The ambitious new DC Entertainment comic book series from Steve Orlando and Riley Rossmo launches in December.

After more than 60 years, it’s time for J’onn J’onzz to finally learn who he really is, with DC Entertainment launching a new Martian Manhunter comic book series at the end of the year. The 12-issue series, the first time the character has headlined a title since 2015, will be created by Steve Orlando and Riley Rossmo. "I’ve been calling this my dream project online for more than a year,” Orlando told The Hollywood Reporter. “I started talking to DC about it at San Diego Comic-Con 2017. He’s always been my favorite character since I was younger, so to be able to fire our best shot across the bow of doing an evergreen story with him, it’s super exciting. Everyday I’m writing, I just can’t believe it; there’s no character I wanted to work on more.” Best known to non-comic readers as a character in the CW’s Supergirl — and, before that, a mainstay of Cartoon Network’s Justice League and Justice League Unlimited — the Martian Manhunter, AKA J’onn J'onzz, debuted in 1955’s Detective Comics No. 225 and has been a permanent part of the DC Universe ever since. Pulled from his home planet of Mars by a science experiment gone wrong, the character used his powers to disguise himself as a human in order to solve crime and help his adopted planet both as policeman and longtime member for the Justice League of America.

The upcoming 12-issue series is at once a re-examination of the character’s origins and emotional journey and also a detective story on Earth, as J'onzz — in his guise as John Jones, human detective — attempts to solve a murder that may have connections to his own past on Mars. As Orlando puts it, it’s also a chance for he and Rossmo to define the character in a way that he’s never had the opportunity to be seen before. Courtesy of Riley Rossmo/DC Entertainment “In the past, J’onn has been too perfect,” he argued. “One of the reasons people have not connected to him is that he was a perfect upright cop on Mars, and yes, his family died but it was no fault of his own, and then he came to Earth and he was perfect. Our favorite characters, that’s not them, you know? Spider-Man let the burglar go. Bruce Wayne was too afraid to save his family. This book gives J’onn that moment, and that’s the keystone as to why this book will be, is, the Martian Manhunter story, because we finally know the why. Why he strives to be so good on Earth, why he has this journey, because he’s never really had one before. All of our favorite characters overcome their faults, and we hope he’s going to do it here, but he has to have them first.” For Rossmo, one of the appeals of the series is the chance to dig into the opportunity to build a whole new culture almost from scratch.