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

I don’t want to get into the mystery, really.  It’s fun, and has a couple of twists, and doesn’t need to be spoiled.  It’s good.  The real pleasure in this book, for me, was in getting to know the town, learning the history of the old guys, figuring out how everyone fits together, and generally wrapping my head around a new universe.  I’ve always liked origin stories, and this has plenty of them.

There are neat characters here, too, like Maxi Man, this universe’s Captain Marvel, who unfortunately has forgotten his “Shazam” and is stuck as an aging mortal.  Or Emoticon, the ridiculously posturing young villain with a mask on his face that always shows an emoticon that represents his true feelings.  The characters are well-written, and despite the fact that the story is all about showing you the past, you are always left with the feeling that there is a lot going on under the surface.  It is a mystery, after all.

The art is well done, and plays a large role in the success of telling these back-stories.  There are several genres of comic art, ranging from a “current” style for “real-life” a low-res, faded and treated style depicting the public fables based on the true events from times long gone, a cartoony style giving the back-story for the pre-pubescent Liberty Snots, and so on.

My only criticism is probably particular to me – Googe has a way of drawing noses that makes them all appear to have a little, shiny patch on the end of them.  It might not bother you; I found it to be very distracting.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes
2. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
3. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man

The Boys is about a group of…, well, I almost wrote “regular, old humans,” but “non-super-powered humans” is a better description, who take on the role of watchmen to the super-powered humans of their Earth.  And there needs to be watchmen on this Earth, because the so-called heroes in this universe are little more that super-powered assholes.

The central premise of the book is that super-powered humans, if they existed, would behave as badly as any other human.  That is to say, apparently, that they would entertain children at the local hospital in order to steal drugs while there; would celebrate putting “the Fearsome Foursome back in Riker’s” by heading off to the nearest brothel;  and would require the new recruit to give good head before becoming a full-fledged member of  team.  I’d hate to know what it is that the Fearsome Four do in order to be considered as “villains” on this planet.

Now, I don’t want to sound like a prude.  I didn’t not like the book because of the cynical view it takes, or the fact that it has gratuitous sex and violence.  I did not like the book because it was a) not that well written, and b) not well drawn.

The Boys is a mixture of black comedy, satire and drama.  I don’t think this is an easy mix to pull off well, though Ennis himself abso-fucking-lutely nails it in The Pro, which is maybe why he thought it might work in The Boys.  Unfortunately, for me at least, I found it hard to make the transition from watching the lead Boy fucking his government contact (for some reason) to giving a shit on the next page about the main characters dead girlfriend.

And that fucking is hard to understand.  Throughout the book, there is gratuitous and graphic sex.  Again, I didn’t care about the sex as such, but it was really jarring as it added about, oh, zero percent to the story.  I felt the whole time like I was being treated like a 16 year old nerd, looking for any source of titillation.  Which maybe was the intent.  My friend tells me that these books apparently sell well.

As for the art, I honestly can’t believe that this was the same person that illustrated Transmetropolitan.  Transmetropolitan is an amazing piece of work; this is uneven, to say the least.  And let me get this off my chest:  choosing to base the appearance of the main character of the book on Simon Pegg was an absolute gigantic mistake.  Nothing against Simon Pegg;  but every time I saw that character, it felt like I was reading a comic book adaptation of a movie, rather than an original piece of art.

All in all, The Boys is less than satisfying.  In my opinion, the theme is done much better in The Pro, and I would recommend picking that up instead of this.

So, I think that’s the rule I’m going with, for now.  No reviews of shitty books, UNLESS we read them for the club, which will have all its selections reviewed.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
2. In The Shadow Of No Towers: A First Impression
3. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art