Martian Maneater
23 years ago (dream realm memory) - Green Martian chieftain J'edd J'arkus, having assisted in the eradication of other Green Martians after the Martian Civil War, is banished to Earth. He becomes the Martian Maneater.
16 years ago (dream realm memory) - Martian Maneater, Jack B Quick, Power Ring, Scream Queen, and Sea King come together as the Crime Syndicate to defeat the formation of the Justice Underground.
12 years ago - The Justice League are attacked in their dreams by Doctor Destiny. They follow him back into the Dream Dome defeating him and disabling his technology. The Dream Dome builds a dream reflection of the world and populates it with nightmare mirrors of the Justice League. They remember their own history, coming together as the Crime Syndicate and dominating their world.
9 years ago - Morpheus returns to the Dreaming. While reclaiming his realm, he disabled the Dream Dome, the technology built by Garrett Sanford while lost in the Dreaming. The dream reflection of the world that is home to the Crime Syndicate, no longer protected by the Dome, is set adrift in its own corner of the Dreaming.
7 years ago - The Crime Syndicate confirms that their world is in fact merely a dream reflection of the real world. They escape, and attack the Justice League to take their place. The League is defeated, and has to regroup. They are assisted in finally defeating the Crime Syndicate by Owlman.
The Crime Syndicate is really one collective storytelling entity. While Grant Morrison's take on these characters did give them a little more backstory, the point has never really been for any of them to have a lot of story of their own, so making character specific timelines becomes kind of beside the point.
Because of the way we did this, with the Syndicate being dream reflections of the League, the timelines of these characters are deliberately pretty esoteric. These characters remember a past, and that past is a sort of mirror universe mélange of the histories of the characters they are reflections of, but none of those histories actually happened, so we they're not going to link out to the timeline at large. They only exist on these pages.
Because of the way we did this, with the Syndicate being dream reflections of the League, the timelines of these characters are deliberately pretty esoteric. These characters remember a past, and that past is a sort of mirror universe mélange of the histories of the characters they are reflections of, but none of those histories actually happened, so we they're not going to link out to the timeline at large. They only exist on these pages.
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Martian Maneater's StoryThere is a very conspicuous lack of Martian Manhunter equivalent character on the Crime Syndicate. The original five members of the Syndicate obviously didn't include a lot of League members, and this persisted right up until they were destroyed in the Crisis, so that's not that surprising, but when Grant Morrison created their Anti-Matter Universe Crime Syndicate there was a real expansion of the world, where we saw alternate versions of lots of characters even if they were happening in the background. Not only was there no Martian Manhunter allegory, but J'onn himself conspicuously stayed behind during that adventure. J'onn was of course left out of the New 52 Justice League (which is how you know it doesn't count), so instead we got alternate takes on Cyborg and Firestorm.
Thankfully, we have the animated movie Crisis on Two Earths to draw on. Phil Bourassa did the character designs for this movie, the same guy who did the fantastic designs on the Young Justice series. The movie introduced the idea that the Crime Syndicate members all basically had underbosses, allowing them to create Earth 3 versions of characters like Captain Marvel (Captain Super), The Outsider's Looker (Model Citizen), Vibe (Breakdance) and my personal favorite Earth 3 character ever, J'edd J'arkus. The design influence here should be incredibly obvious: He's meant to look like the Green Martians from Edgar Rice Burroughs Princess of Mars, and his name is derived from John Carter's main Green Martian ally, Tars Tarkas, and the whole thing just fills me with absolute glee. The name Martian Maneater is actually taken from a one-off creature J'onn fought one time in the New 52 but it just fits WAY better here. |
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