The Manhunters, Explained

The Manhunters are a robot army. In DC lore, the Guardians created them as their first attempt at a cosmic police force, billions of years before the power rings that define the Green Lantern Corps. They did the job well for a long time. Then they came to resent their servitude and the moral limits the Guardians set on them, rebelled, and were replaced by the Corps, a force of living beings who run on willpower instead of programming.

A few things define them:

• They are manufactured, not born. Comics often call them a "race," but they are androids with a robot homeworld, Biot, in Sector 3601, an uncharted region that cannot support organic life.
• They have no emotional range. Stripped of emotion, they treated "justice" as something rigid, which is the flaw the Guardians had to design around next time.
• Their purpose curdled into revenge. After the Corps replaced them, the survivors scattered across the galaxy with one aim: destroy the Guardians and the Green Lanterns who took their place.
• They have a catchphrase. The classic version is "No man escapes the Manhunters," and it has been reworded over the years.

The Manhunters sit at the very start of the Green Lantern timeline, as the failed experiment the Corps was built to replace. The in-universe arc runs in four steps:

That last step is why they work so well as villains. They are not outside invaders. They are the Guardians' own mistake coming back, and a standing argument that the Corps' reliance on emotion and willpower was the right call.

The real-world history is messier than the in-universe one, because the name "Manhunter" was already in use before the robots existed.

Two details are worth noting. The robots' look echoes the original human Manhunter's red costume with a blue faceplate, which is part of how the two stories got braided together. And in the comics, the human Manhunter operatives were eventually revealed to be unwitting pawns of the androids.

Martian Manhunter is J'onn J'onzz, a green-skinned Martian and founding member of the Justice League. He was created by writer Joseph Samachson and artist Joe Certa and debuted in Detective Comics #225 (November 1955). In the original story he is a Martian scientist pulled to Earth by an experimental teleporter built by Dr. Erdel, stranded, and forced to blend in. He takes the name John Jones, becomes a police detective, and in most modern versions is the last survivor of his world.

The overlap is in the word, not the character. In Martian Manhunter's lore, a "manhunter" is a Martian police officer, which is what J'onn was before he came to Earth. Hunting down criminals is his job description, not his species or his employer.

DC has linked the two in places. Some Martian Manhunter stories tie Mars's police force to the Guardians' robots, though accounts disagree on which way the inspiration ran, so treat it as an in-universe echo rather than a shared origin.

The naming mess goes further. At least four unrelated characters have carried the name Manhunter at DC, including two Golden Age heroes from 1942. So a few terms are worth keeping straight:

This is also the confusion the HBO coverage has already had to clear up: the Manhunters in Lanterns are not Martian Manhunter, whose own DC Universe debut James Gunn has teased.