Absolute Martian Manhunter isn't just the best superhero comic of 2025 – it pushes into the wild spaces of the form itself

There are very good superhero stories that came out in 2025. DC's Absolute offerings continue to blow the doors off the industry, the Ultimate universe is gunning towards an ultimate conclusion, and Grant Morrison wrote a Batman/Deadpool crossover.

But there's only one book that's delivering the superhero space at its best — making an old idea new — while also pushing to the creative edges of the comics form: Absolute Martian Manhunter from Deniz Camp and Javier Rodríguez.

A twisted universe

AMM meets the same brief of every other book in DC Comics' Absolute line, which goes like this: Darkseid, the cosmic god of fascism and apathy, created a new parallel DC Universe in his own image. Have you ever felt that the world was just deep down broken? In the Absolute Universe, that's empirically true. The same familiar superheroes are here, battling evil with fewer resources, more challenges, and prevailing in spite of it all. Batman's not rich, Superman never got adopted, Wonder Woman grew up in hell, not paradise, and the Martian Manhunter is "the Martian," a bodiless psychic force sharing the mind of FBI agent John Jones.

Traditionally, private detective John Jones is the civilian identity of J'onn J'onzz, the last of the Green Martians, better known as the shapeshifting Justice League stalwart, the Martian Manhunter. At least, when he bothers to have a secret identity at all — over time and different retellings, John Jones has been a guise that J'onn fabricated, or a recently passed human detective whose identity he adopted.

Camp and Rodríguez's revamp turns the singular character into a transcendental buddy cop duo, battling a wave of anti-social violence in John's hometown of Middleton. The Martian Manhunter's traditionally sprawling set of superpowers (speed, flight, strength, shapeshifting, invisibility, heat vision, and more) are culled into a single focus: John's ability to deescalate violence in the material world and the Martian's ability to address its roots on the psychic. With that narrative concept, Camp and Rodríguez have built a visual playground for Rodríguez's best skill: Color.

Vibrant headspace

While Javier Rodríguez has been making comics since the 1990s and has more than a few original graphic novels under his belt in his native Spain, in the American comics market, he primarily works as a colorist. When he does step up to do interior art, it's often for just a few issues, or, lately, for projects in which printed color is an inextricable facet of the story. Of that latter category, Absolute Martian Manhunter is maybe the best example yet.

For their telepathic detective who battles the emotional roots of social isolation, Camp and Rodríguez chose to visualize emotion as color — bright yellow, orange, red, and magenta, multiple greens and blues. Color billows out of characters' mouths, filling the air like the secondhand smoke of a noir hero, with John Jones and the Martian as the only beings who can breathe it in.

Absolute Martian Manhunter is a book where every character's emotions are on display, but nobody can actually communicate. The root of every problem is the inability (or refusal) to connect; John with his wife, John's non-verbal son with the world, bystanders with their loved ones, perpetrators of violence with their communities. On constant display is the inefficiency of language to bridge the gap between minds, and the difficulties people have in finding their voices in the first place. The Martian speaks in "concept constellations," clusters of equally descriptive words presented simultaneously, because no single human word suffices.

It's the kind of inventiveness of text and visual, and harmony of art and story, that comics usually only approach when they're the work of a single creator. AMM has three, between Camp, Rodríguez, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. The team displays an expert understanding of what's possible with comics imagery, and also with the comic as a physical object, punctuating the biggest mic-drops of the series with a trick of printing and reader participation.

When Absolute Martian Manhunter really wants you to sit up and pay attention to duality in unity, it prints one image on a page, another mirror-flipped image on the opposite side, and invites you to hold the comic itself up to the light, to see the two pages as a single visual.

Exactly the kind of creativity and inventiveness that is easily squeezed flat under the monthly comics churn, corporate pressures, and tendency to choose the reliable over the experimental. And all that visual wow is in the service of a story with a true point of view on modern American isolation packaged in the best scifi allegory. In a crowded year of superheroic bangers, Absolute Martian Manhunter stands above — there is simply no other superhero book like it on the stands.

While Absolute Martian Manhunter tops the list, there's something for everyone in the best comics of 2025.