quote:
Supposedly posted by Dave:
With the Manhunter, everyone knows there are not civilisations on Mars. During the 50s, it was a long shot, to all save astrophysicists. Nowadays it is certain.
Without getting into an off-topic debate, that's not as certain as some claim. There are photographs recently released by NASA which may point to an ancient civilization on Mars which has probably been extinct since long before civilization on Earth. But that's another topic entirely. Suffice it to say there's much, much, much, much more that we DON'T know about Mars than we do. Some scientists are even rethinking the idea that Venus may support some kind of life. It's the hubris of man to make conclusions without proper investigation.

In any case, the comic-book-as-fantasy concept shouldn't be threatened because it defies reality. With fantasy it's simply more important to tell an imaginative story.

That said, I really don't care for J'onn J'onzz. He was an implausible and boring character in the 1950s and '60s, and the only time he's ever been interesting was during the Giffen-DeMatteis JUSTICE LEAGUE series when he had an Oreo cookie fetish. I really can't understand the reasoning of anyone claiming that the Martian Manhunter is the "heart and soul" of the JLA. That's bullshit. The character was absent from the pages of the JLA for something like 15 to 20 years from the late '60s to the mid '80s because he was so derivative of Superman in powers and was basically uninteresting and/or plain silly, not to mention that he had one of the lamest weaknesses of any superhero (fire) -- what would've been even worse was if he was allergic to water, like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable (an otherwise cool movie). Those are my reasons for killing him off.