June 1999 - Planetary 03 - Dead Gunfighters

June 1999 - Planetary 03 - Dead Gunfighters

Essentially

The Planeary team investigate sightings of a ghostly cop in Hong Kong.

Thoughts and Reactions

It's a mix of Hong Kong action film, Chinese ghost-vengeance tale and nod towards DC's character, The Spectre (there's also a touch of Marvel's Ghost Rider here as well). Once more the plot is thin: Planetary arrive, observe the ghost of a betrayed cop and witness something even more bizarre than just a ghost. Jakita Wagner manages to karate-kicks a car and Drummer discovers an informational "junction box" that opens some sort of "God-machine". That's all. We're left pondering the existential problem of making the most of life as it is. (There's a deliberate confusion of "justice" and "just us" at the end which I get the impression speaks to the role that this Planetary team need to play to uncover the secret history of the twentieth-century).

The Planetary team's passivity is doubtlessly something that Ellis is deliberately writing. They appeared overawed by the phenomena they've encountered so far. At some point I'd assume that they will start affecting things rather than being witnesses.

The Issue in Detail

The opening 8-and-a-half pages are cinematic: action-packed, widescreen panels. We're in Hong Kong. A gangster with a scarred/dead eye has just shot a woman (through the right eye) dead in the street in front of a group of his henchmen. The gangster declares that someone called Li has a shipment (of drugs) arriving and complains that Li's "women" are more respectful (than the one he's just killed).

The gangsters drive away in their cars and the ghost of a policeman standing in the middle of the road holds up his badge and points a gun at the cars. The gangsters pretend not to see him (not realising its a ghost). The ghost fires two pistols at the car - which drives through him - and shoots the two gangsters in the head before shooting at the other car killing the rest of the criminals except the dead-eyed one. At this point, the ghost's eyes become fiery and he shoots a flaming bullet at the dead-eyed gangster which makes a 90 degree turn before going through dead-eye's head. As the gangster's car crashes into a storefront, the ghost disappears. 

All this is witnessed by Snow, Jakita and Drummer.

Later, at the Hong Kong Planetary office, Michelle, a Planetary employee, says that the field team hadn't ever visited in the 6 years had worked here. Snow checks this and Jakita says that she hadn't met anyone who worked for Planetary for more than 4 years. Snow is beginning to establish a timeline for the Planetary organisation.

Michelle explains that "The Cop" is a "fairy tale for the weird" about a betrayed cop who takes vengeance until another cop is betrayed and murdered. She takes them to where the cop was killed and explains the background (involving triads and a film star) and reveals that the dead cop was called Detective Shek Chi-Wai.

Drummer finds an informational "junction box" under the ground and gets Jakita to stamp on the floor causing some sort of ghostly dimensional gateway to open. Drummer explains that the gateway appears to him to be some form of storage device:

DRUMMER: It's like a big stack of hard drives. It's a huge information repository. Now, if you're asking what kind of information... no idea, gramps.

 Snow asks aloud what it is and the ghost of the cop replies that it's God:

GHOST: It's the only word for it that fits. It's... unimaginably huge. It is an object with more than one hundred thousand different angles.

The cop-ghost reveals that the dead-eyed gangster - Tony - had been his killer along with his parter, Mok ("He killed me because he really didn't like me.") he goes on to ask the team to tell a woman he loved, Siao Yim-Fong to make the most of her life as it doesn't improve after death. He ominously tells them that he's seen what happens after death:

GHOST: After this, there's nothing. Do you see? There's no sin, no hell for our bastards to burn in. No great punishment in the next life for the killers and rapists.

The cop-ghost begins to fade and at this point more gangsters arrive in cars. The cop-ghost recognises one of them as Mok, his partner. Jakita runs at Mok's car and karate-kicks it so hard that the engine flies out of the battered vehicle.The cop-ghost shoot gangsters in the other car. The cop-ghost finishes by executing Mok.

Before he leaves, the cop-ghost tells Planetary that they came to find a mystery but tells them "There's just us". Drummer asks if the ghosts final words were "justice" which Snow corrects as "just us".

After All Is Said and Done

It's another "three-minute pop single" (Ellis) of an issue in which we're starting to appreciate these are indeed fast-paced, compressed stories which have little room to breathe but allude to a much bigger supernatural mystery lurking just out of sight. Whether or not there is one big mystery (the "snowflake"?) that connects these strange phenomena or that its lots of different strangenesses is to be seen.

Questions and Mysteries

• The Planetary organisation is now at least 6 years old. How old is it? (And, of course, who is the "Fourth Man" who established it?)
• When the ghost mentions the angles of the "God-machine", Drummer is excited and suggests that there are 196,833 angles. Is this referring to the snowflake/quantum machine. And, if so, what's the connection here?
• (Is the implication that "God" is something wired into the fabric of the universe that stores reality as information? We see bodies in fetal positions suggesting these are stored souls/memories of the dead.)
• What happens to the gateway device that Drummer gets Jakita to open? Did it disappear when the ghost faded away?
  

 May 1999 - Planetary 02 - Island

Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and The Drummer investigates an island containing the remains of great kaiju monsters.

 

The Jurassic Park  front cover is quite misleading - so we'll ignore it (though it's quite spectacular). While the issue is engaging in its portrayal of the Mishima-like cult leader and his followers and the appearance of dead famous movie kaiju, the story is quite slight. We're still in the early days of Snow's membership of the Planetary organisation so we're still getting to grips with the organisation and its members. It's obvious that Planetary is a global organisation with offices operating all around the world. Once again, the Planetary team seem to do little other than arrive at a location where they observe something unusual and then retrieve "secret history". At this point in the series, they aren't active protagonists. Much of the early scenes involving the Planetary team are used to restate their characters. The Drummer - once again! - sits out most of the issue. Snow and Wagner show off some of their powers.

The issue in detail

There's no statement of how much time has passed since the events of issue #1 though, from Snow's comments on page 12, he's still quite new to Planetary. This issue begins with the arrival of a small boat on an island somewhere cold. A group of Japanese men disembark. The leader, wearing a hachimaki bearing the symbol of the red rising sun makes what seems to be a joke about how cold it is. The leader, Ryu, insists on being referred to as "Master Storyteller" and that his novels are now to be considered as "scripture". The Master Storyteller locates the setting: an island between Japan and Siberian Russia. He says that he claims the island on behalf of Japan. The arrival of the Master Storyteller and his followers appears to be a rite before they attempt a coup (involving taking cocaine and storming the Japanese parliament). They climb a small mountain and see the remains of a gigantic flying kaiju in the valley below. The kaiju seems based on Mothra. Ryu - the Master Storyteller - is likely to be based on the novelist Yukio Mishima, who attempted a coup in 1967 before committing seppuku.

 

• In Tokyo, the Planetary team are let into their Japanese office and are welcomed by a punk-looking Shinya Fekuda, the Tokyo station chef (who Jakita Wagner gives a friendly kiss). Elijah Snow speaks Japanese and says that he learned to speak the language in 1925. Fekuda reveals that he has summoned them because of Zero Island. He says: Zero Island is off-limits and contested territory; Jakita Wagner has been there before; and the "mildly infamous" novelist and his five acolytes are on the island and must not be allowed to discover what is on the island (oops, too late!). Drummer - dramatically (with the aid of a polaroid-type camera photo stuck to his head) - tells Snow that the island contains monsters.

  
  
  
  
• 
  

  Meanwhile the Master Storyteller and his followers see the skeletal remains of a King Ghidorah-like kaiju embedded in rock. The Master Storyteller says that they are in Hell and takes a pistol out of his pocket.

•  

  Onboard the helicopter travelling to Island Zero, Snow reminds the reader that he is employed by Planetary and being paid a million dollars. Snow smokes a cigarette. He says that he smokes every couple of years and that he knows that Jakita Wagner does this - but doesn't reveal how he knows. Drummer is cold but Snow says that he's unaffected by the cold. Wagner shows Snow the corpse of the flying kaiju and tells him that they need to prevent Ryu and his followers seeing anything else. Snow is startled by the sight of the kaiju.

•  

  Meanwhle Ryu stands inside the remains of a Godzlla-type kaiju. Some of the followers are vomiting and one, Jun, complains of the stench. Ryu declares that the remains are "holy". When Jun challenges Ryu, the Master Storyteller rants and, at gunpoint, insists that his followers eat the rotting flesh of the kaju. Wagner sees what's happening from far off. Snow can't which indicates one of her abilities is enhanced vision. Jun continues to disagree with Ryu and the Master Storyteller shoots Jun's head off. Wagner runs at great speed (another power) to catch up with the men.

•  

  Ryu declares they will eat the kaiju's flesh for dinner and reveals that he ate the flesh of his girlfriend in a sex club in Osaka in 1989. A group of soldiers with guns (later we see they wear USA, Japan and Russian badges) arrive and tell Ryu that he will not be able to leave the island (alive). Ryu shoots a bag containing nerve gas and it kills them all.

• Wagner runs from the gas cloud and warns Snow that the cloud is blowing towards him. Snow behaves cooly and uses his power (of "heat subtraction") to freeze the gas. Wagner says that the Fourth man didn't tell her about Snow's abilities. (She seems fine with not knowing things.)

•  

  Wagner reveals to Snow the history of the island:

  • • The monsters on Zero Island appeared the day after Hiroshima (7th August 1945).
  • • She speculates about what actually caused the monsters (mutagen test, door from parallel Earth, alien).
  • • By 1950, the island was filled with giant monsters. The monsters never left the island or bred.
  • • The monsters died off in the 1970s.
  • • A small guard were stationed on the island to protect its secrets.
•  

  Zero Island is a stand-in for Monster Island from the Toho Godzilla series and the giant creatures are clear analogues of famous kaiju. Their appearance in after Hiroshima and dying-out in the 1970s follows the rise and decline of the Japanese monster movies.
  

   

  Wagner plans to remove whatever secret information is on the base on the island before replacement guards are dispatched. They see a flying kaiju - Rodan - which both Snow and Wagner find awesome. It's a Jurassic Park ending that also infers the continuation of kaiju cinema.
  

   

  Questions and Mysteries
  

 

• • What was Snow doing in Japan in 1925?
  • How does Snow know things about Jakita Wagner?
  • Why didn't the Fourth Man explain Snow's abilities to Wagner and Drummer?
  • What was Wagner doing on Zero Island?
  • Why does Drummer so obviously avoiding frontline activities and waits in the helicopter?
  • How did the kaiju actually come to Zero Island - is it connected to the operation of the "quantum brain" from issue #1?
    

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?

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

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.