloons and lettering and even making some pages transparent to fuse them together… everything coalesces into an experience you’ve never physically had before, as in your eyes have no experience reading what the Martian is doing on page. He is unique, he is alien, he is going to inspire a lot of portrayals of cosmic entities to be just like him from now on, and they’re probably going to add a few good ideas to the equation, but this is going to be the OG forever.

Similarly, John’s Martianvision sequences will be remembered as some of the most inventive uses of the medium of comics in many, many years. They are both thematically and physically relevant to the experience of reading Absolute Martian Manhunter, to the point where digital editions simply miss out on the experience. Seriously, you’re gonna have to buy this one, you’re gonna have to put the pages in front of a light source and see the art bleeding through the pages, otherwise it’s incomplete. It feels like a gimmick when one describes it, but that’s because hey, newsflash: everything is a gimmick unless you do it right, then it’s a technique.

A technique used to great effect. The theme of Martianvision is epiphany: the closer John gets to the truth, the more he can see the world like the Martian can, and interact with the world in a meta level that doesn’t make complete logical sense, because it doesn’t have to. John can walk through panels, phase through bullets and enter people’s minds like they’re corridors. He can understand someone’s trauma by following the physical, intangible thread that links them to their memories. It’s empathy made manifest, and every time John makes a discovery about how to connect with others, his Martianvision becomes stronger.

When John discovers the Martian in general, his consciousness expands to allow himself to feel what others feel. When John realizes that accepting help is how we make it out alive of this nightmare that is real life, Martianvision evolves, and allows him to give others the ability to feel hyper-empathy: the entire city becomes one, sharing everything with everyone. And finally, when John finally manages to communicate beyond language with his loved ones; when he realizes all he really wants is to be with his family, and all Tyler and Bridget really want is to be with him, he manages to physically destroy despair just by looking at it. It’s a path to apotheosis, but John doesn’t become a god: he becomes a fully-fledged human being, capable of looking at others and seeing people who are just as complex as he is, and who all deserve the world.

Martianvision also serves to connect part 1’s main theme to part 2’s, despite them both sharing a lot of the groundwork. I argue issues #1 through #6 have a specific focus of understanding each other, while issues #7 through #12 have the main theme of connecting with each other, putting theory into action. The difference is pretty subtle, but one has to come before the other.

Part 1’s focus on understanding is explored in several ways, two of which I’ve focused a lot in my other reviews: showing empathy to a god damn mass murderer in the middle of their killing spree, and talking to your wife while both you explode in colors as your emotions come out. You can read about those (here) and (here) respectively, but what I want to focus on this time is the book’s depiction of Tyler.

Tyler is a special needs kid with an undefined language deficit. He doesn’t seem to be particularly developmentally challenged in other ways, but the way it is described is that he thinks in images. He is jovial, if wordless, and spends the entire story molding clay dolls that reflect the characters and events in real time.

Absolute Martian Manhunter is in many ways a story about the battle for Tyler’s soul. John has not been a good father or a good husband; the challenges of having a child who can’t simply tell their parents what they need took its toll on both of them, and John reacted by throwing himself at work. After the Martian entangles with him, he also becomes entangled in Tyler’s life.

In fact, the book foreshadows the thing that’s actually going to save the world in the end right away, in issue 3: every time the Martian and Tyler interact, they’re talking through dolls. The Martian talks to Tyler in his own language, with seemingly no communicative issue.

Tyler is a way to explore the idea of a pipeline of radicalization. He goes from a bright young kid with lots to live for to someone who gets radicalized into working for the White Martian, because he lacks the crucial connection to his parents in a critical moment in his development. Even though his parents are only out there to provide for him and to protect him, the problem with bad ideas is that they find their way to the household, and it is far harder to fight them when you’re by yourself than it is when you have support.

Middleton is a macroverse of this theme of thriving community vs marginalization. It is described as a city bursting with diversity: 130 languages and dozens upon dozens of different kinds of immigrants, from all over the world. People who have nothing in common with one another living in relative harmony, until someone uses that exact diversity as a reason to disrupt peace.

It is both a source of conflict and a source of joy throughout the series to see how different yet similar every single person in town is. Both the murderers and the victims have mothers, fathers, high school memories, favorite pets, hobbies, dreams, nightmares, aspirations. Everyone, from the worst person imaginable to the purest soul around, is reacting to their environment. Everyone is looking for home, for safety, comfort, but home can’t be a place where you isolate yourself. That’s the trap. The place where you feel safe can’t be the same place where you feel lonely.

The White Martian utilizes this in his war against life. It attempts to destroy the very idea of safety, of having a place to go back to. It inflicts paranoia, it brings up old hatred that had already been forgotten, it throws the world into a frying pan and then turns off all the lights to plunge it into eternal darkness. For the White Martian, and for everyone, conflict is a lack of understanding. Conflict is the result of the feeling that you have nothing in common with another living being; that your actions have no consequences because they’re not affecting you negatively. 

Through injecting Bad Ideas into the population, the White Martian destroys conventional means of safety. People start burning the homeless to death, restaurants start to serve burgers filled with broken glass, shops start selling poisoned children’s food. The book’s thesis is clear: one cannot live in a society that is incompatible with a feeling of safety. It is a matter of time for ordinary citizens to attack one another if they have no reason to believe the other won’t do the same, if they have no faith in society itself. Society is a community, and a community can be torn apart, regardless of the state of the buildings the community lives in. All you need is a few bad ideas and the right situation to destroy a family.

Yet there are levels even to this simple, relatively obvious thesis: everyone has the capacity for evil, yes, but people’s relationship to that capacity vastly differ. Once again taking from Jungian psychology, issue #5 has people’s shadow selves—here depicted as their literal shadows—running around as alternate versions of themselves. Dangerous, id-like entities that signify the worst in us, that we usually keep hidden.

However, John notes, children seem to be unpreoccupied by their shadows. They have a healthy, beautiful relationship to themselves, and are some of the only people in a world plunged in darkness that seem to realize even small fireflies can be a source of light. Shadows don’t actually have to be our enemies; suppression is a far worse alternative to acceptance, to maintenance, to self-love and relying on others for support. And you do need others. There’s no strength in being the last person standing if it cost you all of your relationships.

Everyone in part 1 who tries to do something by themselves inevitably falls victim to the White Martian. Trigger, the shooter in issue 2, was driven mad by paranoia and alienation. Everyone who goes through the heat wave in issue 4 goes insane when it’s just them and their discomfort, their inability to feel well. Humors explode, words they don’t believe in come out, old fights restart for no reason other than everyone is equally miserable, yet refuse to come out and try to help one another.

The Martian’s job is to remind people that they are not alone. From the first page to the last, the main solution Martian Manhunter proposes for the symptoms of ennui is to remember no one is born alone. We are all in the same world, living by each other’s side; we are fully realized human beings no matter how simple we may seem from outside. Nobody should ever be forced to be alone. Our greatest strength is the fact we can rely on others.

Tyler, by the end of part 1, was alone. His mother and father love him, but can’t understand why he does the things he does. The White Martian takes advantage of this. The triumphant ending of part 1, as John manages to restore the power to the city and drive back the endless night, goes into the horrifying conclusion that by neglecting to connect to who really matters in his life, John has essentially put Tyler in the same path that ended with Trigger taking a bullet to the head after performing unspeakably evil deeds against his fellow humans.

Which is where part 2 comes in, with its theme of communication, of closing the gap and actually reaching out. Now that we understand what it means to connect, we must actually do it.

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Part 2 has a very specific visual theme of cracks: cracks on the wall, on character designs, in the art, in the panels, in the sky. Cracks represent the chasm between people, the Evangelion-esque Absolute Terror Field that forms between human beings who are too scared to be vulnerable with each other; who have been hurt too many times to believe connection is possible, who get frustrated when their attempts to connect don’t work. Because second chances are, again, difficult to live through, even if they’re the most natural thing in the world.

The cracks start small and end up almost engulfing the entire universe. Behind the cracks, two red eyes: the only bad idea that really matters, peeking in, reminding people of anti-life.

Cracks are also significant because part 2 is very concerned with a specific kind of human experience: transition, the liminal space between A and B, the Death XIII card upright. Everyone is only temporary, and everything is going to change at some point. Forcing something to remain the same when it’s time for it to change breaks it, and trying to force change when someone isn’t ready does that, too. There is a rhyme and reason to change that must be observed, lest the thing changing will crack open and break. However, to try to not change is to engage in anti-life.

Anti-life and death are seen as nearly complete opposites in Absolute Martian Manhunter, which can be a little confusing at first. It’s very Grant Morrison; the idea that anti-life refers less to non-existence and more to the lack of freedom, to an unchecked, all-powerful order stagnating everything into nothing. Into whiteness, absence of color and variety.

Tyler is now an avatar of anti-life. He is no longer sculpting his parents, or trying to communicate with them. Instead, he is sculpting monsters: horrifying creatures, the worst ideas humanity has ever had, and also obstacles for the Martian to fight. One of those, crucially, is his response to the threat the Martian poses to the White’s plans to collapse creation.

Meet Despero, Despair-The-Zero.

The changes in John’s life are enough to alienate him from the old comforts he enjoyed. His relationship with his family cannot continue the way it is, so he cannot go home. His only respite is using Martianvision to feel less lonely, even if a little, but it’s simply not the same.

His job has shifted into something he can’t simply lose himself in, so he can’t focus on it. Empathy has ruined him for the business of oppressing his own people that organized police forces specialize in. His boss, surrounded by what John now perceives as horrible, hostile architecture that only serves to hurt others, even questions John: is this even the same guy?

The Martian’s influence on him means he can’t even get drunk the same way, so he can’t numb himself and pretend he’s not in a rut. John is tired of seeing the truth everywhere, he’s tired of not having lies to defend himself from exposure to reality. He wants the numbness of illusion back.

All of it serves to cause a rift—a crack, even— between John and the Martian, which leads the door open for despair to set in.

I didn’t quite know what to make of Despero until the end. There is a version of Absolute Martian Manhunter that actually has Despero be a kind of third wheel in the relationship that sticks around beyond this adventure: something about how one must use both their flaws and their strengths to overcome life, maybe. I thought that’s where we were going. It really wasn’t! That fucker’s dead by the end!

Because the thesis with Despero, which only became clear to me upon a reread, is that he is the personification of the worst way one can approach life. He seems like he has a point sometimes, but that’s the trick, that’s the lie: despair’s only weapon is to convince someone that despair lasts forever.

He characterizes suffering as a state of mind, and not as a moment, or the result of an executed idea. The difference is subtle, but crucial: a state of mind can be eternal, but an idea has a beginning, middle and an end. A plan has a moment where it’s finished, and gives way to whatever comes next. Despair is stagnation, stagnation is apathy, apathy is anti-life. Despero is here to convince John and the reader that he is the last friend John will ever have, that he’s the end of the road that never ends.

Nowhere is that clearer than when John’s Martianvision ability becomes Desperovision, and here Camp actually executes one of the most interesting tricks as far as multiple ways to read a book go: Despero constantly says that he never lies, but Desperovision is John lying to himself because of Despero. The difference here is that John already believes the lies, so Despero doesn’t even have to do anything.

When John is trying to connect to others but can only see in blue and despair, he hears what isn’t there. He imagines people hating him, taking his family away from him, telling him he’s everything wrong with himself. Every paranoid thought, every bad idea he’s ever had, now come out of the mouths of those he was supposed to protect, seemingly with the same confidence as anything else they’ve ever told him that was true.

It’s a hell of a thing to watch happen to the character, and it really benefits from reading every issue back-to-back. By the time Despero is done with John, he’s having a full-on mental breakdown, cracking reality apart alongside his own mind. He’s convinced everything bad is true and everything good is a lie, and all Despero really had to do was to insist that this was the case at a particularly bad moment in his life.

He’s always very clear about what’s gonna happen to John—through not seeing the forest for the trees, John will destroy himself, and thus the world. He twists every interaction and makes it about how life not about connection, but about the destruction of something—either destroying both people, or what they have, or what they could have had. This is the worst kind of the illusions John wanted at the beginning of part 2: a filter that protects him from the truth, the filter of despair.

Specifically, and back to the idea that Tyler is the central case study of the book, Despero’s masterpiece is that he convinces John that Tyler is dead, and has been dead since issue 5, when he ate poisoned chocolate cookies. Choco cookies have always been Martian Manhunter’s comfort food, and a cute characterization trick to make him feel more relatable. So this was a particularly fucked up way to kill his kid, thank you based Deniz Camp very cool.

Despero’s ultimate attempt at bringing John down is to set up a whole funeral for Tyler, which works. John surrenders to despair, unable to move on, while the end of the world happens outside. And I particularly love how the Martian told us what the end of the world would look like all the way in issue 3: Mankind’s last gasps, tragic and glorious. Gaudy gorgeous funeral march. Civilization’s closing ceremonies, beautiful to behold. A conga line into an abyss in which you never hit the bottom.

John, upon reaching the height of Martianvision, eventually interprets this as being a distortion of the truth: Tyler is not literally dead; he is metaphorically dead. The boy Tyler used to be is dead, and has been replaced by the version of him that is being manipulated by the White Martian into destroying reality. His kid is in there somewhere, and he has to confront the reality that part of the reason Tyler fell is because John was not there for him.

So after all of this, after an entire treatise on connection, empathy, respect, adaptation, diversity… I don’t know, the human experience in general I guess, what is the thing that actually saves the world? Once you sum it all up, and once the Martian is out of the picture, fighting the White Martian in the bedrock of the universe, what can John, with a fully upgraded Martianvision that allows him to see beyond despair, do to stop the end of the world?

Well, the end of the world is happening because he doesn’t talk to his god damn son enough. Therefore it’s actually a pretty simple fix.

I’m gonna be real, this was really abrupt for me when I read it for the first time. It works wonders when you read all of it, though: the story really builds up nicely to it, and it feels like the culmination of a year of words about how much this dumb cop should talk to his fucking family more often. This book will never be read the way it was published again, the delay between issues #11 and #12 already doesn’t matter now that #12 is out. It did make for an awkward transition into the epilogue, but it’s fine.

Because connection, despite being so hard to set up, is natural. It is what we are built for, it is how we survive as a species, and it is how we thrive as a society. Lacking connection is what brings about the despair of anti-life.

Despero could only do as much damage to John as he did because John rejected the Martian’s help; the White Martian could only to as much damage to Tyler as he did because his parents couldn’t connect to him; everything that goes well in the story only does so because characters make the tough choice to open up and be together, in more ways than just superficially in the same room. Isolation is the enemy, marginalization is how we all die, turning our backs on each other is the enemy’s plan.

When connection has the change to settle in, when we actually talk to one another like fellow human beings, everything has a way to work itself out. Not because the world becomes any less harsh, but because we get the ability to utilize our communal power to force the world into being less harsh. To make it so everyone is happy. To fix our community’s problems, to dismantle systems that aren’t working and replace them with systems that work, to fight corruption, to put the right people in power, to give marginalized folks what they need to thrive. We can do anything. We can literally do anything together.

It is unbelievably difficult to not sound like a god damn hippie selling you a tie-dye shirt and talking to you about free love when you talk about this book.

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So, before we end, I wanted to close the circle on one part of my analysis of the book that I haven’t mentioned in this full book review, because quite frankly, I’ve talked about it a lot already in the individual issues’ reviews. Let’s talk about the Agency.

Part 2 of Absolute Martian Manhunter gives us a pastiche of the CIA, the Agency, who seem to be taking orders from the meta concept of Uncle Sam, the personification of the United States of America’s oppressive regime. Its agents are empowered with metaphysical weapons that work much like the Martian, such as utilizing the Idea Of A Gun against its enemies, summoning the American experience with war abroad to attack John, utilizing the American Prison System as a paper weight to hold the Martian down, etc.

Camp obviously has a lot to say about how this kumbaya bullshit I just spent 20 pages describing doesn’t quite get to exist in a world that is politically built around destroying empathy. In fact, the millennia-old concept of realpolitik is the exact opposite of the thesis of this book: the idea that democratic politics should be exclusively about practical concerns, and be guided by no ideology of any kind. Specifically, as the term is usually used, politics are the tools that secure the practical concerns of the people in power, not necessarily the people they serve.

The book goes on in great detail about the horrors of the abuses The Agency perpetuates. They spread nonsense conspiracies made by them wholesale, in order to keep populations compliant and distracted from the real issues. They kidnap, torture and kill citizens and non-citizens, utilizing cruel techniques to strip them of every dignity before finally ending their lives. They rely on the fact that the population of their country would never oppose them in great numbers, because they have also convinced that same population that this is how you secure their lifestyles. That there is no universe where America can be great without rivers of foreign blood flowing freely. That oppression is the only way Omelas keeps its utopia going, and that a citizen’s job is to enable it.

And the Martian eviscerates them.

These are the most violent things the Martian ever does in the entire story, and this is consistent with Camp’s other works— more recently, The Ultimates had a very similar vibe and political thematic background, and it also features its revolutionary heroes destroying the bodies of the oppressors, while simultaneously placing the idea of second chances and redemption in a pedestal. I think Absolute Martian Manhunter does it much better, and it’s worth going on somewhat of a tangent about, I think.

There’s an infuriating little conversation-ender that infects things like a plague, the idea that fighting back against your oppressor will make you just as bad as they are. Comic books are particularly guilty of the cliché— Batman cannot be within 10 meters of a situation where he might kill the Joker without this exact sentence leaving the character’s mouth, to progressively louder sighs from other named characters and numerous readers over the decades over how little those books actually have to say about this.

It makes a certain degree of logical sense, which is probably the reason bad-faith actors utilize it in real life so often. If we are righteous, then we are engaging in righteous acts. If the enemy isn’t righteous, then the enemy is engaging in foul, vile acts. Killing people is, usually, a bad, vile thing. Therefore, killing our enemies makes us vile, just like them— we’re replacing one evil with another if we engage in rhetoric, campaigns or thought processes that remind us of the ones we are fighting in any way, regardless of scale.

This usually comes in with the pitch of the correct way to disrupt the enemy’s operations. The polite way to protest policies so that the city’s population doesn’t miss out on their work schedule. The way to debate racists against their ideology so that you can make them see the light and change their ways through dialogue alone. The campaign to vote for the right people every time, because the vote will save us from the bad politicians who engage in unethical lawmaking. Every other way will lead us to a path that is just as bad as the one we’re in right now, when the enemy is in full power.

Let me be very clear about this blog’s opinion: this is bitch-ass cowardice and you are not welcome here if you’re like this. I’m not saying come out of your bedroom with a Molotov cocktail in hand and a pig’s head in the other, but the above description is literally part of the oppression machine that this story’s Agency is succeeding in normalizing. Being completely blunt, if you were as bad as a nazi, you would probably be wearing black and red already. You are not oppressing your oppressors by fighting for your life.

And I’m not saying the world is black and white, absolutely not. There is in fact a well-documented historical tradition of revolutions giving way to bad systems and corrupt governments, or simply failing to address the problems that brought them to destroy the previous systems in the first place. The nature of government is the nature of maintenance, and the nature of maintenance is that it’s boring, takes a long time, and is very hard to keep up. The humors that inspire revolution and rapid change go away fast, people go back to their lives, and you’re usually left with a lot of people who now have a lot of new powers and no checks and balances to really stop them from doing what they want.

Absolute Martian Manhunter simply proposes that this does not mean you should hold back when facing someone who has no interest in reconnecting. There is a fundamental difference between the agents of the oppressive regime and the lone wolf who got pipelined into becoming a suicide bomber. One of the most blatant differences being the fact that hey, who do you think made the fucking structure that led that guy to kill himself and everyone around him?

Who do you think profits when people are marginalized? When there’s homeless in the streets and landlords getting filthy rich off of dozens of owned properties? When skyscrapers are built to never be used, when food is thrown out so what remains can be sold at a profit, when people start believing vaccines don’t work and the Earth is fucking flat? Who has all the power to enable, and the motive to want that world to exist, and continue existing? And who makes that happen, out in the street, looking for the easiest way to make sure nothing changes? That no one has a choice? That life becomes anti-life, white and boring?

Connection, the book argues, is a two-way street. At any point, anyone can stop hurting others. This does not in any way make what they’ve already done better, but it means their position as someone who makes things worse is over, and their new position has an infinite potential to now do good.

But if they keep shooting you, with no reason or interest in stopping? Then man, not shooting back is some stupid pacifist bullshit. All that happens is that you get to become a particularly politically correct corpse, and the man holding the gun gets to move on to the next target that is bothering the status quo. Maybe the only thing more important than the concept of connection is making sure people are alive to connect to others in the first place. You cannot fight for freedom and peace and love if you let yourself die over your desire to do nothing.

So it’s quite harrowing that, in the last page dedicated to the Agency, we get to see the only place in the world where the eyes of the absolute bad idea still linger, strong and shining from the darkness. The place that most represents the concept of breaking connections, of making the world a worst place so that one or two people can isolate themselves further and do whatever they want, regardless of what happens to everyone else. The only place where anti-life would be welcomed as a particularly useful gun.

It’s the Agency’s headquarters.

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Alright, we’re here, I think I’m done. What’s this book about? Well, it’s about the fact that you should probably reach out to your loved ones and ask them how they’ve been, and share some of that sweet human empathy. Sometimes people have no interest in listening to you and there’s very little you can do about that, and in some rare, horrifying times, you might even have to fight to protect yourself against people who want to do you harm.

But most other times, it’s just a matter of learning their language. Other people are worth having around, even if you need to adapt a little occasionally. We’re at our strongest when we belong somewhere we can be ourselves, and be loved for it by people we love back. Quit waiting for people to come talk to you if you miss them. It’s as easy as saying hi. Nobody deserves to be lonely, and that includes you.

There is a lot I didn’t really touch upon here. I didn’t talk about Bridget a lot, but she’s one of my favorite characters, and a bedrock for the entire book’s progression and conclusion. I didn’t talk about the queer reading one can easily make of Tyler and the theme of transition as it applies to them. I didn’t talk about what each individual color means, and how you can try to read far more into this book than you would just by taking the art as normal illustrations, as opposed to part of the dialogue. Those and many more subjects can have their own ~25 page long essays about them, and, hey, who knows—I might come back and write about them in the future. I’m certainly going to read and reread this book for many years to come.

But at around 7000 words and counting, I think I got most of the gist of my feelings on the book out of my system, and I fear more subjects would just make reading this relatively unorganized mess even harder than it already is. Other people will also write far more compelling and complete dissertations about the rest of the themes than I will, in the coming months and years. I think this is as important as Watchmen as far as comics as literature go, I’m being so serious right now.

This has been Absolute Martian Manhunter. I really like this book, and I hope you liked it too. I think the best thing you can do to support books like this is to find someone who you think would have a good time with this kind of story, and share the story with them. Lend them your copy or send them a convenient link to a website that probably needs an adblock to be used. Build a bridge, yeah? Connect a little. Focus on what matters.

People do the things they do because they have to, but we make the world we want to live in. Make a world where you get to do the things you love, surrounded by people who love you. And if you think that world only exists in your head, well, that’s perfect, actually. What happens in your head happens in real life, too.