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If you haven’t picked up Absolute Martian Manhunter, then you’re missing out on one of the most mind-bending comics you’ll ever read. The Deniz Camp and Javier Rodríguez comic reimagines Martian Manhunter in an abstract adventure that combines psychedelic colors with a brain-twisting narrative.

(I’m not doing it justice. You really have to see it to believe it)

While the comic may seem out of this world, the team behind the series says they were inspired by some grounded concepts.

“To me, the book is very rooted in today,” Absolute Martian Manhunter writer Deniz Camp told Popverse’s Jules Chin Greene at New York Comic Con 2025. “It is very rooted into the things that I’m concerned about or that I’m seeing around me. It felt like the right time to do a book about empathy and difficulty communicating and anger and social instability. But then it was also born from the character. I saw all these elements that I really liked. The mind-reading, the alien, the idea of an alien masquerading as a person. The whole fire motif, I wanted to work that in.”

“The character was born from a lot of other stuff that I love reading that’s not in comics, and then most of the world around me right now. If it feels like it’s timeless, which is what we’re going for, it’s because we’re always kind of struggling with a lot of the same issues. The manifestations are different each time, but we’re fundamentally struggling with kind of the same things as we have been for centuries.”

For more on Absolute Martian Manhunter, check out the full interview with Deniz Camp and Javier Rodríguez below.

Need more? Here's our picks for the best DC Comics stories of all time.