Warren Ellis and John Cassaday - "Absolute Planetary (Books One and Two)"

Imagine if pulp literature was true.

Imagine if B-movies chronicled real events.

Imagine if Reed Richards wasn't useless?

Imagine if the powers that be preferred you didn't know these things.

Then you’d have Planetary, the 27-issue original series by Warren Ellis.

Part of the Wildstorm universe, Planetary is a distillation of fantastic pop culture and literature stretching as far back as the 19th century. Firmly anchored in a superpowered milieu, the series reimagines all sorts of things, makes them the underpinnings of the Wildstorm universe and turns them into “mystery archaeology.” Planetary is shrouded in mystery: it's a vast worldwide organization where even the employees know relatively little ... even the most important employees. The only character with his finger on most everything is the unknown Fourth Man who built Planetary and whose influence is felt rather than seen.

The core of the series, if not the organization itself, rests in their superpowered field team, a trio that has been reduced to two members for a reason that comes clear later: the superstrong, superfast, superbored Jakita Wagner, and The Drummer (capital T, capital D), whose control of information flow makes him a little less than stable. Jakita is attempting to recruit a new Third Man: the old (very old), surly, white-haired, white-garbed, cold-manipulating Elijah Snow (also with a mysterious background), who spends his days in a desert diner drinking coffee that tastes like a dog took a whiz in it. He is easily tempted away from this lovely life and soon going on observational missions. What are they investigating? Well, let's see. Someone unauthorized is running around a secret island littered with the corpses of giant monsters. An office building implodes, revealing a strange alien plinth in the rubble. A hidden cave in the Adirondacks contains a universe-creating supercomputer built in the 1940s by a handful of special individuals (including Thomas Edison!) that not even the oddly canny Snow knew about. And things just get stranger from there. Especially when Snow decides that Planetary is entirely too passive about missions and forces them to be more proactive.

The kicker in all this is that a quartet of frighteningly powerful individuals known simply as the Four is quickly revealed to be the main source of opposition to the actions of Planetary. The Four—an obvious evil counterpart of the Fantastic Four, who even got their powers by going into space—have their fingers everywhere. But what are their motives?

As the series progresses and questions are answered and more are posed, the reader takes a fantastic pop culture tour of. The series really works best if you're knowledgeable about such things and can appreciate how pop is being twisted. You'll find references to movie monsters (Island Zero is just the start of that), the origins of several iconic superheroes, James Bond, Jules Verne, Sherlock Holmes, the Lone Ranger, Tarzan, ghosts, 1980s-era British or British-written superheroes, and much, much more ... as well as musings on the nature of reality at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels.

Absolute Planetary Book One contains the first twelve issues of the series plus the script for the first issue. Book Two has the remaining issues plus 14 pages of additional content, including introductions by Alan Moore and Joss Whedon from previous collections; a who's-who spread; and a foldout of the Snowflake (the three-dimensional depiction of the multiverse). I'm reviewing the story from my copies of the original trade collections, so I don't know if the books include the crossover stories (Batman, the Authority, and Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman). Since only the Batman story of these three is good, it would be no enormous loss if they weren't included.

I love Planetary; it helped restore my faith in superhero comics. It's a wonderfully original notion that is clever without being obnoxiously clever, if you know what I mean. In the hands of a weaker writer much of this would have come off as “Look at me! I'm talking about Sherlock Holmes! And now I'm talking about giant ants! Isn't it great how I managed to incorporate these things?!” It helps, of course, that Ellis interweaves these elements with his original creations, including the Bleed, the Snowflake, Century Babies, and the three main characters, all of whom are more admirable than likeable and fun to read about.

There are a few weak moments: the lovely idea of the murderous fictional person brought back into the real world just sort of peters out, and the big reveal of Jacob Greene is anticlimactic given what we know of his “real-world” counterpart, the Thing. (The place where the reveal occurs is far more interesting.) For that matter, Dr. Dowling is a little anticlimactic as well, though the back story for his partner/patsy William Leather and his powerful ancestors is great. The ending of the main Four arc seems rushed with the last chapter, where they tie up their last major loose end, more “wrap-uppy” than I like to see in a major series.

But these are quibbles. Planetary is one of only a few series that touches on the true potential of superhero comics. It manages to bring a sense of wonder back to not only the genre but also to what are normally tired old pulp and SF clichés. It rightly deserves readership among the mainstream.