With tonight’s Supergirl featuring an episode all about Martian Manhunter’s backstory, we hopped on the phone with actor David Harewood ("Hank Henshaw/J'onn J'onzz") to talk about his character.

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Who Is the Martian Manhunter? 19 IMAGES

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IGN also has an exclusive clip from the episode, showing J'onn on the warpath, after discovering that a member of the alien race responsible for the death of his people has surfaced. Check it out below!Being such a longstanding DC Comics character and a founding member of the Justice League, Martian Manhunter has worked alongside numerous heroes over the years, but Harewood told IGN that the one he most wants to have on the show is the Dark Knight himself, Batman.“It would be lovely to have Batman. Reading the JLA comics, I wasn't aware just how dark Batman is, how brilliant he is,” Harewood said. “I grew up with the Adam West version and I'm always used to Batman being a little bit camp, and we knew much more about Bruce Wayne, but in the comics, you hardly see Bruce Wayne, it's always Batman. He's such a fantastic character, so I think it'd be nice to see someone like Batman -- dark and mysterious and you don't quite know what he's doing. That would be quite interesting to play with.”While having Batman on the show would doubtlessly be pleasing for fans, it likely won't happen because Batman is about to make yet another big screen debut in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice played by Ben Affleck, and it's highly unlikely DC would allow the character to simultaneously exist on the show. The CW's Arrow and Flash shows have done little winks and nods to Batman that let you know he probably exists somewhere in that world, but that's about it. Still, fans (and Harewood) can dream of a day that might change. Harewood says he has been “devouring” comics about his character ever since he learned he would be playing J’onn J’onzz. His favorite is 1998’s “Rings of Saturn” by writer John Ostrander and artist Tom Mandrake, which Harewood enjoyed for how it featured Martian Manhunter’s villainous brother Malefic and showing how Martian Hunter can use his body’s many powers.Fans of the character will also be pleased to hear that the show will indeed include his love for Chocos, which are the Oreos of DC Comics. These things are important, people!In last week’s episode, we saw that J’onzz doesn’t have full control over his powers. When he went to erase a man's memory of seeing him, he wound up wiping the man's memory of his entire life, which is something that weighed heavily on J'onzz.“I think we're playing with the notion that he hasn't used his powers for such a long time that he doesn't quite know how to use them effectively,” Harewood said. “Down the line, I think we'll see that he just gets better at it. It's pretty much like Kara. I mean, Kara came out of the box in episode one and wondered whether she put the 'S' on too soon. Just putting the 'S' on your chest doesn't make you a superhero. You have to learn to use your powers. You have to learn to effectively take people out and how to keep yourself safe while keeping everybody else safe. It's very much the same for J'onn. He's not used to being a superhero. He hasn't used his superpowers for a very long time, so what we're seeing is J'onn remembering what it was like to be the Martian Manhunter and hopefully throughout the series we'll get more of a look at him just getting better at it and getting more confident.”While we know that J’onzz is one of the most intelligent, powerful, and experienced characters in the comics, he’s not yet reached that point in his superhero career, giving him an interesting mentor/student relationship with Kara that is sometimes reversed.“I think she actually has a lot more to teach him. I think he's the one that's continually been teaching her and trying to keep her on the straight and narrow. I think the roles have slightly flipped now because she can now talk to him as the last survivor of a planet. She can talk to him as somebody who has also lost her family and lost her people. She can talk to him about how she's made being different a part of her, how she's lived with it, how she's made it part of her character. Those are all issues with J'onn, perhaps buried. Being a shapeshifter, it's not easy but it's fairly simple for him to just assume a different identity and live as somebody else, never going back to being a green, seven-foot alien living in hiding all the time. I think she will teach him about being much more open about who you are, being much more comfortable with who you are and just basically upholding the name of the people that you lost, not seeing it so much as a burden and as a source of pain, but seeing it as a source of pride and something to cherish,” Harewood said.Harewood couldn’t say much about what to expect from his character’s big episode, but he was able to share a few details.“We get to see J'onn's backstory. We'll get to see how he became the last son of Mars, we'll get to see the destruction of his people, we'll get to see how awful that was for him and how that very much scarred his character. It's a real introduction to his backstory and how he had become the last son of Mars,” Harewood said.On his final note, Harewood said that Supergirl is only going to get "better and better, darker and darker.”

Supergirl airs Mondays at 8:00pm ET/PT on CBS.Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter and IGN