The Planetary / JLA crossover gives Planetary the Planetary treatment.  In it, the team is re-cast as an analogue to The Four; they control the world by suppressing alien / emergent phenomena, then re-releasing it as their own.  Opposing them is a faction composed of a naive Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent and Diana Prince.

The Planetary / Batman crossover starts with the Planetary team pursuing a fugitive in their Gotham City.  The fugitive causes ripples in space-time, which allows the team to interact with various incarnations of The Batman.  They are all here – Frank Miller’s Batman, campy TV Batman, standard 70s and 80s Batman -  but tellingly, it is Bob Kane’s original pulpy Bat-Man who compromises with Elijah, thereby satisfying the Planetary theme.

Not a bad collection, over-all, but certainly not a necessary one.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
2. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man
3. Planetary, Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century

About that cover art.  One of the things that I love about the cover art is that it is never the same.  Each issue, the cover is remixed to give you some indication of the genre within.  Are we going back to the pulps this time?  Steve Ditko’s funky-psychedelic-secret agent-groove pads from the 60s?  Attack of the 50 Foot Woman?  It’s all part of the magic of Planetary, and another thing that makes this series one of my favourites.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
2. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man
3. Planetary: Crossing Worlds

From there, we go straight for pure plot.  Oh sure, the structure of the series is the same, it is still a great commentary on the genre of comics and its origins, but now Planetary begins to explore itself.  We get back story on The Four, on the Planetary organization, on Elijah, and the Fourth Man.  Thrown into the mix are 50s monster movies, a rocket crash landing in a house, and some suspiciously familiar characters.

It’s hard not to give anything away, so I’ll stop here.  Simply put, if you like Planetary, you’ll be happy no know that the quality of the tales continues.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century
2. Planetary: Crossing Worlds
3. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories

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:

1. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man
2. Planetary: Crossing Worlds
3. Planetary, Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century

In the future (as now), you can’t live in The City without money, so Spider needs to scare up a job in order to get an apartment and news-feeds so he can write.  He manages to convince an old colleague to hire him to write for his newspaper and starts investigating his first story, The City’s growing transient problem (which is brilliantly not what you think – or is it?).

Transmetropolitan is a fantastic Warren Ellis story – brash, vulgar, anarchic, head-shaking stuff – and Darick Robertson does a great job on the art.  I have come to this party regretfully late (I only picked it up this year) but I am definitely going back to that well for a longer drink.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
2. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man
3. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 2: Cycles