September 1998 - Planetary Preview - Nuclear Spring

September 1998 - Planetary Preview - Nuclear Spring

As an 8-page preview (published in both Gen 13 #33 and C-23 #6), Nuclear Spring wastes no time in introducing the core characters and concepts of Planetary. 

 Our main characters - Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and The Drummer - are waiting for an unnamed general in his underground bunker in a military base. The general is shaken by this intrusion and even more that they are Planetary, an organisation he says "Hell, we never even worked out who you people were!"

Snow and Wagner address the general (and us as readers), explaining what their role in the narrative is to be:

WAGNER: We gather information on the hidden wonders of the world.
SNOW: Mystery archeologists. There's a hundred years of fantastic events that Planetary intends to excavate.
WAGNER: We're mapping the secret history of the Twentieth Century...

Planetary want to learn about David Paine, someone who has been wiped from history (even from friends' and colleagues\ minds). The general recounts how Paine, a brilliant young scientist, conceived the Integral Design Theory - The Drummer calls it Description Theory) - to create a quantum computer which is also a bomb. (I'm thinking hard about how this is a thing.) In a series of flashbacks to 1962, we are told that the general's wife went looking for Paine on the test site when they are about to test the bomb. Paine pushes her to safety but is caught in the explosion which transformed him ia monstrous form that allows him to survive the explosion. We don't ever see the whole transformation - just feet and bones plus the devastation the creature causes. Paine is chased by the army for 24 days until he is caught and imprisoned in an old underground missile silo without food or water. Paine eventually dies in 1983. Clearly, the implication is that Paine and the general's wife were conducting an affar and six months after Paine's imprisonment in the silo, she gave birth to a little girl.

Paine is an obvious analogue of Bruce Banner/Hulk. The 1962 date corresponds to the first publication of the Hulk (May 1962) with the quantum blast being a version of the famous gamma radiation that transforms Banner into the mindless Hulk. The choice of 1983 as the point when Paine eventually dies in the silo might be a reference to The Incredible Hulk #272 where the nature of the Hulk as a separate entity from Banner is altered for the first time.)

Next issue: Planetary #1- All Over The World