Calling Jonnnnn Jonezzzzz Missing: Jonn Jonzz I used to read the comics. Often. There was one Jonn Jonzz, the Interglobal secret detective. From Mars. He could be invisible, walk through brick walls, talk to his immediate superior even if he were in Uranus: the invincible epitome of high-tech fantasies. His omnipresence was a wonder to me, then of so limited scope. I was sure my mother knew him, for she caught me at everything of which she disapproved, knew my every move. I’d often wondered if she weren’t part of his team. He quite logically spent most of his time on Earth, capturing interstellar spies, thieves and smugglers, for as everyone knew in the Fifties, we werent causing all the problems. The blame was actually Galactic. The Earth was a Switzerland, a Monte Carlo, a Moroccan bazaar, a Moscow, a Washington D. C. Del Comicoso Marveloso. We were dysfunctional victims of circumstance, free without consciousness or conscience to project our crude collection of cock-ups upon the Outrageous Other; the greedy, power hungry political renegade from the Dog Star, and his mesmerized human slaves. I imagined that Khrushchev, Mao, and Ho were members of that unfortunate legion, because no human could be that bad by one’s own volition. I soon added Ike (Dad was a Democrat back then,) McCarthy and his Malicious Marauders (Mom is still a liberal,) the Jamisons next door, and eventually included my little sister to my list of suspects. When the notorious Outrageous Other was finally fully foiled by that sagacious shapeshifting secret sleuth Jonzz, and was sent to an inescapable penitentiary on Pluto, I was surprised that the world didn’t automatically fall into some beaming and bounteous order. I was, however, comforted by the notion that the Demented Degenerate from the Dog Star wasn’t the only creep from outer space: Jonn Jonzz would arrest them all, eventually. As time did its linear dance, it appeared to me that Jonzz must have been given another assignment, maybe to Mercury to keep it from being thrown into the sun, or maybe to Polaris to keep some cosmic villain from moving it and rendering my compass useless; for his esteemed careful biographers stopped posting his adventures. For a week, I thought Stan Lee had been kidnapped, or worse, censored. After a while, my musings wondered to other considerations of global-cum-cosmic phenomena. We, the few uncorrupted citizens left on Earth, were on our own. Jonn Jonzz, the victor over Vvevvvenn, the virulent Venusian, the powerful one-man possé whose exploits were pronounced from Oakland to Orion’s Belt, was nowhere to be found. I assumed that there must be something of more than mere astral importance, something more dreadful than my young imagination could conjure, going on somewhere in one of the many dimensions, which made this little blue crumb in space secondary in importance--or else Jonzz would have never let Kennedy, King, then Kennedy get taken that way. I considered that maybe he and his agents got marooned in another piece of time, waiting for the tow-rocket to bring a rare, back-ordered omniphasic circuitboard to get their temporal jump-buggy back on line. Or maybe the fantastic Jonn Jonzz was dead. But here we were, on our own. It became beyond a shadow of my doubt that he was dead when the National Guard and the FBI had been successfully infiltrated by Goons From Another Galaxy, for I heard about the kids murdered at Kent and what happened at Pine Ridge; how Leonard became the scapegoat and was railroaded to jail. I became bitter and afraid. There was never a replacement sent by the Universal Police. Gradually, the gangsters of the globe became more Earth-bound. There was no evil spy camp on the moon, and the Martians had obviously migrated to a more satisfactory solar system, leaving us to deal with our own kind, leaving no trace. Some time later it occurred to me that we were finally responsible for own planet, that we had to protect it ourselves, fight our own battles. The problem was ourselves. In my so-called wisdom of middle age I have come to accept the idea that goodness and evil often come to the center of the ring, shake hands, and walk off, arm-in-arm, without a fight; that sometimes they wear the same dress to a party. I have learned that technology alone won’t purify us; that the mistakes we Earth humans make are our own, and no one else’s. I know now that the Earth will treat us as well as we treat Her, and guilt is something to correct, not to wallow in. If there is someone out there, the stars house neighbors in equal straits, and Jonn Jonzz has probably been transferred to some five-hundredth floor desk job to finally enter his exploits into his holocubic version of perpetual police paperwork, after severing his ties with the loose-lipped comic strip he once deigned to inform and thereby simultaneously permit us common humans both hope and vicarious indolence. Now I find it is I myself who must be on guard to protect the planet without the benefit of informed direction included in the parting message from the methodical multifaceted Martian, which must have been inadvertently sent to a parallel universe. But I miss the days we could blame it all on some maniacal menacing malefactor on some careening miniscule meteor, and know that somewhere in the night sky, sprinkled with distant, pulsing nuclear fires, immense gaseous clouds, and immeasurable relative voids that Jonn Jonzz, special detective from Mars, was on his way. -CL Hodge Photo from: dc.wikia/wiki/Jonn_Jonzz_(New_Earth)
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 05:14:26 +0000
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