November 1997 - Planetary Proposal

 
 

Planetary, Warren Ellis & John Cassaday's exploration of 20th Century pulp and superhero genres, was pitched in 1997 as: what if underneath the world of known superheroes "there was an entire classic superhero world... just slowly leaking out into this young and modern superhero world of the Wildstorm Universe"?

Ellis' proposal presents Planetary as three characters - Elijah Snow ("He's very old... he controls temperature within his immediate area"), Jakita Wagner ("somewhere between Catwoman and a Mrs Peel for the Nineties") and The Drummer ("Computers talk to him... Ewan McGregor in a superhero book").

Each issue is proposed as a single, self-contained story ("a three-minute pop single") and is deliberately presented as a superhero comic ("we treat each issue like a new single from a band"). Equally, Ellis insists that each cover will be different, reflecting the genre of the content inside. It's envisioned as a straight-forward, dialogue-driven comic with an air of mystery.

Part of the standalone stories approach Ellis explained after the series finshed in 2013 was 

about solving each single issue and providing something for John [Cassaday] to do that wouldn't bore him stiff. I mean, part of the genesis of Planetary was John saying to me, "I'd really like to do a regular book, but I can't face drawing the same thing every issue." And that was one of the big building blocks in Planetary; writing an ongoing book that was completely different from issue to issue. (Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews)

He went on to say:

Like any book, it starts with the big idea. The arc of Planetary had to be first about the big ideas and the standalone stores, and as it went on, it had to become about the people. (Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews)

From the outset, it's clear that Ellis is taking a nostalgic look a superhero comics (the analogy of archaeologists that's used) in a far more direct way than, say, how Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons use the shattered perfume bottle in Watchmen to reconstruct a new mode of superhero comics from the pieces of the past. (Or, more pointedly, the under-rated Moore's Supreme: Story of the Year which had been published in 1996-97.) Ellis is actually doing something different in the sense that he's using nostalgia for superhero comics to give the infant Wildstorm Universe a sense of history and continuity that it obviously didn't have at the time.