April 1999 - Planetary 01 - All Over The World

April 1999 - Planetary #1 - All Over The World

Planetary recruit Elijah Snow and investigate a cave system in the Adirondacks where they find Doc Brass, a member of a secret society of superheroes and a quantum computer that creates universes.

Pacing is fast. Four pages in and Elijah Snow has been recruited by Jakita Wagner and helicoptered out of the desert he'd been living in for 10 years. Five pages later and the Planetary team are flying to the Adirondack Mountains to investigate a cave complex. Four pages later they've found a bizarre trophy room and encountered Doc Brass and a quantum computer in the form of a giant (holographic?) snowflake. Along the way we find out just enough about each of the characters to establish them and a series of mysteries that encouraged

As straightforward as it is, this is compressed storytelling. Ellis' analogy of it being like a 3-minute pop song is apt. It's dizzying by the time you finish the issue - but, if you step back and think about what has happened, all that takes place is a series of movements between places: 1) desert diner to 2) Planetary HQ (in New York?) to 3) a cave system in the Adirondacks. The Planetary team don't actually do very much and the second half of the issue is Doc Brass recounting what happened in the 1940s. Nevertheless, this is a fantastic first issue. 

The issue in detail

Jakita Wagner finds Elijah Snow in a desert diner. Whenever he eats there, the air conditioning malfunctions. Wagner reveals that she knows that Snow is 100 years old and that he "haunted" the 20th Century. For some reason Snow has spent 10 years in the desert. Wagner has a job for Snow that will pay $1 million for the rest of his life and that the organisation she works for will wipe any remaining records of Snow. Wagner wants "the exclusive use of you. Your talents. Your memories. Your experience. The helicopter that transports Wagner and Snow has the Planetary logo pointed on the side.

Two days later in the Planetary HQ, Snow is cleaned up. Wagner tells him that the organisation, Planetary - or more precisely a mysterious "Fourth Man" - pays for everything. Planetary is always a three-person team and the Fourth Man funds everything "without question". Wagner says - ominously - that they haven't yet worked out what happened to the last Third Man

Snow is introduced to The Drummer. Visually this team is white (Snow), black (Wagner) and now the multicolour of The Drummer. He's carrying drumsticks and he's the youthful rocker of the team. The Drummer "talks to machines" and "Machines do as he says". As a means of testing Snow, The Drummer throws a bottle of Whak Cola at him - who catches it without looking.

The Drummer has discovered a man-made cave complex in the Adirondack Mountains in Northeastern New York. The entrance to the caves is a hologram. The Drummer reminds Wagner that they had discovered from diaries stolen from a KGB vault that the Adirondacks was the last "destination" of Doc Brass. (This is clever storytelling and cuts down the time needed when Doc Brass is introduced.)

Planetary fly to the Adirondacks in three helicopters. (Obviously the organisation is bigger than the three main characters.) Wagner tells Snow what she knows about Brass: he was born on 1st January 1900 (like Snow and others) and disappeared in 1945.

WAGNER: By the Thirties, he was your genuine Renaissance man; great scientist, gifted inventor, something of a visionary... We'd never heard of Brass until we read the books. Turns out Brass was also an adventurer. Also, there's evidence that he'd retarded his own aging, and possibly no longer needed to eat.

For some reason, Snow is annoyed by Wagner's explanation (other than he just doesn't get on with other people - he does call The Drummer "you little bastard"). The Drummer warns Snow not to annoy her as she's physically powerful.

Wager jumps out of the helicopter - presumably to show off her physical power. Snow asks Wagner how long Planetary had existed and she says she has no idea - she joined four years ago. Wagner says that she's a member of Planetary because she gets bored easily and Planetary stops that.

Inside the mountain Wagner and Snow walk through smashed glass cases containing the remains or recreations:

•    the skeleton of The Vulcania Raven God
•    The Hull of the Charnel Ship
•    Vestments of the Black Crow King
•    a group of five figures called The Murder Colonels

Wagner suggests this is a trophy room.

In another cavern they find Doc Brass still alive. (Brass is a Doc Savage analogue.) His legs are withered and broken. There's also the holographic projection of the multiverse. Brass says that he stopped needing sleep and food in 1942, stopped ageing in 1943 and learned to close wounds in 1944. Brass recounts that the base had been built in the mid-1930s as a headquarters for the organisation he belonged to. We see his arrival at a meeting. The characters around the table (left to right):

•    Hark (a Fu Manchu analogue)
•    Jimmy (a Spirit analogue)
•    The Aviator (an ace-pilot/spy; G-8?)
•    Edison (a Flash Gordon analogue?)
•    Lord Blackstock (a Tarzan analogue)
•    The Dark Millionaire (a Shadow/Green Hornet analogue)

Edison and Brass had build the others "simple" electronic computers. Now they have built "an extrapolation of the computer", described as a "quantum brain" by Hark:

HARK: A multitude of possible alternatives, none of them quite real. All of them contributing towards the actual reality... This quantum brain would perform each calculation across universes, each possible answer being processed in a different world -- each alternative universe vanishing, one by one, until the answer made itself real.

The computer reveals the shape of reality describing the multiverse. Hark says that "Each rotation makes a New Earth". The snowflake (hologram?) of the multiverse. As they use the computer is used to generate the snowflake, the calculations cause new universes to "decohere and vanish". Hark says that he could use the computer to create a "corrected version of Earth". Their intention is to save the world. (Here there has to be a pause to consider the moral implications of what they tried to undertake). Brass reveals that the program would work out how to change "geopolitics, psychology, weather systems, the procession of the stars". They wanted to use the computer to end the World War Two in the quickest, least costly way.

When they used the computer it generated universes that came into being, decohered and vanished. A group of superheroes - analogues for the Justice League (Flash, Swamp Thing, Green Lantern, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter) fight Brass and his associates. The fight is brutal and only Brass, terribly wounded survives.

Brass is unable to switch the computer off and has remained in the caves for over 50 years in case any other threats came through. Clearly, the computer is still operating. Snow realises that the room they are in is inside the physical computer that generates the snowflake. At the end, Brass is taken away for medical treatment and Snow and Wagner reflect on their success.

Questions and Mysteries

This issue generates lots to think about:

• Snow is a mystery: he's over 100 and trying to hide from something? Is Snow immortal?
• Why was Snow living in the desert, seemingly reluctantly, for a decade?
  
• Who is the Fourth Man? Why does he fund the investigations of Planetary "without question"?
• What happened to the last "Third Man" before Snow?
• How old is Planetary as an organisation?
• The Drummer doesn't go into the cave complex. Is that because he could affect the quantum brain in some way? (And does that suggest that Planetary knew what they were going to find?)
  
• What was taken away in the third Planetary helicopter? The quantum brain? Something else?
• Brass' associate, Jimmy refers to Chicago as "strange" and Snow echoes this at the end when he says "It's a strange world." Is there a significance?