Hickmania 4.1: A Red Mass For Mars Review!

A common issue with a lot of Jonathan Hickman’s early work is the sense that he’s not so much exploring the ideas and implications of his fiction as he’s gesturing towards them. This is certainly an issue with many an early writer, but it’s more pronounced with Hickman. And nowhere is this more pronounced than in Red Mass for Mars. The plot is a rather straight forward tale of “Alien invaders are coming to conquer the Earth, boo-hoo we’re all going to die. Wait! The superheroes will save us!” that you’ve seen time and time again. Thin plots can work wonders for exploring ideas.

The problem is that the ideas themselves are half-baked in their approach. Consider the titular superhero at the heart of the book, Mars. Mars was born from the heavens during the 9^th century and was raised in the Dark Ages. He was taught that the divine right of kings is rubbish in the face of a might-beats-right society. However, he found that age too… shit. Not willing to embrace the god king who had slaughtered the weak king in front of the court. So he buggered off for a few centuries until mankind was ready to embrace a better kind of hero. However, after a rather drab personal tragedy, the people of Earth come to realize they’re better than Mars and tell him to piss off after he murders two common criminals and two superheroes.

In essence, what this is asking is what happens when Superman is the man of yesterday. Not in the trite sense that most use that phrase to refer to Superman as a simplistic idealist who can’t hack it in our modern age of terrorism, torture, and NASCAR. But rather what happens when the cultural standards of an age where ethnic slurs were perfectly acceptable language are held up to one where they’re not. What happens when Superman realizes we’re better than him? This is a fascinating well of implications and meaning that could make for a fascinating four to six issue miniseries.

In Red Mass for Mars, this is presented to us as backstory for the main alien invasion bollocks. Indeed, it takes up roughly 18 pages of the series, less than a single issue of the comic. There are other places where the concept of an evolving idea is present. Each issue discusses how the notion of utopianism has evolved through the years (without any connection to the wider implications of the narrative) and Mars’ son highlights how the idea of Mars can be repurposed beyond him (that is, if you squint and ignore his untimely death at the hands of the alien invaders).

But nowhere is this more apparent than in the character Lightbender. Lightbender is introduced to us having overthrown the British government (and raped the corpse of the queen, an act we merely hear about rather than see [which, as Transhuman shows, Hickman is not above showing]) on the grounds that the English language is not the sole language on Earth. However, prior to his reactionary and revolutionary turn, Lightbender was seen as a superhero. “The greatest sorcerer in the modern world.” Someone on the list to save the Earth from the invading alien horde. But now, here he is talking about “the constant babbling in guttural Chinese and the unending peasant-speak of Spanish.”

While abjectly a horrific and racist sentiment to hold, within the concept of the nature of an idea growing and shifting with time, it’s worth looking at how it can collapse into horror and cruelty. When many talk of the power of stories, it is often with a liberatory fervor, a belief that our stories will save us from the baddies. That if we just tell the right story, the better story, then we can defeat the fascists who want us dead. Unfortunately, the fascists also are creatures of hope and optimism and utopian ideals. They tell stories just as well as non-fascists do. They have a love of superheroes like Captain America, the Punisher, or Rorschach. They dream of Utopian futures where we have colonies on the moon and slaves to do as we please.

(Rather than link the work of noted fascist Mencius Moldbug [whose approach to utopian theory is worth looking at in the context of Hickman’s larger work given it {alongside the work of other …interesting figures like Scott Alexander, Roko Mijic, and Eliezer Yudkowsky} comes out of the tech scene that a lot of Hickman’s work gestures at. Though you’d probably be better off reading Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilsk instead], consider that the etymology of “Robot” is the Czech word “Robota,” meaning “Slave.”)

Ideas grow and change over time, yes. But they don’t necessarily grow in directions that are the ones we wish them to grow in. The master’s tools will never tear down the master’s house, but a slave’s tools can be stolen to beat the slave down. The fascists also dream of a better world.

Unfortunately, Red Mass for Mars opts to chicken out of the implications of this in favor of a gag about the English obsessed magician being, in fact, French. Furthermore, he didn’t really mean to be a reactionary UKIP/Qanon/Tea Partier. He was just trying to sound more megalomaniacal in the face of his grand and epic return to the world. And he wanted to kill some English.

In essence, we discard the fascinating notion that an idea can grow and change into something monstrous and cruel in favor of a gag about a mad magician. Furthermore, we discard this idea immediately, effectively within the second appearance of the aforementioned magician in the second issue. We aren’t allowed to let the idea linger before it’s discarded for other things. And those other things are, again, a trite story of stopping aliens from invading and conquering the Earth.

Which, at its heart, is the main issue of Red Mass for Mars. For all the spectacular art work from the late Ryan Bodenheim along with colors by Jonathan Hickman and Marty Shelley, for all the ideas of utopianism and change, for all the pretty good lines, the story at the crux of it all is rote, trite, and flat with characters who are archetypical to a fault. Which would be fine if it was in the service of exploring the ideas at its heart, but the ideas themselves aren’t fleshed out to fully utilize the space given to them by the flat story. They are not allowed to grow into something new.