God, I love Planetary. As I write this, it is my favourite series. Warren Ellis is my favourite writer. John Cassaday is my favourite penciller. Jesus, Laura Martin is my favourite colourist (have I ever had a favourite colourist before?). I mentioned somewhere before that I don’t collect comic books; I prefer to wait for the good ones to percolate to the top and get bound into volumes. Even so, I am having a hard time waiting for the final volume to come out in March, and am thinking about buying the final issue when it comes out next week. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories is where this awesome story started a decade ago.When Moore and Gibbons gave us Watchmen, it was like Duchamp unveiling “Nude Descending A Staircase” or “Fountain;” suddenly, the usual criteria for evaluating art were thrown in the toilet. The rules were laid bare and exposed for what they were – arbitrary constraints, a self-deluding set of instructions for making sense of the non-sensical. Watchmen took the superhero genre, deconstructed it, and made it impossible for us to take the status quo seriously again.
Enter a series of retcons, whole universes of superheroes reorganized and reshuffled, personal lives given human foibles and emotional lives given complex flaws. Robin dies. Superman dies. Kicking the status quo in the teeth becomes the status quo.
And then along comes Planetary. It does the impossible – “How can we look at all that stuff we created,” it says, “and make sense of it all? And how can we do it while not making ourselves look like the same kind of stuff?” For while Planetary is a great story, it is really a story about stories.
In the first issue, we meet the Planetary team: Elijah Snow, born Jan. 1, 1900, able to freeze things, usually testicles; Jakita Wagner, a leather-clad super-strong, super-fast woman; Drums, a young man who can communicate with information by tapping out a rhythm on it; oh, and the mysterious Fourth Man, the financial backer of the whole deal. They are “archaeologists of the impossible,” and their first mission together is to investigate a mysterious cavern located in the heart of the Adirondacks (literally – the cavern is carved into one of the mountains and hidden with a hologramatic door).
Here they find the destroyed clubhouse of a group of pulp-aged heroes. The trophy room sets the tone (”The Vulcanian Raven God,” “The Hull of the Charnel Ship,” “The Murder Colonels”[!?!]), and then they meet Axel “Doc” Brass. He is wounded, and has been lying here guarding the place for 50 years. But no worry; he eliminated the need for sleep and food in ‘42, stopped aging in ‘43 and learned to heal himself with mind power in ‘44. He describes how he and his compatriots – analogues of Doc Savage, Tarzan, Fu Manchu, The Spirit, etc. – created a quantum computer in 1945 and started it running to create a perfect version of the world. In doing so, it opened a Bleed into the quantum calculating space, giving access to, and FROM, the 196,833 versions of the universe being used to solve the equation.
The pulp heroes fight off a thinly-disguised version of the Justice League of America, leaving everyone dead but old Brass, and our thematic journey is off and running. The series starts with a bang, and doesn’t slow down; further stories in this volume deal with an island in the Japanese archipelago which is home to the carcasses of massive monsters; a ghost cop haunting the streets of Hong Kong, waiting for revenge; the “fantastic” origin story of four completely dysfunctional super-powered beings; and the story of a scientist who is radically transformed during an experiment with gamma radiation.
These stories are demand re-reading. They operate on a couple of levels – the naive reading, the meta-reading, and so forth – and the art is fantastic, giving just the right amount of homage or clue as to what we are dealing with this time. This is a fantastic series, and I really can’t recommend it enough.
Hypothetically related posts:
[...] you have read my review of Planetary, you know that I love this kind of playing around with the pulps. Having demolished the superhero [...]
[...] Man that runs and finances the Planetary organization.The book starts with more of the same from All Over the World, if you can apply such a ho hum description to such a tasty treat. “To Be In England, In [...]