Saturday, September 13, 2025

Martian Manhunter: American Secrets #3 (November 1992)


I bet I'm the first person who completely understood these covers!

That caption is less of a brag and more of a declaration that comic book readers don't give a lot of thought to some stuff. Oh, sure, everybody thought about Watchmen! But that's because Moore shoved a fucking novel into the end of each issue and people were all, "Why are there so many words? Must be important!" Plus to my point, I'd say the majority of Watchmen readers at the time were all, "Hurr hurr. Rorschach is fucking cool, man."

As you may have heard, Charlie Kirk was murdered earlier this week and the GOP, whom I've recently mentioned have a tough time understanding reality, immediately used Kirk's death to weaponize their followers against Leftists and Liberals, even though their standard mantra after a gun incident is "Stop politicizing gun deaths with calls for gun control, you evil monsters!" But as I mentioned, they rarely understand reality so they were probably the only ones who didn't read about the killing and then turned to their partners and said, "It was probably a conservative with some kind of stick up their ass about the way Kirk Conservatives." My speculation at the time, which I didn't speculate on because I want to keep my reputation as a reporter pristine (What do you mean "delusional"?!), was that it was some Qanon soused Conservative who saw the Epstein book's release and got murder angry at Kirk for following Trump's lead and deciding that the Epstein files weren't important. Turns out it was just a fucking Groyper. Love that these fuckers keep shooting at themselves.

The main thing I wanted to discuss, because it's comic book related, has to do with Gretchen Felker-Martin and how Bluesky banned her and then DC dropped her Red Hood series. My introduction to this incident came when I saw this Skeet mentioning her ban:


Being that I'm only reading comics from 1992 currently, I had no idea Gretchen was a comic book writer.

Apparently Gretchen was banned from Bluesky for this post due to "glorifying death" which, by the way, wasn't against their terms of service until they decided they needed to ban people rightly acknowledging that Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit and his death was no loss to the world. But I'd also argue that this Skeet wasn't glorifying or making fun of his death anyway! It's a shot at Newsome and a joke about the jobs market. Here's my response:


Seriously! This is funnier and more complex than 90% of right wing humor that's basically just calling somebody a faggot or a retard.

I suspect that, like a majority of the Internet, the Bluesky mods' reading comprehension is sub-standard. I think they read this as Kirk's death was the silver lining. The job opening was the silver lining! Because so much unemployment! And it was a shot at Newsome for having fucking right wing demagogue on his stupid podcast! Glorifying his death it is not. Sure, there's a bit of a smirk about it in there. But it's just collateral damage and not the direct hit. So to speak.

Later, still not knowing who Gretchen Felker-Martin was, I saw that DC was canceling the new Red Hood series. I thought they were canceling it because Red Hood is the kind of guy who would write memes on bullet casings and shoot Nazis in the throat! I thought DC was all, "Oh shit! This is too close to the tragedy! Maybe let's give Todd a rest for a bit!" But no! Come to find out, it was Gretchen's book and DC was all, "We can have Gretchen write funny books about vigilante murders but God forbid she writes a funny Skeet that's assassination adjacent!" Jesus fucking Christ if I wasn't reading old comic books that they published by pedophiles which I'd already paid for, I might just have to boycott these fucking dum-dums!

Anyway, I think I have a 48 page comic to read and that rant just really ate into the word count. But that's okay because I've already said all the smart stuff I could think up about this book in the first two issues. I'm tired of trying to be smart so maybe I'll just make fun of J'onn's cock in this one. Remember, this thing is about white supremacy (you know what that is! The thing Charlie Kirk desperately wanted although apparently not strongly enough for his Nick Fuentes loving Groyper killer! I hope they just leave us all out of their little gun squabbles and just redden the streets with each other's blood, the dumbshits).


That's exactly what a lizard head would say, Doctor Lizard Head!

Doctor Mid-nite tries to convince Detective Jones that he didn't see any lizard heads at all. Was Doctor Mid-nite the man all the Men in Black were modeled after? The Doctor describes how the Justice Society were convinced and not at all gaslit by Hoover that they were the problem and that they should hang up their capes. So they did but they kept working with the government in secret to help maintain the status quo. See, being a flashy hero fighting societal injustice was just too subversive. That's because white people don't want super heroes beating them up for committing crimes which cops and politicians would let them get away with. So now the FBI want Martian Manhunter to work for them keeping the current status quo. They want order over justice and they're willing to burn the shit out of a Martian if he doesn't play ball.

Prelvis falls for the grift because this is DC Elvis's version of working for the FBI. But Detective Jones and Patty are forced to flee as the FBI sick Skeeter on them.


What the fuck is up with that kid?! He's definitely a Gerard Jones self-insert, right?!

Martian Manhunter flies out a window and into the Nevada desert with Patty Marie. Skeeter lies dead on the sidewalk thirty stories below.


He's no longer a little boy but he's also not a lizard head? What the fuck, man?

So Skeeter was a pervy old man who somehow looked like a little boy. I guess that's lizard head magic (and more proof that they're not just white supremacists but also pedophiles (although it wouldn't take much of anything to convince me that those two things often go together).

The FBI mobilize fighter jets to chase down Martian Manhunter. A brief dogfight occurs where one jet is destroyed by another jet's incendiary missiles. But Martian Manhunter and Patty Marie are caught in the explosion. The flames cause J'onn to drop Patty while also lighting Patty on fire so that J'onn has trouble saving her from the fall. They crash to the ground and when J'onn regains consciousness in the morning, Patty is dead. I guess the heroism is that he tried to save her at the risk of his own life. He mostly only failed because writing the rest of the story while he continues to protect this little girl would be a pain the ass. Best to put her out of her misery early and get on with all the alien on alien violence to come.


Oh, um, I guess it all plays into his past trauma too.

I probably shouldn't be the one hinting at another writer lazily scripting up plot points just to make telling the rest of the story easier. Especially when I'm about three pages away from just summarizing the last thirty pages in one paragraph, rating this whole shebang a "B+", and going to take a nap.

You didn't notice but I just took my nap early and had some dinner.

Jones dumps Patty's body next to the dead pilot. He notices some blue gunk leaking out of the pilot and realizes the guy is full of a weird blue fungus. As a scientist, he's basically forced to cut open little Patty too. He discovers she doesn't have the fungus in her. He surmises that some people are either immune to the fungus or too young to have been corrupted by the fungus or too rural for the fungus to have reached them, like Prelvis. He believes the lizard heads use the fungus to somehow keep people in check, to limit what they see (or control it, like people seeing Skeeter as a kid instead of a lecherous old man), and to cause them to spontaneously combust when they say too much. He finds surveillance photos of him on the pilot and a map of Cuba. One of the locations on the map is PTO Iberez, an anagram of a bunch of silly words Keene kept throwing at him, and Doctor Midnight as well. Detective Jones has finally found some real, non-holistic evidence of the alien invasion!

Detective Jones meets a Cuban Beatnik who tries his best to explain what's happening through metaphor and allegory. But ultimately he says too much and burns like Phil did earlier.


This poet less-than-subtly (thus the combustion) explains there's an alien invasion and the aliens are at PTO Iberez.

Detective Jones goes full on Tom Joad, declaring he'll be there when somebody combusts or when somebody gets taken by fungus or when somebody is told by some big-headed, small-faced moron to prove them wrong. But less metaphysically, Martian Manhunter convinces Castro and Guevara to send their guerilla fighters to PTO Iberez instead of Havana. Because that's where the true threat to the world lies!

While the lizard heads battle to protect their fungus mind control crops against the Cuban guerrilla fighters, Martian Manhunter and Prelvis infiltrate the Master Gardener's lair. It's probably time for the lead lizard head to explain why they want to control human culture to this degree but first they need to drop the big white supremacist line whenever they're criticizing somebody Other who speaks or acts against their race-based tyranny.


Only the very worst people expect gratitude from others, and expect others to be grateful for people allowing them to survive. Or earn a living. Or to merely be left alone. As if they spoon feed us everything. Fuck off!

The lizard head plan reads a lot like Peacemaker, Season One. The butterflies decided to take control of the Earth for the sake of the humans, to save the world and force everybody to live in peace. These lizard heads have basically the same plot. And, again, it sounds quite similar to certain white supremacists who are trying to force order through violence in America today.


Look, we've know the fascist playbook for decades. Centuries, even. It's no surprised Jones writing this in 1992 sounds so fucking familiar to today.

Speaking of fascists, I want to return to the revelation that the Charlie Kirk murderer was probably a Groyper and most certainly right-wing himself. I mentioned in an earlier American Secrets review how conservatives want to live in irreality and anything sniffing of actual reality is woke nonsense because they can't control that narrative. So what happens when they learn the killer was one of their own? They just fucking steamroll right over the fact and continue with their bullshit about leftists being violent and leftists having caused this and how leftists need to be violently punished. They have no ideology except hurting the Other that doesn't even exist. The Left they talk about is just more of their shared hallucination. It's no wonder so many of them love AI because it comprehends reality just as well as they do. They want so badly to be given the legal right to just up and murder any Democrat, Liberal, or Progressive they encounter on the street. They want us to be demons from Hell. Their world doesn't make sense without it so they grip as hard as they can at the belief that their enemies are out to get them. Instead, we're cracking jokes because a Nazi was killed by another Nazi. We're having fun with something that probably made the world better, even if it was done by another piece of shit. Oh? And because that piece of shit was a white MAGA Republican? Now they fucking have empathy for him.

A major problem with the Right is how they think they have sole ownership of laughing at people who get hurt or killed because it's not "politically correct" to do so. But they love if someone Other gets hurt somehow. Their jokes, in that regard, are absolutely fine. But when they see the Left make the same kind of jokes about one of them, they shit their pants. Not because they believe people shouldn't make jokes about people getting killed. They shit their pants because they can't imagine that we're having fun with it in a way that isn't completely batshit angry like how they do it. And they want to call us hypocrites when we actively engage in behavior they've been told we're against. We see them for who they are while they are, their lizard heads scowling and frothing and full of hate. But they can't see us because the fungus down their spine projects what they've been told by their thought leaders who we are.

Frankly, they're all mostly dumb as shit.

Anyway, surprise! The lead lizard head turns out to be something else altogether!


He probably, to keep with the metaphor, should have been a white Martian. I get why he wasn't though!

The lizard head warriors, not realizing that their master is actually a Martian too, accidentally burn him to a crisp when they turn their flamethrowers on him wrestling Martian Manhunter. J'onn only survives because Prelvis throws him in a canal nearby. But J'onn doesn't pass out until he sends a message to the lizard heads in jets to bomb PTO Iberez. They do it because they do whatever their leader tells them to do instead of thinking anything through.

Sometime after the world is saved, Prelvis dies in a plane crash. Or he died saving J'onn and the plane crash is the lie told to the public. Whatever the case, the immediate threat has been vanquished. But nobody can actually discuss it because the fungus still living inside them will burn them to a crisp. So now they have to wait a generation or two before super heroes can return to the world. Is this some kind of explanation of some continuity gap between the Justice Society's World War II exploits and later continuity? I don't maintain the entirety of DC history in my head so I have no idea.

The final page shows J'onn declaring that he's not a Martian anymore; he's a Beatnik. Ha ha! I wish that fucking character trait had remained!

Martian Manhunter: American Secrets #3 Rating: A. Good stuff by a shit pedophile. What can I say? Enjoy art but don't make a hero out of the artist, I guess? Everything else I need to say about this book has already been said. Plus I guess if I had any conservative readers (highly doubtful), I've probably lost them after these last few reviews. Or not! Prove me wrong!

No wait! Don't do that!

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