Discovering Mars

It was the summer of 1980 when I discovered a member of the Justice League who I had never heard of.

In my circles, I was widely considered the foremost authority in comics. Even at eleven years old, it formed my identity and personality. We moved a lot, and I didn’t have many roots or lifelong friends to help me through formative years. My consistencies and reliabilities were comics and science fiction. So my identity, for a long while and even today to some extent, is wrapped up in comic book super-heroes.

So imagine how I felt discovering a member of the Justice League who I had never heard of.

I had gotten all eight issues of a mini-comic that came packaged with some candy. I didn’t care about the candy all that much. But the comics were great! Little tiny comics recounting the secret origins of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Hawkman, and the Justice League of America. This was the first time I found out about many of the origins of these heroes.

I got the candy comics in a small convenience store at the end of the street that we lived on in New Hampshire. I savored each one of them, refusing to flip through them until I was ready to read them in full. I placed them in careful order, saving the best for last. Superman was first. Who didn’t know his origin? Then Batman. Aquaman was second-to-last. And I saved the Justice League one for very last.

I remember reading the Aquaman one on the way to the beach. I thought that was appropriate. All I knew was that Mom mentioned meeting some friends at the beach in Maine. When I hear ‘beach’, I think Ocean City, NJ with sand and surf. When we got there, it was a rock beach with freezing cold temperatures. The Aquaman comic was of very little help.

Let’s get back to the Justice League comic. When I finally got to it in my reading order, I had this major, juicy mystery on the front cover! There was a guy! A guy who was green! A guy who was green who I had never, ever seen before! Who was this?



It was page five before I learned his name.



He snuck around in the background once:



It was page eleven before he showed up again:



On page thirteen he got another mention:


And that was it. That was all I would get about this previously unheard of character. I knew that he could fly, could punch things, and was from Mars. That was it.

The point being… what a wonderful feeling this was! It’s like a ‘history’s mysteries’ sort of thing. A feeling that there was a whole history to this medium that I thought I knew so well. But Justice League was my absolute favorite book! How could there be a mystery character? A character never mentioned in any of my Justice League comics or any of my Super Friends episodes.

It was the summer of 1981 before I would learn more about this mysterious character.

It was the summer of 1984 when he heralded the destruction of the Justice League that I loved so much from my childhood.

It was the summer of 1988 when I realized I had known about him all along, remembering a story I had read in the summer of 1976 at age six.

But those are other blog posts.

Thanks,
DCD