The DC Comics psychic, and when transformed into the ultimate version of himself, Marvel Comics’ similarly powered heroes can’t compete! Let’s just say for as powerful as the X-Men’s Professor X or Jean Grey are, they have nothing on J’onn J’onzz — and that’s saying something.
Shown in his ultimate form way back in 2003’s JLA #85, by Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke, this issue sees J’onn J’onzz aka Martian Manhunter as he’s called upon by the Justice League to track down a telepathic villain who they can’t seem to identify nor pinpoint. Met by a hopeful Wonder Woman and Superman while getting back in touch with his inner self in the Adirondacks, J’onn needs a moment before acquiescing to their request of using his powers to locate their target.
Quickly realizing that this new baddie needs to be found sooner rather than later as he’s moved on from “lobotomizing inmates” to influencing international politics, J’onn morphs into a version of himself that fans had never seen before. Transforming into a towering tree of enormous proportions, J’onn reaches out to every mind across the world in an attempt to find this villain. Scanning from coast to coast, country to country, even Wonder Woman is impressed by the fact that J’onn can “scan them all,” a feat that the strongest of telepaths in Marvel Comics would have a hard time accomplishing.
An ultimate form that J'onn can utilize without any outside help giving his powers a boost, this issue proves that Martian Manhunter is not only the foremost telepath in comics but shows that even Marvel's most powerful telepathic s like Professor X, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, and even Legion (lots of mutant psychics out there, apparently), still only hover around the bottom of J’onn’s power scale even with their abilities pushed to the max. In fact, what J’onn pulls off here is something the X-Men have only been able to do in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run when Cerebro enhanced Jean's already Omega-level powers to a point that it nearly destroyed her mind in the process!
Marvel has more than a few powerful telepaths that could give J’onn a run for his money, but at the end of the day, his ultimate form puts them all to shame. Martian Manhunter turning into a telepathic tree and touching the minds of everyone on Earth is a fun visual to see while also giving fans a glimpse of what true psychic power is capable of when cranked up to eleven.
