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This issue kinda convinced me this could work as an ongoing. Even if it only came out for 6 months every year, I would love to tune back into this style, this world and this specific take on every character.

Following an epidemic of snitching that would have made XXXTentacion blush, John and the Martian are not doing well. John’s sick and tired of being involved in the metaphysical battles his partner is fighting in, and just wants his family back. The Martian leaves him alone and has a cute little adventure by himself, checking in on the people in town looking for White Martian influence.

He’s the best and I love him, but parallel to that, we are properly introduced to how The Agency, this arc’s antagonists, operate. They seem to have access to the same metaphysical, metanarrative level of reality that the Martian has, to the point of recruiting the audience to participate in his imprisonment. Since he doesn’t get to go back to John’s mind after being captured, we also get a new Absolute version of a previously established character: Despero, who is a metaphysical embodiment of despair in this called Despair-the-Zero.

As usual, there’s a lot going on, but I want to focus on the more surface level stuff this time. Deniz Camp is incapable of not writing about heavy political matters, and now we’ve got American superpolice calling out the Martian as an immigrant, and using force to subdued him simply for existing.

This wasn’t written yesterday, but it’s tough to not see the parallels with the current situation in America. A country from which I have thankfully escaped and will not be returning to, but one where most of the audience for this book lives, by choice or not. I’m honestly a little worried that the tone and execution of Absolute Martian Manhunter isn’t super conducive to this kind of narrative, specifically because we only have so many issues and there are… a lot of things to say about it.

Thankfully, I think Camp and Rodríguez nail it by focusing on what exactly it is that The Agency is doing. They’re weaponizing and glorifying the worst aspects of America— the agent that captures the Martian literally states he is using the idea of a gun to fight him.

Instead of having to ground this in a more obvious metaphor, or laser-focusing on ICE or other groups that we all hate, Camp decides to make this a lot more evergreen by talking about aspects of American power that would be issues even if, I don’t know, Obama was in the chair for the third time. The glorification of violence, the trillionaire war budget, the Big Stick diplomacy—all of this is much older than the current extinction burst being experienced by the country, and it’s all worth talking about at any point.

By making this not just about what America does, but about what America has always done as a way of maintaining power and hunting down that which is different, the story gets to age like wine. We get to have an actual conversation instead of just nodding in agreement that having a Gestapo in your streets is bad. A lesser writer would have just made it literal, but Camp understands that this kind of story is only good when you get to go back to it years later and still get something out of it.

State violence is the opium of the people. It’s the little-death of progress and destroyer of the future. It’s the assurance that there is Something being done about whatever ails the population, and it’s always a blatant lie. To throw the very idea of armed law enforcement at the Martian is to enlighten it as the enemy. To understand that at the end of the day, if you have to kill someone to get what you want, there’s something deeply wrong with the entire situation, and failure happened a long time ago. Just not the way you probably tell yourself it did.

Exhaustion, paranoia, nostalgia— it’s all the ammunition of a system that only works if the people are content enough to not rebel, to not reach out to undesirables and people whom they’ve been told are not to be trusted, and shouldn’t be here. The Martian is literally the embodiment of hope and good, and they put him in a cage. And they enlisted the audience to become complicit in it.

Because the truth about the nightmare of imperialism and fascism is that it only happens if the population is in on it. If at some level, someone put them in power, and didn’t take them out when it got really bad. If a con got so big that it became reality. They only have powers that their societies accept exists, because that’s what politics are. They’re the will of the people, consensual or not.