Mars plays a special role in popular culture science fiction. Part of this is that the roots of science fiction began to take place when scientific discoveries about our planetary neighbour were just taking place. Early novels such as War of the Worlds used Mars as the the basis for a group of aliens invading Earth and used some supposition that canal like features on the planet were actually canals. Although this has long since been disproved, it still remains in the public consciousness that Mars may be home to little green men with not such good intentions towards Earth. Incidentally this ties into one of my big comic projects - to review all of the golden/silver age Mystery in Space - as the planet more often than not was a source of problems for Earth (this is also true going back to the early Golden Age for Wonder Woman.) With better and better knowledge of the planet though, we now are fairly certain that there are no advanced life forms there, and even quite certain that there is no life there, but this leaves a lot of science fiction in a strange area in terms of accuracy. The Martian Manhunter, a DC character from the late golden age age has always sort of had to deal with this problem, of what exactly to do with Mars in relation to him, especially as our knowledge of the planet has increased over time. Thus as with the rest of the new 52, I am somewhat intrigued by the revelation in Stormwatch #5 that there may in fact be other Martians alive (as in the panel above) as it may mean that Mars might finally get a story which is both factual and fun. After all it has been the case overwhelmingly in the reboot that DC has tried to go for those two characteristics at the same time.
4 Comments
