To be quite honest, I’m shocked that this hasn’t been recommended by any of us yet. I know that I personally should’ve known better. Long before I even realized who he was, whenever I read or someone said the name Warren Ellis I knew in my head that this correlates to “the author of Planetary.” To say that Planetary is a career defining series is to put it lightly, and we’re talking Warren Ellis here. The man is by far the most prolific high profile writer in the comic industry today. Every single week a new comic comes out that has Warren Ellis’ name on it, either on a big name comic company like Marvel (fresh off the tail of his highly succesfull Thunderbolts run, Marvel gave him the keys to Astonishing X-Men) or a smaller company like Avatar (where he has at least 3 books currently coming out – No Hero, Gravel, and Ignition City) or just online (Freak Angels is updated once a week). We’re also talking about the man who gave us the Authority with Bryan Hitch, and you know we love the Authority because Grant Morrison has even taken a stab at that book. But despite all of this, Planetary will forever remain the book in my mind that defines Warren Ellis, and after moving in to my new apartment and hanging up my Planetary #27 poster (pictured above), I decided that Planetary was most definitely the next book that needed to be recommended.
If you’ve never read Planetary before, take a minute and just look at the above image in all it’s glory. It probably looks like a pretty insane and jumbled mess, right? You’ll notice that, as you read Planetary, the images surrounding the heroes in the center become more and more clear, and this one image goes to show you the intense complexity of the world that Planetary takes place in. Imagine, if you will, a single universe where all the stories we’ve ever created all exist together (in a similar way to the previously recommended League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen). This, in a nut shell, is the world of Planetary, and the Planetary Foundation itself is the small group of people who monitor and keep records of all of the strange things in the world, because it’s a strange world we live in, so let’s keep it that way. The three heroes you see in that center circle are whom we follow throughout the book: Elijah Snow, the newest member of the team and a very old man with the ability to freeze things looking for interesting ways to kill time; Jakita Wagner, a super powered feminine dynamo who is the team knowledge base; and the Dummer, a mysterious young man with the ability to understand and speak to all machines (and sometimes more than just speak to). Together, the three of them are “archaeologists of the impossible,” and they catalogue the secret history of the world.
But it’s not just as simple as that. It never is. The series has several on-going mysteries which are all tied into the background. For example, one of the biggest mysteries is that Planetary receives all of it’s funding through a mysterious entity known as the Fourth Man who could be anyone from Bill Gates to Adolf Hitler. When Elijah is brought into the fold in the first issue, he immediately begins to question the identity of the Fourth Man, as well as many Planetary policies, much to the chagrin of vets Jakita and Drums. There is also the question of what happened to the man Elijah Snow was called upon to replace, the previous Third Man Ambrose Chase. On top of that, there are the barely seeable threads of the universe to which everything in the book is tied together. There are quite literally events and points of interest that take place in the first book that tie in 1,000% with the events of the last released issue (#26). Planetary also has a way of answering questions you may never have thought to ask yourself, such as the secret origin of Jakita and Drums. When I first picked up the book, I honestly believed that the two of them, as well as Elijah, were just characters who simply existed from the point of page 1, and their origins would hold little to no meaning on the great arc of the series, but lo and behold I was wrong. Every little piece and detail is highly important to the overall structure of the series to the point of absolute insanity. If you watch the television show LOST, you may find that the interconnectivity of this book is right up your alley. Ellis is well known for sociocultural commentary, and you can be sure that through out both the main topics of issues as well as the underlaying thematic elements that tie the story together, there is plenty of commentary on the human condition and the technology that surrounds us.
Continued belowAs I mentioned before, the book does have similarities with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where it takes archetypes and characters and uses them in a singular universe. While Alan Moore’s League takes strictly from famous literary sources (the main cast being all highly recognizable characters (to those that read books published before the 90’s or who paid attention in their high school English classes, anyway)), Ellis offers up pastiches of modern day archetypes in addition to the classics. The original idea behind Planetary (from what I understand) was to offer an alternative view into the world of super heroes, much in the way Garth Ennis’ The Boys currently does (but probably to a less violent extent). What it is now is an offering of characters ranging from classics like Sherlock Holmes and Dracula to pulp characters like the Green Hornet and the Lone Ranger and going even beyond that to including the existence of old horror monsters such as the Ants from Them! and, in the very second issue, showing the true existence of Japanese monster icons Godzilla and Mothra (without mentioning their names, of course). Ellis also parodies popular characters in the books, such as John Constantine and a funeral held in England which is attended by several characters which several characters created by other English writers appear, including Neil Gaiman’s Death, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, and Grant Morrison’s Animal Man (all of whom fall under Elijah Snow’s scrutiny for looking ridiculous). While Alan Moore’s original concept of a singular literary universe is still gold, Warren Ellis’ treatment of this idea comes off as entirely fresh and much more exciting because while it is still highly rewarding to read Alan Moore’s League and understand where the characters are coming from, you can’t help but wish he would do a book aimed at a more modern generation of readers and film goers. This book does that entirely.
The book’s basic format is quite simple: our three-man team will go to one point of weirdness, document it and comment on it, and move on. It’s quite episodic, really. While all issues ultimately connect to one another and MUST be read in order, there are very few issues that pick up directly where the previous issue left off. This might sound rather unexciting at first, but it’s a bit more complex than I am describing. What Warren Ellis and John Cassaday (who you might most recently know from his phenomenal work on Joss Whedon’s run of Astonishing X-Men (the run directly previous to Warren Ellis taking over on the book)) do is take a given theme and emulate it through out the issue. For example, the first character we meet outside of Planetary is a send up of Doc Savage who had previously formed a group of elite men to help save the world in the shadows. As Doc Savage is an old pulp character, the issue that focuses on his past is written in the style of old pulp stories and even drawn in a similar style by John Cassaday. This goes for the majority of issues. In the issue where Planetary investigates a ghost in Hong Kong, the art and scenes are set up and drawn by Cassaday as that of old Japanese action cinema, such as the Killer, and many of the covers to the individual issues are send ups of classic film posters, magazine covers, and books, such as my personal favorite pictured at the left (a send-up of the poster for the film 2001 by Stanley Kubrick). It’s in this that John Cassaday really proves himself as a talented artist. There is no consistent cover logo like many books, and while everything is ultimately original, you can clearly see what Cassaday is paying an homage too in brilliant style. As much as Ellis’ story writing capabilities, Cassaday’s art style clearly drives the book forward, expertly capturing every moment in such sharp artwork as we’ve come to expect from the man and helping to piece together the basic idea of a unified universe.
The final most important aspect of the book, however, is that it redefines the idea of the multiverse. Now, the idea of a multiverse is obviously not an original aspect of the book as we’ve had examples of the multiverse both in scientific research and in comics for plenty of years before this. What Warren Ellis did that no other comic writer at the time had even thought to do is take this existential concept of a million possible different alternate realities and put a plausible scientific spin on it. If you want to take the time to research his inspiration on it, look no further than the Planetary Wikipedia page which will point you in the direction of something known as the Monster Group, a mathematical equation that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around. The multiverse itself, however, is described as a snowflake (which bits of can be seen to the right) existing in 196,833 dimensional space. While the multiverse exists, so does a way to traverse the indefinite universes, traveling across something known as the Bleed, a concept that plays heavily into the overall scheme of Ellis’ ideas. Without this one single page on the right, none of the rest of Planetary would theoretically need to exist as it can all tie directly into the concepts and ideas found on the very first expedition of the very first issue of Planetary. Every idea in Planetary, as you’ll discover as you read, all has route in scientific explanation, and much in the way the show the Wire explained things you never thought you needed to know, so does Planetary. Magic, Heaven and Hell, the human soul – all of it will be explained in a true and crazy Warren Ellis fashion that will sometimes make you laugh, sometimes make you think, and more often than not leave you quite stunned at the level of detail put into his story.
Now, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday first began the extraordinary tales of the Planetary Foundation in 1998. It’s been over 10 years, and we still don’t know how it officially ends. What’s nice is that, with where the last released issue (#26) leaves off, if they never actually took the time to make issue #27, I wouldn’t be angry because it’s just such a great open ending. Sure, there are some open ended mysteries, but it ties off so many of the big questions we had that I would forgive the missing stories. You’d honestly think that on some level we as fans would resent both Ellis and Cassaday. However, no matter how many times I’ve gone over the book, it never really gets old for me, and I can’t stay mad at Ellis and Cassaday for taking so long to finish this. Heck, the first time I ever really picked up Planetary in a comic book store, I put it back on the shelf! And the second time I actually sat down and read Planetary, I left the book alone for quite some time before coming back to it and finishing my read. I look back on these two events as some of the most idiotic decisions I ever made in my reading of comic books. While I always equated Warren Ellis to Planetary in my mind, my indecisiveness in reading it was just a mistake. Some may say that his work on Transmetropolitan and The Authority are more important, but to me Planetary is by far and large some of the most entertaining and thought provoking work I’ve ever read by the man, and as I’ve said, the guy puts out a lot so there’s plenty to read (I currently love Ignition City, but where is issue #5?!). Planetary is just one of those books that you almost instantaneously fall in love with when you give it a chance. Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner, and the Drummer are all absolutely unforgettable characters, along with their supporting cast of allies and enemies. I found the book to be a complete page turner and was rather upset whenever I had to be drawn away from the book to do other things. This is a book that, once I gave a fair and honest chance, I fell absolutely in love with and immediately began clamoring for more.
I started writing this article at 8:24 AM this Friday morning. At the time I punch out this sentence into the keyboard, it’s around 10:30 AM. Part of the reason that I am so intensely recommending it right now is I just in fact finished a read through of it last night at around 10:00 PM due to (our old writer) Josh commenting on my Planetary poster in my apartment. I am 100% geared up now for the release of the final issue as everything is ultimately fresh in my mind. I don’t know how much else I can recommend Planetary to you, the reader. I’ve gone through and written about every single tiny element I could think of in what is probably my largest Friday Rec yet (I’m just trying to keep up with Gil’s amazing abilities, to be honest) and a far change from the mere 3-4 paragraphs I wrote when the website first started. The bottom line of this article is read Planetary. If you have ANY appreciation for the comic art form at all, Planetary is a book that MUST somehow be in your collection. I personally own this book in trade format as I wasn’t collecting books like this in 1998 when it first started, so if you have some extra money, go to your local book store and comic book store and demand that someone in there get you a copy of Planetary. Heck, just go to Amazon.com or DCBS and order yourself this bad boy. You need to own it. If there’s one book I can’t highly recommend enough at this point, it’s Planetary, and you’ll definitely want to have read it before the final issue comes out in October so you can celebrate with us here at Multiversity.
To order yourself a copy of the first volume of Planetary, “All Over The World and Other Stories,” look no further than the image to the left. At $10.19, you might as well order all three volumes and get yourself some free shipping. If you trust me at all when it comes to reviews, than believe me: you won’t regret this purchase.
