Opinion

Planetary

Writer: Warren Ellis, Artist: John Cassaday
Published by Wildstorm/DC

This review takes an overview of the series as a whole and the latest issue, #14, specifically.

I came to Planetary quite late, via the trade paperback collection of the first 6 issues, All Over The World, and have been in love with the series ever since. Plenty of comics in the past have claimed to 'break all the rules', but Planetary really does so. This is a comic with a different logo, cover style and interior art style every issue. It's a comic that started life apparently telling the story of the field team of the Planetary organisation, 'mystery archaeologists', exploring the hidden world of mythic archetypes that underly our present-day culture. And so they discovered long lost supermen, explored Japanese islands populated with radioactive monsters, encountered the ghost cop haunting the criminal elements of Hong Kong, and generally discovered that all the things you thought would be really cool when you were a kid, if only they were true, were true.

Along the way, Ellis started to weave elements of a continuing story from threads as diverse as the unknown motivations of a multinational corporation, the mystery of Planetary's 'Fourth Man', the unseen leader of the organisation, and the motives of a group known as 'The Four', who went into space in an experimental ship and returned changed by the strange forces they encountered there. And in a brilliant twist on the story of the Fantastic Four that this echoes, instead of being their world's greatest heroes, these Four might well be its most dangerously crazed villains. Where the series started out as apparently being focused on the exploration of the mythic archetypes, with the lead team really no more than a vehicle to take the reader from each one to the next, it has evolved to a point where the continuing story is central, and supported (in a sense made possible) by the existence of the archetypes. This is now a conspiracy theory story of a quality the X Files could only dream of reaching.

There are three central characters (the 'field team'), Jakita Wagner, who is super-strong and tough, The Drummer ("First name The, second name Drummer"), is mildly insane, and can communicate with machines, and Elijah Snow is 100 years old and has the ability to subtract heat from his surroundings. The early issues introduced Snow to the team, which had clearly already been in existence for some time, and threw the reader straight into stories which introduced elements that would later knit together so subtly that the long-term plan Ellis clearly has firmly in mind is almost invisible: You read this with a sense of wonder that the world can tie together like this, and then realise that of course it does, because it was planned that way by the writer....

In focusing on the story, I don't mean to do any disservice to the art, which it simply outstanding. In adapting his style to the nature of each different story he's illustrating, John Cassaday demonstrates a flexibility and maturity that many comic artists would find difficult even to attempt. And at the same time, the innate strength of his style provides a degree of consistency that holds the entire series together.

Issue 14, Zero Point, is in some ways the least typical of the series to date, because it is purely there to tell a story from the series' own mythology, rather than exploring someone else's. This is the story of a major battle between Planetary and The Four that took place before issue 1, and which was alluded to in the turning point issue 12. Readers of Marvel comics' Thor will recognise elements of the opening section, as we are presented with this world's equivalent of Thor's hammer and the chilling secret behind it, before embarking on the story of the confrontation that would cost Planetary a member and start the whole sequence of events leading to Snow's recruitment.

It's hard to find fault with such a strong issue of such an outstanding series - the art, especially images of the alien world in the opening segment and the invisible-person point-of-view of an assault on a Planetary outpost, is as good as Cassaday ever gets, and even though regular readers should know what's going to happen here, how we reach the inevitable conclusion is utterly enthralling. Even the letters page Next Issue box - "Not telling. No way." is the perfect way to wrap up possibly the best issue yet of a series that has never failed to impress.

Collections of the first 12 issues are available, and can't be recommended highly enough.