Planetary #22 (March 2005)

They manage to obliterate the Wildstorm logo and the Issue number and price without any evidence but they chose to scrub the "TM" with what? A Sharpie tool in Photoshop?

Planetary #22 (March 2005)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy Martin, and Richard Starkings
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by Scott Dunbier

I don't own the singles of the last seven issues of Planetary so this is a scan of the cover from the trade. Which is why the various edits and the missing UPC code box. As somebody with well over 25 years of Photopaint experience, that attempted obliteration of the TM after Planetary is just mind-boggling. They could have just cloned over it using the covers own colors. Who would choose to grab a pen tool, select BLACKEST BLACK, and rub it out like they were filling in a Scantron? This entire trade is fucking ruined for me. I might as well just throw it in the bin. Just low quality garbage!

After lying about that, let's lie about something else: William Leather sure has short legs! I never realized! Also I think I'd fuck that horse. Obviously I mean if I were drunk. Or had been drinking. Or was about to go out drinking.

So now that you know I don't understand foreshortening or basic non-bestiality etiquette, let's read about William Leather's torture! I guess after last issue, somebody reminded Ellis that Planetary had captured William Leather and Snow wasn't actually trying to find the last three of The Four. Just the last two. And with one of them being invisible, it wasn't going to be easy so Elijah had to ask an oracle and risk winding up fucking his mother.

As you can tell by the cover, this issue is of the Western genre. It is the story of William Leather's ancestors and it involves outlaws and lawmen and mining rights and a mystic, mysterious Indian savior. But there's something odd going on right from the start.

The cracked moon is a clue!

Also the name of this story, "The Torture of William Leather", is a clue. One the first page, William Leather's pupils are strange, reflecting some odd shape that looks like the sight on a gun or maybe a harsh spotlight. And being that he's tortured, the spotlight seems like a likely suspect. Which then maybe explains the prominence of the moon on the next few pages, always overhead, always slightly blocked by some piece of geography or a Native American's mysterious head.

William Leather's grandfather, John, was nearly killed by Dowling's ancestors who did manage to kill his grandfather's brother (I'd describe him more accurately if I knew anything about how you refer to family members further up the family tree. Great Uncle, maybe?). But William Leather's grandfather escaped. He was rescued by a Native American scientist (the Melanctha kind and not the Stephen Hawking kind (or maybe? Was Hawking into hallucinogens?)) who stuffed a bunch of drugs into his mouth so that he could experience what Elijah Snow just experienced at Melanctha's pad. Legend has it that nobody ever learned the Native American's name because if they learned it was Tonto, Ellis might have been sued.

Having been saved by an experimental drug that drove him to the afterlife and back, John Leather took up murdering people with Mercury-tipped silver bullets. I think he only murdered scumbags and maybe it was his working with Mercury that made him a massive nutbag and not Tonto's drugs.

Ha ha! Not armed! Good one!

That final shot looking through the dead man's split head looks remarkably like William Leather's pupils from the first page. Is that a clue?! Probably although I don't think there really are any clues here. They're just echoes of William Leather's surroundings as he tells his torturers his tale. I've never played Assassin's Creed but I think it's similar to how I think that game's story goes.

The Leather Ranger eventually hung up his guns and unsaddled his silver to get a lady pregnant just in time to give birth to their son at the turn of the Century. His name was Bret Leather and he was the Century Baby father to William Leather. Bret became a vigilante running about at night in Chicago in the '20s and '30s, a parody of Batman and The Shadow and, I don't know, Dick Tracy? Maybe Spider-man since he could seemingly turn into spiders and other bugs. The bandolier across his chest looks like a cockroach so maybe he was a parody of a parody and emulating Cerebus's The Roach.

This guy was one of Axel Brass's group who were nearly all killed in the Adirondacks by Alternate Dimension Justice League in the, um, '40s, I think it was? The night he's showing of his skills in the story is the night that William Leather was born.

Is this an interrogation or therapy?

After learning that he wasn't actually the son of the coolest guy in Chicago, William Leather began drinking and pouting and kicking rocks. Right up until he met Randall Dowling who was all, "We suck and it's the fault of those super human jerks! How dare they not be us!" So he joined Dowling's 20th Century gang of bandits and brigands to steal all the silver mines in all the worlds.

The final two pages return us to the present where William Leather is strapped to a table under a spotlight so much like the moon while Elijah looms over him and tells him his future (because he's the scientist in this situation): William Leather is going to get his eyeballs punched out by a pair of goggles full of needles and then he's going to tell Elijah where Alternate Dimension Reed and Sue are. Elijah admits he was told to think about the big picture and not the little picture where he's a vindictive jerk who murders four assholes for the sheer pleasure of it but he's all, "You shot somebody I loved or something so now listen to your eyeballs pop, you piece of shit."

The Ranking!
Warren Ellis had probably been promising John Cassaday a western story for years and he finally figured out how to do it. Probably when he was playing Assassin's Creed while listening to old radio dramas of The Shadow while The Lone Ranger played on nearby television and a small baggy full of the detritus of the mushrooms he just took sat on the table nearby. I wish he'd promised John Cassaday two western issues because one just isn't enough. Especially when he had to throw in the Chicago gangster stuff. Those could have been pages and pages of wild horses running free with their manes blowing in the wind! Maybe even throw in a panel of a horse just pissing so much piss. Just so much piss!

Planetary #21 (December 2004)

This issue gonna be about the Grateful Dead, right?

Planetary #21 (December 2004)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy Martin, and Richard Starkings
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by Kristy Quinn and Scott Dunbier

This issue is called "Death Machine Telemetry" and my brain has no idea how to process that. It began by nodding vigorously and assuring me it knew what all of those words meant. But then it began sidestepping all of my questions about what they meant when they're strung together like that. It was all, "Oh, you know, data about a machine that causes death being sent out to an observer, I suppose." And I'm all, "Okay, yeah, I know what all the words mean and can put them together like that but why has Ellis put them together like that? Speculate, you gooey pink piece of shit." And my brain answered, "I guess we'll just have to read more because you can't always know what a thing means devoid of context. You sound like your aunt two minutes into a movie asking about questions nobody could possibly know the answers to at the movie's two minute mark." So I guess I'll revisit the meaning of the title even though I know (and so does my fucking brain) that Warren Ellis loves to come up with phrases that sound like they probably mean something just on the other side of profound or paranormal and they never actually need to be explained because sometimes stuff is just cool, you know?

"Death Machine Telemetry". Maybe it's just the name of a band Elijah Snow was in when he lived in San Francisco in the '60s?

The issue begins with Elijah Snow meeting up with the psychedelic medusa on the cover.

Is this the same Melanctha from Gertrude Stein's Three Lives?

I only ask if this is a fictional character from a book published just a few years after Elijah's birth because that's the kind of shit that happens in Planetary. Plus it's an easy short cut to get the 1% of readers who have read "Melanctha" into the fucked up state of mind that the novella puts them in. I'm exhausted and dizzy already and I've barely finished the first page! Maybe I should read it eighteen more times to really get in the right mood!

Elijah visits Melanctha for an oracle because she's an, um, oracle. Or, as he tells people who ask, a magician. He wants to know how to get to the other three members of The Four now that he's taken out Jacob Greene and captured William Leather. Um, wait. Shouldn't he be asking about how to get to the final two? What happened to Leather? Did I miss him getting away at the end of "The Gun Club"?! Did "The Gun Club" take place after "Rendezvous"? Maybe I should just assume Leather was rescued or escaped. I'm certainly not going to re-read a comic book I've already read to see if I missed something important!

Oh, sorry. I called Melanctha an oracle but she assures Elijah that she's a scientist. Fine. If that's what she wants to call herself, I'll accept that she's a scientist. Just try to ignore that when I call her that, I'll tend to wink and make jerk-off hand motions. Who am I to deny what she claims to be? But also who is anybody else to say I can't wink and make jerk-off hand motions when I say things?!

Melanctha spends a few pages describing nanotechnology to convince Elijah that she's a scientist and not a practitioner of hoodoo.

Now that we all agree Melanctha's a scientist (*wink* *jerking off hand motion*), she describes Shinto to Elijah. Her specialties seem to be micro-universes and the souls of the dead. Oh, is she describing the science of "Death Machine Telemetry"?! Did Warren Ellis name this story and then thought, "Shit. I'm going to have to spend half of the script's page count to describe the title!" Well, I guess it worked!

Never you mind why both of my hands are now making jerk off motions!

Anyway, Melanctha gives Elijah all of this backstory to explain that she drugged him with hallucinogens. See, hallucinogens, according to Melanctha's theory, do their work because they're saturated with the souls of our buried dead. Oracles and Shaman do not simply ingest drugs to get into the correct state to speak with the dead; they eat the dead so that they can share their memories and hear their voices. Elijah soon trips his fucking balls off.

By speaking to the dead and visiting the afterlife and given information from informational superobjects, Elijah learns that the Century Babies are not natural beings. They are not organic creatures of evolution. They were, all of them, created for a specific purpose. When they "die", they do not possess a soul that moves into the afterlife (or becomes drugs or whatever). And in learning the vastness of the universe, both the macro and the micro versions, Melanctha asks Elijah Snow: "How can your purpose be so small as to murder four stupid assholes?"

The Ranking!
An interesting issue that throws a lot of Warren Ellis's mind-noodles against the wall and I'm not sure most of it's done. At least not in the context of Planetary, maybe. Maybe more seems to be perfectly cooked in the context of "Warren Ellis has some philosophical thoughts on death and drugs and shamanic rituals." I think some of the context is also "Warren Ellis loves sexy new age mystic women who teach him how to be a more profoundly weird man and also make him come a lot." But I guess the main point was to let Elijah Snow know that maybe he's losing track of his century long exploration of the mysteries of the 20 Century in his need to avenge the injustices done to him and his people by The Four. Sure, it'll be satisfying to kick Randall Dowlings' head off of his smug shoulders but maybe don't see that as the end point of his work, I guess?

Planetary #20 (September 2004)

Is this Jacob Greene's fucked up eyeball?

Planetary #20 (September 2004)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy Martin, and Richard Starkings
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by Kristy Quinn and Scott Dunbier

Last issue recap: we saw Galactus's quim. And that's all I have to say about that.

Jacob Greene, Alternate Dimension Ben Grimm, has arrived at the alien biodome while Planetary watches. It's their first ever glimpse of him. Sure, he's in a spacesuit but it's a massive fucking spacesuit. My guess is he looks like Thrunk from Cerebus which would make sense since I think Thrunk was supposed to be a parody of The Thing anyway. Except I've seen what Jacob Greene actually looks like on the cover of the fourth Planetary collection and he looks more like Swamp Thing than The Thing. I don't see any Man-Thing in him which is a stupid joke but I've written it so, well . . . *shrug*

Jacob Greene disappears into the ship and Planetary loses sight of him. So they contact the angels to tell them to get back to the entrance of the ship because they missed recording something super cool. But they're currently recording something super cool already so why would they want to backtrack?

The super coolest: Bee People with Pubic Hair.

The angels rush back to observe Jacob Greene and Dr. Kwelo learns that his little pets can fly faster than Mach 2 when they're really curious. They pass more creatures with pubic hair before they finally lay their eyes on Jacob Greene (who has no pubic hair at all).

I skipped many pages of visual storytelling which were beautiful and haunting but, you know, I only know how to talk about words. And pubic hair.

Jacob Greene is just as gross as everybody was expecting him to be. He's also tremendously violent and bloodthirsty. Plus he does sort of look like Thrunk crossed with Swamp Thing (with maybe a touch of Sloth from Goonies thrown in). The pupils of his eyes are those triangles from the cover which remind me of the massive god-like being from The Authority which (if I remember correctly) Jenny Sparks kind of gave her life to defeat (but mostly because they defeated it just on the turn of the century (it's also possible I'm mixing up two or three different story arcs from the series)). Could it be that that massive pyramid god was the thing that transformed The Four into their Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four personas?

While the angels scan Jacob Greene and download the data to Planetary, Elijah Snow springs the trap. The angels' vessel was fitted with a bomb which they detonate, destroying Jacob Greene's ship as well. He's now stranded on the alien vessel which is simply passing through our solar system. The angels are also trapped aboard it but they're totally cool with it because it contains so much pubic hair to document.

This didn't make me weep like Pig or Mark Russell's Traveling to Mars but it is touching.

For some reason, Jakita gets really pissed off and claims that this Elijah isn't like he was before the memory loss. Is she mad that he separated the angels from Dr. Kwelo even though the angels were destined to leave at some point anyway? Sure, Dr. Kwelo is sad. But he's sad in a happy way like when the Bigfoot you've been living with finally gains the confidence it needs to go live in the forest on its own and you have to drive it from your home. You're proud of it but also sad to see your big little guy go. Is Jakita mad because Elijah ruined a chance to do some really good archaeology on the alien vessel? Is she mad because he stranded another human being on a craft headed for deep space even if that human being is gross? Oh, um, and evil! Is it because Jacob Greene is certainly going to kill, eat, and fuck every living thing aboard that vessel? Or is she just mad because Elijah didn't tell her his plans and she's all, "How could he lie to me?! I'll never forgive that Goddamned Oliver Queen!" I mean Elijah Snow!

The Ranking!
Well that's it for my single issues! This issue came out in July of 2004 and I believe I stopped collecting monthly comic books with the final issue of Cerebus in, I believe, March 2004. Sometimes around then, anyway. But this proves I was still going to the comic book store occasionally, mostly to pick up Fables and The Walking Dead. But eventually I just started getting those books in collected editions and didn't really pick up many comics at all until The New 52 began. I think maybe I also got a Giffen Suicide Squad run and maybe those I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League books? I can't remember. I'll find out as I continue my journey through all of my old books.

Even though this is my last single issue, I'll finish the run by reading the last seven issues from the collected book, Spacetime Archaeology. I normally don't do reviews of issues I read out of trades but it's going to become a regular thing because my next two runs of comics I'll be reading are also missing some of the first issues: Preacher and Hitman! I'm also currently reading the hardback of Tom King's Supergirl but haven't decided how I want to talk about that yet. Maybe when I've finished it.

Planetary #19 (May 2004)

Christ. It's so Goddamned white!

Planetary #19 (May 2004)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy Martin, and Richard Starkings
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by Kristy Quinn and Scott Dunbier

Planetary is ostensibly about a group of people discovering as much as they can about the planet Earth, first for passive librarian science reasons but eventually to help protect the planet and its people from those who would manipulate them and take advantage of everything. So when you have an issue that calls itself "Mystery in Space", it's an attempt at extending the premise outward, embiggening it. It seems obvious that the protection of Earth cannot remain exclusively an on-Earth activity. Threats come from space as well! We saw that last issue when three 150 year old corpses crashed to Earth. Okay, well, that wasn't a threat but it was maybe a prelude to the idea that unknown threats can come from space. Although this cover doesn't hint, at least to me, at a dangerous threat from space. This cover hints at God making the index finger of one hand going in and out of a circle made by the index finger and thumb of the other hand. I guess that could be interpreted as an alien or god sending the message "You're fucked!" to Earthlings.

This paragraph and the next are asides and have nothing to do with the comic book meaning none of it will be on the test and you can skip them if you're in a hurry or you're a fucking traitor. Recently I heard somebody spouting the old tried and true statement about how crazy it is that everything had to work out just perfectly for life to evolve on Earth. How miraculous it must be for all the parameters for life to have been correct. But, dude, yeah. Obviously! The only way life can take place on a planet is if that planet is the correct distance from the sun and has water and has a Jupiter as a shield and has a moon as a mini-shield or whatever all of those parameters are. What am I? A scientist? No, I'm just a philosopher who understands when people are trying to make something more out of a pure tautological argument. "Humans exist on Earth because Earth has the right conditions for humans." Yeah. That's fucking it, man. It's not magic. It's not a miracle. It's not God. It's a fucking fluke of random chance! Now if your argument was "Humans exist on Earth despite its not having the correct parameters for life", now I'm fucking listening! I'm all, "Whoa. How did life evolve here then? What helped us along? How could the impossible happen?!" But instead, people are all, "How did the possible become possible?! The only way people could be on Earth is if Earth were in the correct position to evolve people! Mind blown, man! Mind blown!"

Fucking hell, dudes. If that's your argument then you've got to admit right now that if we find any other planets in the Goldilocks zone that they'll have life because your argument isn't life is a miracle and what were the odds. Your argument is this planet could sustain life and so life happened. Which, you know, isn't a big admission to make. You're not going out on a limb there. Because we're also dealing with an Earth that didn't have life on it for billions of years. Maybe millions. Hundreds of millions? What am I? A geologist?! Anyway, you know, whatever. Back to the comic book.

At a secret base in Zambia which nobody in Planetary knew about for over a decade because Elijah Snow forgot it was there (as well as where everything else was), a team keeps watch of objects in the sky. They've noted a cylindrical object floating out well past the moon, too far away for conventional space flight. But, as the director of the place says, they engage in unconventional space flight. They also house angels.

Angels. Fairies. Alien greys with gossamer wings.

Elijah says he's been keeping the angels in captivity, changing locations often, since they "came down on Germany in the Thirties". Isn't that where and when Superbaby landed? And didn't the people of Krypton look something like these creatures (minus the wings)? Is this Zod, Faora, and, um, the other one? Elijah says they're happy to stay as long as they're fed information but they don't look that happy to me. Maybe they were just fed the entirety of Watership Down? Hopefully they're not too depressed because they are Planetary's "unconventional space flight". Elijah's going to send them to investigate the massive dildo floating out past the moon.

Oh. I get it. Some scientist found Elijah's sex doll and he was all, "It's an angel! AN ANGEL! It records shit!"

So after Elijah stuck a camcorder and reel-to-reel tape recorder into his sex doll, he convinced his team of astrophysicists that they're alien beings that can fly spacecraft. He says they have limited brains which is his way of saying, "My 20th Century Baby super sperm control them."

Elijah casually reveals more of his memories to Jakita which were secrets kept from her for decades when Elijah had his memory. So now she's giving him constant narrowed eyes. We might be ramping into Felicity not trusting Oliver WB Green Arrow territory here. "How could you not tell me you hate Diet Coke?! You're a massive liar whom I cannot trust anymore!" Although maybe keeping nineteen alien space invasions of Earth secret from Jakita is a little bigger than all the bullshit things Felicity would get upset about Oliver not telling her. "You pee sitting down?! How could I not know this?! How can I ever trust you again?!" Man, that show was rough.

The plan isn't just to send the cum dolls to observe the space phallus; it's also to catch Jacob Greene, Alternate Dimension The Thing, investigating on his own. I guess they've yet to see the monstrosity he's turned into and they're all got massive expectation boners going. You know what an expectation boner is, right? It's when you're pretty sure somebody's going to put their hand down your pants at some point during the night so you walk around with a massive hard-on which maybe winds up being the cause of somebody putting their hands down your pants to check it out. Kind of a self-fulfilling boner.

I appreciate that Cassaday went out of his way to make sure the angel's ship wasn't penile but I know a pee hole when I see one.

The angel's ship looks like a suppository which might be some kind of foreshadowing. I think the original script for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier had the Enterprise flying up God's butthole so maybe this is an homage to that. Or it would be if I wasn't always full of shit and writing complete nonsense. But imagine if Kirk had to fly up God's butthole instead of what the actual movie was written to show: Kirk is the only person in the universe man enough to sass back to God. I know it wasn't God but that's the point. Everybody else was shitting themselves and kowtowing to the obvious fakery and Kirk was all, "I question your reality!" And everybody was all, "Oh no! Is Kirk an atheist?!" And then God turns out to be the Star Trek version of Zod in the Phantom Zone and he loses his shit and attacks, proving that Kirk was right: there is no God.

If you're one of the few people familiar with Star Trek V, you might realize I don't fully know what I'm talking about. But that's because I haven't seen the movie since it was in theaters! But you kind of remember a movie where Captain Kirk faces down a god. It would have been even better if they had Kirk fuck it.

Here is the part of the comic book where I nod along as if I understand and pretend I haven't been reading comic books for decades just for the tits and ass.

After The Drummer gets completely red pilled by Dr. Kwelo, he goes off to his room to do some calculations which, in a universe whose underpinnings are information, might be slang for masturbating. "I just ejected fifteen different derivative functions from my holographic sex unit!" is what I'm going to say next time I get caught jerking off.

The Drummer's new theory of the multiverse and the snowflake incorporates God's wank bank they saw in Hong Kong. So now I guess we're just accepting the Dr. Kwelo's theory that everything is two dimensional and what they saw in Hong Kong was the ultimate version of reality: God's stack of hard drives. And the 20th Century Babies are the anti-virus protection. The Four are the virus. These angels are, um, spiders, I guess?

The angels breach the massive floating cylinder to discover an alien ecosystem containing trees, water, and even primal, naked humanoids. They move in even further and discover a dead Alternate Dimension Lady Galactus.

Complete with Galactic Camel Toe.

Birdlike creatures feed off the dead or dying god's eye juice. Giant rats eat the flesh from its extremities. Humanoids trek across the vast expanse of its fingernails. Skeletons crowded around its nipple have died trying to get the last of its milk. Villages have sprung up in the shelter of shadow of its feet. Its death has created much life (other than the skeletons whose death was created by its death).

As Planetary observes in awe, another ship with a lone pilot pulls up alongside the space object. Jacob Green. Finally! And, I think, the first Planetary story to be more than one issue because that's the end of this one!

The Ranking!
Some astute readers may have noticed that my "The Ranking!" section doesn't actually rank anything. It's just a way to say, "I'm done commenting on the comic because I reached the end!" It's hardly ever even a section where I sum up my feelings on the entire piece! It's just a place to say one or two more stupid things before I end the entire process in the weakest manner possible. In reality, this section should at least say trite things like, "This issue was fucking awesome!" or "I can't wait for next issue!" or "Ellis and Cassaday and DePuy-Martin have created the kind of story which will linger on in the minds of readers whose brains actually somehow retain information for longer than six months!" I will say, "I do remember the whole Galactus thing." So that's a plus for my stupid brain. I don't really remember what takes place with Jacob Greene though. According to the cover of the next issue, it looks like it's going to be part of that Authority story where they encounter the giant dead triangle God thing and root about its corpse. Fuck. I'm probably remembering that all wrong too and I just re-read it a year and a half ago!

I might be desperate enough to start taking fish oil or whatever fake bullshit supposedly helps with memory. I probably can't make my memory worse! Hmm, maybe more LSD and mushrooms would help?!

Planetary #18 (February 2004)

Looks like more backstory and imperialism!

Planetary #18 (February 2004)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy Martin, and Richard Starkings
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by Kristy Quinn and Scott Dunbier

Here are some of the themes I get while reading Thomas Pynchon novels:

1. THEY are doing everything they can to make the world a worse place for the majority of people simply to sate their own selfish desires.
2. Imperialism is one of the major tools used by THEM.
3. Predestination and Preterition may not be true religious or philosophical concepts but it hardly matters since they explain so much of the world. THEY have everything at birth and keep it; the Preterite have nothing and gain less.
4. Belief warps reality. New ideas don't just change the future; they literally change the current reality.
5. Nostalgia traps the mind into viewing the world where constancy trumps change leading to stagnation, racism, and anger.
6. Dick jokes are pretty goddamned funny.

I feel like Planetary hits a lot of the same notes. Maybe not so big on the predestination stuff but, I don't know, maybe? I haven't really thought about it much but The Four are gods who are definitely also THEM and who is to say why they were picked to become gods? THEY were picked so THEY were always picked so THEY were predestined to become gods. Everybody else are the Preterite to be used at their whimsy. I mean, everybody except all the Century Babies! I think they were natures way of combating those four future gods.

I guess all the white men with guns on the cover made me realize I need to finish Against the Day!

This issue begins, sort of, with (6.), the dick joke:

See, Bond fucks so many dirty evil spy women that his dick probably looks like a half-rotten cucumber mauled by a sewer rat.

Thanks to Elijah Snow's earlier meeting with John Stone where Snow regained his memory, Elijah has been meeting up with all of his allies (and potential allies) to bolster his relationship with them. He's been giving some of them pensions and some of them Wilders and some of them German families. He's been considering his past and deciding who might join him against The Four and who might have already sided with The Four. He's headed toward an ultimate showdown with the gods who have been shitting on the world because it's their kink and now he's meeting with the guy who — for still unknown reasons — got the ball rolling. Where does Stone, John Stone, stand?

Stone has some information for Elijah: he knows where William Leather will be in a few days. An object that has been in orbit between the Earth and moon for 150 years will be making landfall soon. Leather will be there. Stone thinks Elijah, with help, has a real chance of destroying him. John Stone kills a pigeon with his cigarette and walks off. So I guess Stone isn't actually offering to help any more than handing Elijah a piece of paper with the location of the space object's return to Earth? And what does this have to do with the Gun Club?

Oh wait! Do I actually remember something? Did the Gun Club launch this thing like a massive skeet shoot in the mid-nineteenth century?! I guess that's why those three guys on the cover are in rudimentary space suits. And that's the space barrel of their space gun behind them, ready to launch those three idiots to their death.

I do not, however, remember what happened to the crew. Or what will happen to Leather when Snow catches up to him. Or too many things to list but none of them have anything to do with this comic book which I first read 22 years ago and, I believe, re-read eight years ago. I do remember a day many decades ago in Aptos, California standing in front of a full length mirror naked immediately after losing my virginity suspecting that I'd see myself differently but, alas, I perceived no change at all. Except maybe I was a little giddy while my partner in the other room was a lot disappointed.

The returning space capsule landing exactly where it was launched 150 years previously.

Alternate Dimension Johnny Storm, aka William Leather, blazes onto the scene covered in blue fire. He speaks angrily with Randall Dowling about getting something in return for this artifact recovery. It seems they've been on the outs and Dowling has been keeping something which Leather desires. His soul, maybe? That's a joke. Souls don't exist! Even in comic books!

Before Leather can procure the space bullet, a Planetary helicopter arrives on the scene and scoops it up. Knowing that Leather isn't subtle about his actions and doesn't think anything through because, you know, he's a god. Why would a god worry about the consequences of his actions? So he burns his way into the helicopter to begin kicking ass and discovers he's in the inventory of Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Man, I've got to remember that one. If I ever meet a god, I'm calling them Mr. Buttwipe. Or Ms. Buttwipe, if I can easily tell their gender. Probably don't have one so, um, Mx. Buttwipe? Is that right? I'm old.

I don't imagine a helicopter full of explosives is meant to take Leather out but merely to knock him off-kilter so Elijah, Jakita, and whoever else they convinced to help them appears.

While Leather's getting his bearings, Jakita speeds up to him and jams some kind of Hark-brand inoculator with a five inch needle into the back of his head. Leather remains unconscious and Planetary takes him into custody. Next, Jakita opens up the massive space capsule to see what that thing's all about.

This would have made a cool painting on the inside of a double album by a prog rock band in the '70s. The front and back covers would have just been the orb itself floating in space.

Planetary can only surmise what happened here from the available evidence in the capsule, the surrounding buildings, and the massive pipe crumbling across the moor. Three men make an attempt to visit the moon using the technology of 1850 and disappear from history for the next 150 years. They discover photos of the day, the club, the men as they entered the space vehicle. And they discovered a list of signatures of people in the club, one of them being Jules Verne. So that name alone probably answers any question anybody might still be asking!

The Ranking!
This one was unexpectedly emotional! What I was thinking as I read it was, "Wouldn't it be awesome if nothing after opening the capsule was explained? Then the reader would just put it together from the cover, really. But the cover is a replica of a photo inside the space capsule. And, of course, Jakita and Elijah wander about speculating on what could have happened here. It's so weirdly optimistic in the way it shows what humans will attempt for nothing more than curiosity and possible knowledge. Three men willing to risk their lives on a belief in their belief in technology, math, and human ability. Seeing their corpses was both sad and uplifting at the same time. This is why I love literature. I like people who do things out of passion and love and curiosity and knowledge and whimsy and art. I can't stand people who do things for money or fear or hatred or practicality. Give me chaos over order any fucking day because chaos believes you can shoot the moon. Order believes you're stuck in the mud.

I'm so glad I was wrong about the cover being imperialistic! Of course, I don't know that these men weren't planning on colonizing the moon, excited to oppress the moon beings they find there. But that's too cynical even for me. The cover knows it'll make the viewer's colonizer Spidey sense tingle and then it actually tells a story about scientific ingenuity and humanity attempting the seemingly impossible. And they succeeded! Sort of!

Oh look! No footnotes this time! Maybe I've gotten them out of my system for a bit. I guess littering my thoughts with asides encased in em dashes and parentheses is probably easier.

Planetary #17 (December 2003)

I hope the cat wins.

Planetary #17 (December 2003)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura Martin, and Richard Starkings
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by Kristy Quinn and Scott Dunbier

Cassaday got that cat looking right in the camera doing the whole record-scratch, freeze-frame movie moment when the cat's narration begins, "You might be wondering how I got in this situation." The more I look at the cover, the more I see it from the sabre-tooth's point of view in a comedic tone. I know it's supposed to evoke the thrilling action of an old pulp fantasy novel with barbarians and topless women but this was put out in the 21st Century and in the 21st Century, nobody wants to see the hero kill a big sweet pussy kitty probably named Mr. Tom-tom. Imagine living for 100 years spanning the entire 20th Century. You experience growing up on a farm drowning kittens like in that poem I can't name because I don't want to re-read it when I look it up and realizing 100 years later that if you told anybody about those memories of something that was not just normal but expected to keep farm life running the way it must, they'd castigate you as a monster. Which you are, obviously, because even 100 years ago, I couldn't drown a kitten! Also imagine having toes almost as long as fingers. What's going on there, Elijah?! Maybe I'm the freak, though, because I do know some people with long toes. Even with shoes on you can tell who has long toes because they're often seen chanting, "Gooble gobble! Gooble gobble! One of us! One of us!"

If I'd seen a book with this cover at the B. Dalton Bookseller in Valley Fair Mall in the late '70s, early '80s, I would have snapped it up and devoured it. I think I read my first Conan book because the cover reminded me of a Harryhausen film. Later, I convinced my grandmother to buy me a Skeletor¹ figure because it looked like something out of a Conan novel.

Man, I hope I wasn't like fifteen when the first He-man figures came out. Looking them up, it looks like they were originally marketed in 1982 meaning I was ten. So I guess I read my first Conan book at nine or ten. That was probably appropriate, right?

This book begins in 1933 with Elijah shirtless and heading down a river in a jungle in Africa. It's previously been mentioned that Elijah Snow and Alex Brass explored Opak-re early in their careers (though at different times). Not only does it have a pulp fiction vibe but it's definitely playing to the Heart of Darkness crowd as well.² Elijah has become lost but he's sure he's nearing Opak-re. I thought maybe Opak-re was an anagram for something but the best I can come up with is "Kreap-o" which might be foreshadowing of Warren Ellis's social life.

I think this is the one where Snow discovers Eclipso.

I have, at times, seemed to criticize this comic book (as well as many others because I'm just not a visual person) for spending several pages at a time without any dialogue. But that's because of my own limitations when it comes to experiencing art. I just wanted to make clear that I understand how much Warren Ellis trusted Cassaday to tell the story through his visuals. I often make a joke about how short and lazy Ellis's script probably looked but when you've got John Cassaday on the other end of the fax line, you realize just how little you need to say. This time instead of sending Cassaday reels of film containing Slouching Tiger, Forbidden Dragon, he sent him a DVD of Apocalypse Now and just said, "This but Elijah's looking for Wakanda instead of Marlon Brando."

The river Elijah's floating down leads him directly to the lost city which means it couldn't have been that lost if the river led right to it. Lost cities should be in the middle of the jungle covered by foliage and not just sitting there close enough to be seen from anybody passing by on the river. But I guess when you have a massive phallus guarding the place, it makes it easier to remain lost.

While I hated that Elijah is about to kill the pussy on the cover, I really don't mind if he slays this penis.

I don't think you can categorize a work of fiction as pulp fantasy unless there's at least one giant snake in it and three topless women. I suspect Ellis and Cassaday will have to forego the topless women though but only because this is a comic book that probably sold on the same rack as Scrooge McDuck. My guess is they'll have at least one topless woman but she'll be wearing a necklace which hangs perfectly to hide her nipples or have that perfect length hair for hiding tits.

Elijah blows out the snake's left eye and freezes it in the river. But a bunch of legs come out of the portholes built into it and it pulls itself free of the ice to charge him. Just as it's about to eat him, Tarzan swings down and does an elbow drop on its head, knocking it unconscious. Tarzan introduces himself as Kevin Sack which is, um, embarrassing. He also goes by the name Lord Blackstock which is just another indicator that he's Tarzan if you hadn't already gotten it from his swinging on a vine, his Tarzan shout, his loincloth, the description earlier that he'd gone feral, and his perfect nipples.

Another clue to his Tarzan identity: he fucks chimpanzees.

One of the rules for outsiders spending time in Opak-re, especially white outsiders, is not to breed with the locals. Elijah is all, "Oh, don't worry: I hate kids!" But then he meets Anaykah, a topless woman, with whom he has loads and loads of unsafe sex.³ None of it results in a child and the breaking of the rules because Elijah respects the culture and/or he's shooting blanks. Eventually, Elijah leaves to go gather more information for his Planetary Guide. While he's gone, Anaykah gets bored, has sex with Tarzan, and births a child. When Elijah returns, he discovers the city collapsing into the ground to seal out the rest of the world. Anaykah meets him outside with her and Tarzan's baby, pleading with him to keep it safe as she disappears underground with the rest of her people, never to see the outside world again. Her last words are "Wakanda forever!"

Elijah, not made to deal with babies, drops the kid off with the German family that would have raised Superman if William Leather hadn't ground little Kal-el's baby skull under his bootheel. Their name was Wagner and they named the baby Jakita. That'll probably be important later. The name sounds familiar, anyway.

The Ranking!
Well if Jakita is Tarzan's baby then that means the girl whose mother was bathed in Gamma Radiation and saved by Alternate Dimension Incredible Hulk is still out there as yet unrevealed! Will she make an appearance along with the creature from Planet Fiction that arrived on the day Ambrose Chase "died"? We don't have many issues left, Warren! And we're still getting back story! Where's the front story?! I want to see Dowling murdered already!

Hey! I just realized Elijah Snow never battles a sabre-tooth tiger! Fraud! False advertising! Also, I'm kind of relieved. I didn't want to see him murder a kitty cat.


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¹ This was before there was a cartoon and they were sold with mini-comics to explain the characters and the world. I didn't care about all that because Skeletor was just some animated Skeleton bad guy to fight Conan. Conan was, um, me, I guess? Definitely didn't have a Conan figure and didn't purchase He-man until I realized he had the other half of Skeletor's sword (which wasn't as cool as his ram's head staff but I still needed the full sword!).
² Which obviously means playing to the Apocalypse Now lovers too, especially when you consider Cassaday's visuals. Cassaday never had a problem putting the visual sources he was alluding to right out in the open.
³ That's why Tarzan confesses to fucking animals. Because he's admitting to Elijah that he's never slept with an African woman. I think it's less because he doesn't want to and he's kind of racist (in a systemic way which is different than a hick way (though not better. Just clarifying!)) and more because the women see him as an arrogant imperialist who just wants to dominate people he sees as subservient to him. He is a British Lord, after all!

Planetary #16 (October 2003)

I'm assuming the Kanji reads "Planetary" because of the little bubble that makes that first symbol into "pu".

Planetary #16 (October 2003)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy Martin, and Richard Starkings
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by Kristy Quinn and Scott Dunbier

This cover screams two things at me: movie poster and "We're gonna learn about the Harks, motherfuckers!" Most comic book covers usually just scream at me, "You're a pathetic loser, you virgin bitch!" So I'm actually quite thankful that this one's being so helpful what with the Asian face and the super long fingernails and the Kanji and whatnot¹. Oh, this comic book cover screams one other thing at me as well: "Don't think about how the last issue you read, Planetary #15, also had 'OCT' on the cover or how Laura Martin used to be Laura DePuy and how John Layman isn't editor anymore and how two years of your pathetic excuse for a life have passed since the last issue!" So, um, you know what, cover? I'll take that advice. I'm not going to think about that two year gap between issues at all! It's not my problem!

One thing I will note about the delay between issues as this comic book moves along. I only own the single issues up to Planetary #20 because of these delays and my self-exile from the world of comic books for nearly a decade. About eight years ago, I finally remembered that I'd never finished the series and purchased the final book in the collection so I could see how it all ends. I've only read the last seven issues the one time which means I've basically never read it at all, being that that's how my brain works. The only comic books I truly remember are Elfquest and Cerebus because I re-read them many, many times and also I was a lonely loser who often fell asleep at night pretending that he was Skywise making out with Foxfur under the stars while also listening to country music or Doctor Demento on big plastic yellow radio headphones.

No, you know what? I made up the last sentence of that last paragraph. You can disregard it as me being stupid and silly. Especially the part about how I'd have sexual fantasies about being Skywise. That part was totally just a joke. Ha ha!

This is the end result of Anna Hark's Night's Stars Attack. It occurs on Page 10.

Being that the first ten pages of this script must have been something like, "Hey, John? Did you see Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon? Just come up with a fight scene like in that movie for the first half of the book. *cough, cough* I'm a widdle sick boi. :(", I decided to read up on the whole two year delay. My extensive research uncovered that Ellis was sick and Cassaday had other work engagements. I was fairly certain the delay was on Ellis's end because Cassaday knocks the fucking fight scenes out of the martial arts ball park where they play martial arts ball. I don't know if you can plagiarize a movie's fight scenes but Cassaday does them so well, I just assumed that he projected scenes from Sneaky Tiger, Rambunctious Dragon on his desk and just traced the fuck out of them. It's also possible my pretend script had too many words and Ellis just sent Cassaday a film reel of the movie with a Post-it note stuck to it that read, "Planetary #16".

In the second half of the comic book, Warren Ellis decided to have the characters use more words than "Die!" and "No you die!" That's probably because Elijah Snow and Anna Hark needed to reveal more back story while flirting with each other.

The sexual tension has me throbbing like a massive erection!²

Whenever somebody tells me something I didn't know, I always respond, "Who cares? Nobody, that's who! Such useless information!" Especially if it's information about my father. If he wanted me to know what you're telling me, he wouldn't have abandoned me when I was two years old! Then I'd hope they'd leave quickly so I could pull out my jar of tears from under my bed and explosively add another half inch of volume to its salty contents.

In this conversation with Anna Hark, I think it's the first time Elijah Snow is referred to as "the ghost of the 20th Century" which I fucking love. Jenny Sparks is the Spirit of the 20th Century and we know there are many more Century Babies than Jenny. So labeling them all as various aspects of the century seems like a natural progression to their identities. But I don't think Ellis ever really commits to that. I'm not even sure what "the ghost of the 20th century" means. But I love it and even if it's just Anna Hark's personal manner of referring to the man who tried to stay hidden as he also created a super secret world organization, it's pretty fucking great.

Elijah lets Anna know that he met a witness who saw her working with Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four at City Zero and he won't stand for it. He wants to work with her to keep the world safe. He wants to befriend her and her organization, utilizing her secrets for the benefit of the world. But he needs to know that she'll turn against Nazi Fantastic Four. She says there's always been a Hark to make sure the sun comes up and she implies that working with The Four may have been her only option to keep peace in the world. But now Elijah is offering her a better choice. Maybe work with the team that didn't choose a symbol that's basically an unfinished Swastika, hmm?

If I were Elijah, I'd be nervous about this meeting because what if these two had some kind of weird sexual history that he's yet to remember?!

While discussing how Wilder, the man who became a Shiftship Engineer by stepping on an ancient sacrificial stone, Hark alludes to Jakita Wagner being an orphan brought into Planetary by Elijah Stone. In a previous issue, Elijah³ mentions how Jakita is older than she looks. I still suspect she's the daughter of the woman saved by Alternate Dimension Incredible Hulk just at the edge of the Gamma Bomb's explosion mentioned in the introductory story published in, um, Gen-13 or something?

Hark smiles at Elijah which apparently means she agrees to work with Planetary. It's a bit maddening that they understand each other on this level. It's like when somebody hangs up a telephone in a television show without actually saying goodbye or indicating that the conversation is over in any way. Am I the only one that bothers? Or is that how people actually do things?!

After Anna smiles, Elijah calls in her orphan employee Wilder so she can see what's become of him. They hug and Elijah looks on like the Ghost of the 20th Century before disappearing to haunt somebody else for a bit.

The Ranking!
Since Elijah's memory returned and he decided he was done running, he's pretty much just began collecting his army, either by outwardly recruiting them or by simply making sure everybody in his organization are well taken care of so that they'll back him when four godlike shits hit the fan. I know the final issue is some kind of epilogue so that leaves ten more issues for the final confrontation. I figure Ellis and Cassaday will need a full issue for the Randall Dowling battle and another full issue for the William Leather battle. But I think Alternate Dimension Thing will go down fast, maybe he's already even dead from his transformation. We haven't really seen him yet and I don't remember much about him except I think he doesn't play a major role in the climax.⁴ Alternate Dimension Nazi Sue Storm feels like she'll go down quick. Somebody will call her a Nazi and punch her tits off and that'll be that. Anyway, according to the next cover, Elijah Snow suplexes a sabre-toothed tiger!




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¹ The whatnot does not indicate that I had anything else to say. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. I had run out of things to say but didn't think a list of two things was enough. I mean three things. I can count.
² I really need to work on my metaphors.
³ Or somebody. It's the forest that my brain remembers. It doesn't give a fuck about the trees.
⁴ I can't wait to find out though. Maybe I should write shorter entries so I can read more than one comic book per day!