The Martian Manhunter had long stints as a back-up feature in various DC books back in the Silver Age, and a 4-issue mini-series in the late '80s, but he didn't get his own, ongoing solo book until John Ostander and Tom Mandrake took a crack at it in the late '90s.
Ostrander shifts between J'onn's Martian roots and his connections with people on Earth, mostly keeping the book from leaning too heavily one way or the other. It's made easier since the Martians had been established as performing scientific experiments on Earth in the distant past. So J'onn can run into remnants of the White Martians' experiments - drawn in slippery, toothy-ridden form by Mandrake - or even a few Martians that transferred their minds into human bodies and have been doing so for decades or more.
But you also have stories where J'onn has to contend with his brother Ma'alefa'ak, who gets a name that basically implies he's cursed (which she intended as a warning to Ma'alefa'ak), only for him to abduct and torture other Martians until J'onn catches him and his telepathy is shut down. Which leaves him free to create a plague that only attacks telepathic Martians and causes them to burn to death. That would be a great lesson in the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies. You know, if J'onn hadn't been the last Martian left on the planet.
Still, it leads to a lot about how J'onn lost himself in grief for some period of time before being accidentally brought to Earth. Ostrander delves into the nature of Martian beliefs (the Green Martians, anyway, he doesn't diverge from the "ruthless supremacists" mold Morrison stuffed the White Martians into), how J'onn perceives his duty as a "manhunter", things like that.
Those parts work pretty well. Mandrake's art, with those loose pencils and heavy shadows, is well suited for a species of shapeshifters. J'onn's telepathy, combined with some of the stuff he finds in the minds of his enemies, offers another avenue for Mandrake to bring a horror element to the work. It's not a horror book by any means - definitely closer to a detective book - but the nature of the Martian Manhunter's powers means he's going to face stranger, more dangerous things in the course of his investigations.
Likewise, the exploration of J'onn's life on Earth outside being a JLA member is interesting. Ostrander runs with the idea that J'onn has a lot of identities across the world, not just John Jones, private detective. Famous Brazilian authors. A Japanese boy who transforms into a giant robot. A dumb muscle super-villain (who somehow always screws things up for whatever gang he gets hired on to). A cat. It fits not only with J'onn's ability to assume different forms, but with his image of himself as a philosopher, striving to see things from many different perspectives.
One thing that doesn't particularly work is that Ostrander has Ma'alefa'ak kill J'onn's friend and partner, Karen Smith, after "John Jones" finally revealed the truth about himself, but before there'd been any sort of reconciliation or real conversation about it between them. It ends up leading to the DEO (mostly Cameron Chase of the short-lived series Chase) finding a story Smith started writing about the truth about John, and the DEO trying to force J'onn to tell them secret identities of other heroes, but there's never really any reckoning for J'onn about Karen's death, all the times he used his telepathy to make her forget things she saw him do, or where things were left between them.
I like Ostrander's work, but women have an extraordinarily high mortality rate in his stuff, there's no question.
I also don't love giving J'onn a long-standing enmity with Apokolips. It makes sense that Darkseid would want beings with the array of powers Martians have under his control, and symbolically, I can see it. Guy weakened by fire, venturing into a world with fire everywhere. A telepath roaming a planet full of suffering and death, where the inhabitants believe their pain is proof of their ruler's love. J'onn, coming from a people who routinely intermingled thoughts and bodies, as a way of connection and healing, against Darkseid, who wants all thoughts to be his thoughts anyone. Still, it feels a bit like punching out of one's weight class, even for the Martian Manhunter.
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