Planetary #14 (June 2001)

Planetary's first album never charted.

Planetary (June 2001)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy Martin, and Bill O'Neil
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

Did Wildstorm release a second version of this cover but in red? Zero Point II? Obviously, other than the color, this is less like a Guns N Roses cover than something by one of those early to mid '90s bands like Gin Blossoms or the Spin Doctors. I also thought maybe Ugly Kid Joe but it's their comic book advertisement that I'm picturing and not one of their album covers. I think. What do I know about Ugly Kid Joe except that they, along with Faster Pussycat, had a hit song that made me think about how terrible my father was. Speaking of "Cat's in the Cradle," I actually have a memory of my favorite time ever hearing it: at Karaoke on Halloween when somebody dressed as Darth Vader sang it. Classic.

The way this begins, in 1995, I'm highly suspecting it's a riff on The X-Files. I've explained how I don't go in for that 100% confident crap and how "highly suspecting" is about as close to 100% as I'll get because I remember the young person I used to be who was way too confident in his ignorance and once pissed off Well-Done Comedian Bobby Henline's older sister Colleen by telling her that "Rock and Roll All Nite" was not a Kiss song but, in fact, a Poison song. But this issue begins with somebody saying, "The truth is in here," and then going on to talk about abductions so "highly suspect" basically means "Yeah, we're doing Sculder and Mully this month, guys!"

I was walking down the street a few days ago wearing my I Want to Believe shirt when somebody passing by in the opposite direction just said, "Mulder." I made some kind of noise in acknowledgement that communicated nothing but, possibly, contempt. It was the kind of response you save for somebody who responds to something you've said or written with "I see what you did there!" or "I get the reference!" Great. Good job, sir, but I don't carry Scratch 'n Sniff stickers or gold stars around with me. You're going to have to accept my grunt of semi-acknowledgement at your pop culture awareness.

Is it brown? Is it sticky? Yeah, it's a stick. Or an alien turd.

The stick turns out to be Mjǫllnir so, um, maybe I owe Colleen Henline an apology. Did The X-Files ever do a Norse God episode? I don't think they did. The weapon was discovered by Ambrose Chase aboard some flying ship which Chase managed to crash in the Amazon. Alternate Dimension Nazi Sue Storm was apparently aboard the craft.

How do you hit somebody with your giant hammer if a sharp jolt of kinetic energy causes it to turn back into a fucking stick?

On the page opposite the above panel is an advert for The Lords of Acid album, "Farstucker", which contains a song with one of the most pertinent and profound lyrics of all-time: "What freedom's yours when you're not allowed to say, "Fuck you. FUCK YOU! Motherfucking cocksucker. Fuck you, fuck you!" My runner-up favorite line after that is from Marilyn Manson: "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers!" Look, I probably have thousands of other favorite lines but those are the main two that come to mind at the moment. Do I have to remind y'all that I live in America?

The vessel which Ambrose brought down has been abducting people and cows so, yeah, okay, we're back to The X-Files. I guess the Ellis didn't really know where to insert his theory on how that dude's uru cane could become Mjǫllnir so he stuck it in here. He also threw in some phrases like "superstring theory" and "quantum mechanics" to make readers nod their head at how sciency it all is. The guy telling Elijah Snow all of this information is a bald man I've never seen before who looks suspiciously like Doctor Venture.

Being that it seems Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four have been cosplaying as aliens, Elijah Snow decides he's going to put Mjǫllnir up his butt and strike it with a sledgehammer so he can also be transported to wherever the fuck it goes when it's not a stick. Nobody says, "That's a bad idea, Elijah!" They just start shoving the hammer up his bunghole.

Ride the ass lightning, baby!

Elijah Snow transports to Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four's weapon storage locker. It turns out to be a world full of weapons and the skeletons of the native population. Snow assumes Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four murdered everybody on this world just so they could turn it into a fancy footlocker. But the native population could have already been dead when they found it, right? You shouldn't assume the worst, even if the people you're making the assumption about are the worst. Just remember, Snow: you're the guy who currently has a massive hammer up his ass.

Wasn't there a Biblical quote about this exact situation? "First cast out the hammer in your own ass; and then thou shalt see clearly to cast out the hammer out of thy brother's ass."

Later in Antarctica, Planetary has planned an ambush because if these bastards are off committing genocide across the universe simply to have a place to keep their condoms and sex toys, they probably need to be stopped. First into the trap: Kim Süskind. Alternate Dimension Nazi Sue Storm (or Kim as I should refer to her because, well, three keystrokes versus thirty-four) does her own The X-Files riff by breaking into Planetary's secret base in Antarctica where all the aliens are held in stasis tubes.

Dammit. I really thought she had to be naked to go invisible.

Kim encounters Ambrose Chase whose reality distortion powers gives him the ability to not immediately die when encountering what I've been led to believe is a god. Leather quickly arrives to save her but Jakita ambushes him and continues to punch him directly in the brain every few seconds to keep him off-kilter. With Kim stuck in a reality distortion field and Leather getting a crash course in brain surgery, Snow prepares for the last two members of Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four: Dowling and Greene. We haven't seen much of anything about Greene yet. He's Alternate Dimension The Thing and he's probably been busy fucking blind chicks. I bet he gives them their sight back mid-stroke just to drive them insane by seeing the grotesque creature who seduced them.

But instead of stepping into the same trap that his teammates did, Dowling arrives in the mother of all X-files' ships and abducts Elijah Snow and Ambrose Chase and Jakita Wagner and the building and about a five mile diameter circle of snow and ice. That's when the scene takes place where Dowling erases Snow's memory and I say out loud, "I see what you did there!" Also, I've basically just been writing, "I get the reference," this entire time so if Warren Ellis wants to make a contemptuous noise at me, I fucking deserve it.

Snow delivers his last commands to Planetary just before his mind is erased.

What? No "I love you all"? I'm surprised they cared enough to find him again.

The Ranking!
So we've done the whole media res thing and now we've discovered how it all began so are we headed toward the climax now? I think this issue marks the exact halfway point in the story so, structurally, well fucking done, Ellis! I'm really getting excited to see the deaths of all the Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four members! Especially that jerk Leather! Maybe not Greene. He might be a good guy since he hasn't really been mentioned much. Maybe he's just so grotesque that he can't bring himself to leave his self-imposed solitary confinement. Also maybe he's a giant shit monster and everybody else hates him. I will say that Ellis has done a stellar job at brining all of his story threads together to make sense of the world. This is the kind of shit I love. I'm a massive fan of Cerebus Syndrome because while I may want writers to know where they're going rather than just winging it constantly, I especially love when they don't quite have a plan but discover the plan on the way and make everything work. I think the television show Lost did a good job with this in that they obviously went off the rails multiple times but developed a new track that could make sense of the past lore and situations. Neil Gaiman did a masterful job of this in The Sandman and Ellis is knocking it out of the park here. Cerebus did it so well that even Dave Sim couldn't stick the landing that he telegraphed to all the readers and which they knew was coming because Dave's plan fell apart when he discovered he was the only person in the world who was actually reading The Old Testament, The New Testament, and The Quran correctly so he found he could no longer end the series by parodying The Bible and instead decided to explicate it to everybody from his understanding of it. So boring! And sexist!

Planetary #13 (February 2001)

For the life of me, I can't figure out what this cover is parodying. Highlights for Children?!

Planetary #13 (Febraury 2001)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Bill O'Neil, and Laura DePuy Martin
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

I guess the modern day tagline for Highlights is "Fun with a purpose" which just sounds fucking exhausting. I decided a long time ago that life itself doesn't have any meaning so why should I saddle fun with some sense of it?! Ridiculous. You might as well try to convince me that sex has a purpose! I've read John Barth's "Night-Sea Journey" so you're going to have to be smarter than John Barth to convince me sex has any purpose other than perpetuating the curse of existential anxiety!

Speaking of things not having any purpose, I've been watching Curb Your Enthusiasm for the first time in my life the last few weeks and this is my summary of it: Seinfeld if Jerry and George were merged into some kind of Jeff Goldblumesque Fly freak while Poison Ivy's plant played Kramer and everybody was allowed to say fuck. I've finally gotten to the really great episodes which mean the episodes where Cheryl has left him because thank fucking Christ I don't have to think about how she sucks that maniac Kennedy's dick every time I see her onscreen. I think my favorite character is Jeff Green's wife Susie played by Susie Essman. Sometimes I just put her screaming at Larry on loop and I fall asleep to its beautiful music. I kind of hope the series ends with her murdering him, stuffing his corpse in a golf bag, and getting away with it because everybody is just relieved that Larry's no longer around complaining about complete bullshit every two minutes.

Was that a positive review of the series because I'm really enjoying it?

This issue begins in 1919 when Elijah Snow was still a teenager and dumb enough to admit to shit even I wouldn't admit to on this blog.

Do we ever learn any more about Uncle Caleb? Did he get a spin-off series?

The dumb thing Elijah's currently doing is exploring Baron von Frankenstein's castle somewhere in Germany. I guess it's dumb because Frankenstein¹ was super horny after he was created and now it's been one hundred years so he's probably super duper horny and wouldn't mind a little prison wife anal at this point? Maybe the actual dumb thing was believing that the castle actually existed after the guy who told him about it also told him he'd been to Mars. If some guy told me one of those things, I might be, "Hmm, that's interesting. You seem like a believable fellow!" But if they told me both of those things, I'd be all, "You cuckoo, Homie."

Although now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever said, "You seem like a believable fellow," to anybody ever in my entire life. Y'all are fucking liars, man! Not that I don't enjoy liars but you've got to be an entertaining liar for me to like you. You've got to be clever. You need to make me smile and laugh. You can't just be all, "Immigrants are massing at the borders and they're going to eat your dick!" My needle isn't moved by irrational fear and anger. Although now that I think about it, if Fox News was saying immigrants were out there eating people's dicks, maybe I'd watch it sometime? That sounds hilarious!

So ever since, um, four whole years ago?

Elijah Snow has some kind of poor American kid accent in this issue because he's yet to become the sophisticated and mysterious leader of a secret organization that travels the world and needs to not sound like he's from the worst, most arrogant country in the world. He uses the word "ain't" and exhibits a particular laziness in pronunciation. But Snow isn't just an American doing overseas paranormal tourism at Frankenstein's castle; he's looking for "the Map". That's how he thinks of it, capitalized and everything²!

While searching the premises, Elijah steps on a plate that triggers a trap. A bunch of Frankenstein eggs fall from the wall, crack open, and expel several living Frankensteins. I'm assuming they're baby Frankensteins even if they're full grown when they hatch because that's how it works when you make a creature from adult corpses. You can't make a creature from a baby corpse and then expect it to grow into an adult! You have to make the adult body and then bring it to life and then be repulsed by it so that you abandon it to figure out language and philosophy and sexual desire and murder all on its own. Or you just leave it in a glass egg so that it imprints on the first sucker who comes along and sets off your trap. Now Elijah Snow is going to have four or five Frankensteins following him around like baby ducklings, I imagine.

"Ma ma! Ma ma! Why must you abandon us in our greatest time of need?! You have given us life and now you flee from our appearance?! It is most unjust!"

Warren Ellis must have been pretty busy with his Transmetropolitan script this month because he wrote into this script: "Elijah Snow battles five newly-hatched lizard Frankenstein's for five pages. I guess he can say, "Oh shit," or something in there somewhere. Otherwise, go to town. But don't do anything fucking clever, John, like making the lizard Frankenstein's look like my Internet girlfriends, yeah?" I can't say for sure but I think John Cassaday did not base the lizard Frankenstein's on the women Warren Ellis was, um, dating.

Elijah Snow finds "the Conspiracy's" holographic secret map of the world. One of the prominent "secret places" is Big Ben which was designed by the guy who went mad and whose biographer had a quote on the John Constantine cover of this series. That's probably important or something. It looks like some kind of alien language or musical notation is inscribed at the top of Big Ben on the secret map. Maybe it's Aramaic or Hebrew. Or it's just the Neo-Gothic spikes and frills and negative spaces as seen through a hologram that makes it look like something it's not.

The next year, Elijah Snow finds himself in England on Baker Street looking up at Big Ben which subsequently leads to his first encounter with Sherlock Holmes. I guess the map helped him find him? Maybe this story isn't about coherence but just a smattering of Elijah Snow's adventures before he began Planetary.

The Conspiracy is Ellis's version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And while Elijah's previous mentions of meeting Sherlock Holmes may have led readers to believe that he sought him out to train with him, what Snow was actually up to was putting an end to the League. The League was 19th Century bullshit! He's here to create a 20th Century team that doesn't do the work of imperialist bastards! He's an American which means he's going to do it right! And independently! And for profit! And absolutely no unionizing!

I think what Ellis is saying is that Planetary is 21st Century minded and Alan Moore's comic is old timey 20th Century pulp junk.³

After Snow kicks the frozen dick off of Dracula, Holmes describes how their Conspiracy took a darker turn. He explains how they "were conspiring to make a better world" but then goes on to insist that to make the world better, it needed to embrace "eugenics, re-education, and a controlled economy." Aren't those all things which Alan Moore would deride? Why would his League be into that stuff?!

Sorry, I made the mistake of forgetting that Warren Ellis was writing his version of the League and not Alan Moore's. Not that Moore's League was all sunshine and happy puppies. But at least it seemed to be led, as best it could, toward light by Mina Murray. I think that's why Snow mentions that he met a lady named Van Helsing who would have also loved to kick the dick off of Dracula.

Anyway, Holmes seems thankful that Snow has ended the association of fictional characters. He agrees to teach Elijah all of the secrets he knows. Snow spends five years training with him before Holmes finally dies of old age and opiate addiction. After that, Elijah returns to exploring the secrets of the world.

The Ranking!
When Snow mentions the Conspiracy's roster, he mentions "Poor old Carnacki". He says this as he's leafing through The Sigsand Manuscript which is from the stories of occult detective Carnacki. The question I have — which maybe will be answered but, I mean, probably not because it doesn't really matter — why poor? What happened to him?! Did he try to expose a ghost in some haunting of a mansion whose ownership was disputed in the courts only to discover that the ghost was really just an old white man with a fully loaded shotgun?! That's my guess anyway.

I may have read this one a bit too quickly because my sense of pacing was thrown off by the battle with the Frankensteins. Plus my cat threw up in the middle of it and I had to go clean up and then sit with her for awhile to make sure she was feeling okay. Now I'm not even sure I should publish this post?! I should probably rewrite it. Ha ha! That was a joke! What is a "rewrite"?!




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¹ Yeah, I called the monster Frankenstein. What are you going to do about it, pedant?!
² Okay, fine, the capitalization is pretty much everything. But he also uses the article "the" instead of "a" so, you know, more than just the capitalization!
³ In other words, Moore's an old man and Ellis is the young pup with a new way perspective on the world. Move out of the way, old man!

Planetary #12 (January 2001)

He was the ghost of a Texas Lady's Secret Organization to Catalog and Understand the Paranormal Underworkings of the Known World. Yeee-hah!

Planetary #12 (January 2001)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura Depuy Martin, and Bill O'Neil
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

I just recently finished re-reading Koji Suziki's Ring but haven't gotten around to reviewing it. No, wait. I just stopped this comic book review to review Ring because I thought, "Wait. I guess I'm ready to discuss it. I should just do it in an actual review. So I did! Now I need to begin again!

I just recently finished re-reading Koji Suziki's Ring. Dammit! I didn't mean begin again exactly as I did before! Stupid genies and their tricky wishes.

Elijah has regained some of his memories so the first thing he does is sit in his dark office to brood. Or maybe he's just reveling in some of the better forgotten memories he hasn't had the opportunity to enjoy for the last fifty years or so. Like a really good shit he took in 1992. Or a little taco place he randomly came upon while walking around Bangkok hunting Daemonites. Or traveling across the United States in his 1972 VW bus feeding groundhogs, talking to locals, and driving through the Badlands after dark listening to the soundtrack from Fire Walk With Me. But after that, it's time to yell at his teammates who have been less than honest with him about what they know.

It's also a good chance for Warren Ellis to retcon some moments in the early issues that didn't jibe with the later stuff.

I think that whole retconning the early shit to make it fit into the wider narrative that the author found themselves creating years later is called the Cerebus Effect. Or the Dave Sim Deal. Or something. He may not have been the first to do it but even I think of Sim whenever I notice it. Like when I read Stephen King's Desolation and I was all, "Oh, he's forcing all of his books into one unifying continuity!" I think. Is that what I was thinking in 1996? I think it was. I was also reading Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol and a shit-ton of Douglas Coupland at the time. Maybe it was also the first year I read Catch-22? I normally don't remember when I read things but this was my first year out of college when I was managing an office furniture warehouse on the Netscape campus. It was directly under the giant can of Libby's vegetables in Sunnyvale. My desk was stacked high in books and comics. The walls of my office were covered in photocopies of pictures from Coupland's Polaroids of the Dead and enlarged copies of the sidebar memes and definitions in Generation X. My boss didn't mind because I was a great employee. I won the first ever Employee of the Year award at the Christmas party that year where everybody thought I was drunk because my personality is aggressively different if I've had even one beer in me. I go from person who only drops the occasional one-liner in a conversation and won't look you in the eye to gregarious avalanche of fun in the speed of one domestic beer. My inhibitions are mammoth but they're as frail as spun sugar.

Mostly I was Employee of the Year, though, because all of the blue collar installers voted for me while everybody at the main office probably split their votes. Or they all sucked up to the boss man without realizing how much power and unity the working class team had. And they voted for me, probably, because I did my fucking job, didn't care how much work I had to do while on the clock, and helped out whoever needed it. Plus I'd ordered a really cool forklift for the warehouse that I'd let them drive around! Not to mention sometimes leaving the warehouse open after hours so we could all hang out and play dominoes.

I guess this issue where Elijah Snow remembers stuff is just going to turn into a review where I remember stuff! I hope I don't remember anything too terrible!

After John Stone mentioned The Planetary Guide to Elijah in The Last Shot pub and dinner theater, Elijah Snow's memories began painfully stampeding back into his head. One thing he found odd was that having had no memory of the Guide until that moment, he suddenly remembered who wrote it.

My memory sucks but, for some reason, I remember everything I ever wrote. Especially the slash fiction.

I don't know why The Drummer is acting so scared about Elijah finding out he's the writer of The Planetary Guide. I guess it's because Elijah may have forgotten about his bad temper and how he hates people lying to him but The Drummer certainly hasn't. Now he's just waiting for various parts of his brain to freeze so it can be his turn to blissfully forget it all.

Even Jakita begins to grow frightened by Elijah's sudden memory retrieval (and also his smashing mahogany desks into millions of frozen pieces). What could they have possibly done to this man to make them this nervous about his sudden loss of memory loss?

Drummer doesn't want Elijah to remember he was a hair stylist? Or that Jakita once had nits?

Elijah begins questioning other early plot points. He's all, "Why did Warren Ellis write this when now it doesn't make any sense because the narrative is going off in this direction? Let's discuss it for a bit until it all lines up in a way that sounds like it was planned from the beginning!" And Jakita is all, "Oh, we're doing the Cerebus Syndrome now?" And Elijah is all, "I met Dave Sim once. Have I told you that? We were partying in a hotel room at Comic-Con drawing on an underage girl's leg in Sharpie. I think The Flaming Carrot was there. Oh, yeah, he's real, you know."

While Jakita and The Drummer shit their pants, Elijah finally gets to the real point of it all: the identity of The Fourth Man.

Well bowl me over with a ribbed dildo! Nobody ever would have guessed!

I know I've read this about five times previously so I really should have remembered for certain that Elijah was The Fourth Man. But even now, I'm questioning it. Does Elijah just misremember that he was The Fourth Man and did I misremember it because I remembered this bit but not the later bit where Jakita is all, "The Fourth Man is actually Scrappy Doo. Yeah, I know. Worse yet, The Fifth Man is Cousin Oliver. The Sixth Man was Chrissy Seaver. The Seventh Man was Spike Fonzarelli! And it just gets worse from there! Do you remember why you wanted to stop remembering now?!"

One of the things Elijah hadn't remembered until Jakita says his name is Ambrose Chase. But then his head hurts again and he remembers. Is Elijah sure he's remembering things he actually knew and not that somebody's using alien technology to painfully fire implanted memories into his brain? Seems like something that could happen in the Wildstorm Universe. It's probably Grifter hiding just off-panel.

Apparently, Elijah Snow agreed to the memory blocks implanted by Alternate Dimension Reed Richards so that Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four wouldn't kill his teammates. But if he ever remembered his old life and came back to Planetary, they'd go ahead and kill them all. Jakita and The Drummer located him in the hopes that they could get Elijah Snow back on their team but without awakening his forgotten past. Somehow it didn't work and now he remembers and now they're all going to die. No wonder The Drummer was so scared. He has zero protection against the godlike powers of the Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four. I'm fairly certain they could blink him out of existence at any second. I know how terrifying that is because I'm, you know, mortal and that could happen to me too! So scary!

Elijah Snow decides not only is he tired of hiding, he wants to stride out in the public and sing, "I am the Fourth Man!" So he makes sure Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four knows he remembers. The battle begins in earnest now.

The Ranking!
I just noticed the Planetary preview story in the All Over the World and Other Stories trade paperback. I guess I'm not doing a blog about it because it's just a brief introduction to the team where readers get to go, "Oh neat! Super hero archaeologists that don't do anything! They just learn what the Marvel and DC Universes would look like if Warren Ellis were in charge of them! And this one lets us know how he would have handled The Incredible Hulk! Interesting but it wouldn't have made much of a profit being that The Hulk simply spent 20 years in a deep well until he died of starvation. Marvel's take was probably better!" Anyway, this issue just let everybody know the identity of The Fourth Man so they could stop spending all of their time thinking about it. Plus it seemed to imply¹ that Snow and Jakita fucked. So was the baby Ambrose held up Snow's or his? Also the wife of the general from the preview issue was pregnant when she was just inches away from the edge of David Paine's Reality Disrupting Bomb which turned him into the Hulk² and the general said he's never seen the little girl his wife gave birth to. Was it Jakita?! Probably! Anyway, I think this issue cleared up a bunch of lose ends while also dropping a bunch of threads that can be followed up later, like next issue where we'll get one of Elijah Snow's adventures with Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, and Jack the Ripper. Or Dracula. Or young Alan Moore. It's hard to tell. Oh, and it set up the big up-and-coming battle with Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four that will supposedly take up the whole second half of this story. Sort of.


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¹ Or confirm? I think it confirms it since it was implied in some earlier issue. Maybe it just double implies it?
² Actually he used his mind powers to turn himself into the Hulk because it was the only form in which he could survive the blast of his bomb, Device Nine.

Ring by Koji Suzuki (1991)

Translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley

I just re-read Ring because I remember it being an easy read and I needed something to occupy my time while sitting outside with my cat, Gravy. It's an easy read because the premise keeps you hooked and interested (even when you know the outcome (which isn't a woman crawling through a television set at all. I'm not even technically sure there's a ghost in this book when you get right down to it)) but also because the Reading Level, on an American Reading Comprehension Test, would be somewhere around 7th Grade. The prose is not complicated at all. It even skirts the edges of being terrible. Granted, I read the translation so I don't know how much of the style translates or if the oddity of the prose is a result of the Japanese language being so different from the English language. That being said, the prose doesn't fucking matter because the book's premise was interesting enough to certainly make Koji Suzuki a rich man by spawning like fifty thousand movies, some of them good, some of them just incomprehensibly misbegotten (like Sadako's baby! (Spoiler? For this book or Spiral? It's hard to say!)). Like Rings. What the fuck, guys? Anybody with a fucking brain stem knows that Rings should have been about the viral video clip going, you know, viral. But instead it's about a research project where the whole thing is mostly contained except for one stupid jerk who goes on a ski trip or something? Look, I've forgotten most of it. I think the only thing they bring to the Mythos from this book which I don't think was touched upon in the other movies was how Sadako was intersex (did Rings touch on that? I seem to remember it did. Unless it was just me thinking the entire time, "Mention how Sadako was intersex! Come on, you cowards!")

I have not read Birthday, S, or Tide so I can't really say I know anything at all about Sadako and the lore of the entire Ring series. That statement is based on just how fucked up the entire premise gets by the second book and how absolutely gravitationally off-kilter it gets by the third. By the six book, we probably find out that Sadako was a simple "Hello World" BASIC program written by a sentient jellyfish from a dimension thirteen levels above ours (actually, upon re-reading this, I should have gone weirder on the speculation since that premise is basically exactly what Loop is (minus the jellyfish)). As pornography. So all of my commentary and speculation in this review will be within the confines of the covers of this book. Will get to the batshit fucking nonsense of Spiral when I decide to re-read that mindfuck.

One aspect of the novel that the movies (as far as I remember (I've never seen the original made-for-television version from 1995 so I can't speak to that)) don't mention is the role of the smallpox virus in the curse. The two aspects which allow for the development and propagation of the curse are Sadako's psychic abilities and being infected with smallpox when she's raped by the doctor who then throws her into the well. What mostly struck me this time as I was reading it was this thought translated from Alan Moore's "Anatomy Lesson" from his early Swamp Thing: "Sadako Yamamura was a smallpox virus that thought it was a girl." The novel explicitly mentions near the end that part of what was driving the curse was the smallpox virus itself seeming to use Sadako's rage and psychic ability to bring itself back from extinction. It found a new way to infect hosts and to keep on living. Sure, Sadako's rage at humanity (mostly at men. There's a heavy theme of rape and how casual it's taken in late 20th Century Japan (and other places, sure, but we're within the confines of the book's covers here, remember! And that's Japan! I wish I understood Japanese culture better than I thought I did until I learned that the creator of Grave of the Fireflies was all, "It isn't a sad movie!" So then I had to read about the movie because fuck you it's the saddest movie and I learned a bunch of stuff that made me think, "Will I ever be able to understand a Japanese movie if that movie was about THAT?!" (This isn't a review of Grave of the Fireflies so if you want to know how it isn't about two super sad kids who tragically die (not a spoiler! You see it at the beginning! Part of the creator's point!) while carrying bones around in a candy tin, go read up on it yourself!))) coupled with her psychic ability is absolutely enough to explain the curse as we've seen by the movies simply concentrating on that. But one thing Suzuki goes to great pains to do is try to explain as much of the oddness and paranormal aspects of the mystery through scientific thought. We'll see more of that in Spiral and Loop even if they get off-the-charts weird.

I mentioned that I'm not sure there's a ghost in this book and that stems from the whole smallpox subplot. In the movies, Sadako physically (or non-corporeally but visually? What am I? A ghosthunter?!) emerges from a television set to scare the life out of her victims. But in the book, the victims all die from sudden cardiac arrest after sensing a terrifying and horrific presence approaching them from behind. But we never know explicitly what they see. The closest we come is when Ryuji is dying and looks in a mirror while sensing something behind him. But he just sees his own face "a hundred years in the future." His final thought is that he "hadn't known it would be so terrifying to meet himself transformed into someone else." We'll learn a little more about the science of the deaths of the bearers of the curse in Spiral (I think. It's just so nuts, man. So, so nuts). But here, it mostly remains a vague half-literal virus compounded with a young girl's trauma and paranormal abilities.

In the end, Ring is more of a mystery novel than a horror novel. It's presented as both but, in the end, they don't shake out into equal amounts. It's mostly a story about how the triumph of the smallpox virus to overcome near extinction and rise up to destroy the world. Like Infinite Jest, the world may not be destroyed by the end of the novel (or by the end of the first chapter in regards to Infinite Jest) but it's heavily implied that the end of everything is under way. That makes it seem like Spiral would be about the end of the world but it's, um, not. At least not according to Ring rules! Spiral seems to be Sadako losing patience with how fucking long it takes for everybody to watch a video tape and then make a copy of that tape and then to get somebody to watch that tape so she's all, "Fuck it! Let's ramp this shit up! Faster, people, faster!" I say "Sadako" in this context and not "the smallpox virus" because Spiral really does make it all about Sadako! So much Sadako! Loads and loads and loads of Sadako! "Loads" might be a pun here. You'll have to wait for my Spiral review to understand it. Or you can go read the fucking book yourself!

Planetary #11 (September 2000)

This one gonna be some James Bond junk? Or The Prisoner shit? Maybe The Human Target?

Planetary #11 (September 2000)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura Depuy Martin, and Bill O'Neil
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

If this issue depicts any kind of building being blown up (especially by a hijacked plane), I'll be willing to change my mind on the concept of predictive programming. It's the 11th Issue with a September cover date in the year 2000? There's what looks like one of the twin towers behind the "AR" in Planetary? The radiating reticle behind the man's head makes it seem like some kind of psychic foreknowledge is being beamed to the reader. The clock ticking down. The panel full of question marks signaling the precarious changing world and an unknown new future forced upon us by violent madmen¹.

No, you know what? Even if this issue completely depicts the destruction of the twin towers, I'll never accept predictive programming as a thing. I'd be more apt to conclude that Warren Ellis was the mastermind of 9/11. Here's the thing about predictive programming: people in power don't ever need to prime the masses for some future horror they're going to commit. That's the whole point of power. You just do what you want and shrug when people point out you're an asshole. You just light up your cigar, take a few puffs, and say, "What are you going to do about it?" Or, more accurately, you say, "You're a traitor if you don't embrace the violence and war and our propaganda networks won't stop calling you a traitor until all the dimwits whose entire mental structure would collapse without the load bearing pillar of that propaganda actually believe if you're against an imperialist war for oil, you actually are a traitor." Then all the supposed Democrats fall in line before they're called weak and anybody with any kind of compassion or rationality gets edged out of society until only fanatic madmen have a voice.

Depressingly, that's a pretty apt description of "dialogue" in the 21st Century. Violent loud-mouthed morons drowning out any humanist thought by screaming over them and calling them names. I suppose it's been that way long before Yeats pointed it out in "The Second Coming". Nothing's ever actually new, I guess.

Last issue ended with Elijah Snow declaring he needed to contact John Stone. This issue begins by introducing us² to the man.

Let me guess: this lady's name is Blowfellas?³

Okay so those panels didn't actually introduce us to John Stone. They introduced us to his 1969 antagonist, The Bride (or whoever she is). But we've learned a little something about him! He works for S.T.O.R.M. and he's got codes! So many codes. Not so many men now. But still enough to leverage for the codes!

This issue is called "Cold World" because it sounds like "Code Word" unless it's because it sounds like "Cool World" unless it's because it has something to do with the Cold War unless it's supposed to suggest Elijah Snow unless it's some entirely different reason altogether. Oh also? The lady's name is The Bride. You don't dress that way and expect to be called anything else, I suppose. It's a nice gimmick, especially if your mortal enemy is James Bond. I mean John Stone.

Not knowing Bond canon or the Wildstorm Universe very well, I'm not sure to whom John Stone is referring here. Henry Bendix? The Fourth Man? Q?!

Does John Stone reference the man who gave up terrorism by mentioning he met his daughter because John Stone fucks so much? Is that how he makes all of his acquaintances? "I once met the wife of a man" or "I once met the mother of a dude" or "I once met the lovely triplets of a brother"?

The organization S.T.O.R.M. refers to S.T.O.R.M. Watch so I'm guessing it's my ignorance of not only Bond but Wildstorm as well that's got me befuddled. Was StormWatch always an organization based on an acronym? Or is that just a trait of '60s spy literature? I would normally make up something silly that it stands for but I'm going to hold back until I hear from Mad Magazine about my application⁴. I can't be giving this shit away for free. I mean this gold!

John Stone's suit allows him to teleport and he's got a DVD that decapitates every one of The Bride's best men.

I bet Mark Millar bought Cassaday's original art for this page. So many headless men! So much cream in Millar's jeans!

John Stone corners The Bride which is when she reveals her secret weapon: a laser eye! She's got laser eyes! She knows what you're thinking! Comes as no surprise! Christmas lights are blinking! She's Tofuriuos⁵! She's Tofurious⁵! She's Tofurious⁵! She's got laser eyes!

The Bride's laser eye doesn't save her because she's completely frozen and then kicked into a million pieces by Elijah Snow. He refrains from saying, "It's a cold world, Ms. Bride," because he's not John Stone who just said, "Got a light?", after burning a bunch of men to death. Unless Snow says it on the next page. I hope he doesn't say it on the next page. Maybe I won't ever re-read the next page and then I'll never know. I can live with that, can't I?

I cannot. Let's find out together what Elijah quips after his kill!

He's so serious! He's so serious! He's so serious! About that laser eye!

John Stone introduces himself to Elijah Snow as Stone, John Stone, so I guess that completely and utterly settles the question upon whom John Stone was based. I'm sure it was only a question in my mind but then I'm so old that I never feel completely comfortable believing something 100%. It's not that I lack confidence; it's just that I understand the perils of communication, of the dialogue that happens between artist and audience, between any two people in any situation. Also I've written like 5000 blog posts on the Internet so I know that most people have no reading comprehension. I'm so tired of trying to communicate! Why don't we have telepathy yet? I wouldn't mind people knowing my deepest darkest secrets as long as they couldn't pretend to misunderstand me from now on because we're sharing our thoughts directly! Besides, most of my deepest, darkest secrets have already been exposed in 5000 blog posts.

After the meeting in 1969, the narrative returns to the year 2000 where Elijah Stone has come to a small bar in Kazakhstan to meet with John Stone. I think this is the same bar that everybody makes their clandestine meetings in every fictional universe (and maybe the non-fictional ones⁷). Or maybe this place — The Last Shot, it's called — becomes a standard location in this series.

John Stone fills in a few memory gaps in Elijah Snow's memory. Is this going to be one of those Philip K. Dick cases where Elijah Snow, desperate to regain his memory, discovers that he purposefully destroyed his memory for perfectly good reasons? That's like the ultimate paradox and PKD understood it completely. You can never forget something which will leave traces that you've forgotten it because the human mind will always need to know what it's forgotten. The only way to obliterate memory is to, like the Russian scientists who get their last drink at The Last Shot and then put their photo on the wall, strap yourself to an underground nuclear test device. That might be a bit of overkill but you can't say the memory will return.

Elijah Snow has come to John Stone to learn about William Leather, Alternate Dimension Johnny Storm.

If one of the worst people in the world wants you to remember something, you probably don't want to remember it.

John Stone takes the opposite take than me: he believes William Leather benefits from Snow's loss of memory and, therefore, doesn't actually want Snow to remember. But if that's the case, why would Leather push it and force Snow to confront that loss of memory? Surely by knowing he's missing some memories, he's going to pursue them. If William Leather benefits from Snow's loss of memory, he should have just said, "Oh, never mind. Must be thinking of somebody else," when Snow says he doesn't remember meeting Leather. But then, I'm not the world's greatest super spy either! So our opinions have equal validity then, right? Isn't that how insane people who spend too much time online think? That all opinions are equally valid? You kind of have to convince yourself of that when you're fucking stupid.

Just talking about his lost memories causes the memory loss to begin to fall apart. Knowing that the internal timeline of his life is off-kilter causes cracks in the subterfuge. Elijah Snow begins getting flashes of lost memories: a naked tattooed woman who declares her love for her; Sherlock Holmes congratulating him on finding him; Randall Dowling saying, "It's a game, Mr. Snow," as he prepares to fuck with Snow's memory. All of this happens just after John Stone mentions that he met somebody with a Planetary Guide from 1931 (right around the time Snow met H.P. Lovecraft and fucked Jenny Sparks).

After Snow recovers from the memory attack, Stone mentions that he's been consulting for the Hark Corporation which makes Snow curious. But that's not the most important thing at the moment because Snow declares he now knows who The Fourth Man is. I hope it's Jim Henson!

The Ranking!
I re-read Planetary about eight years ago which tells you how terrible my long term memory is because I still don't remember all the major plot points coming down the line. But it's all familiar as I read it. Don't the pictures in The Last Shot become some sort of clue or message? Or is that a memory I'm having of one of the other "lone pubs in the middle of an Asian nation" stories? Maybe my memory has been tampered with as well! If it has been, I, at least, know it was for a good reason because I allowed myself to remember all the Philip K. Dick stories which warn against digging for lost memories and alternate realities. I happen to trust that my past self hit himself in the head with a hammer multiple times for very good reasons! Good job, me!




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¹ I'm referring to the American government and not the terrorists.
² I say "us" but it might just be "me" being that John Stone could be a well-established Wildstorm character and I'm just not familiar enough with the entire Wildstorm universe.
³ That single joke is my application to work for Mad Magazine. If I've been hired, please send Sergio Aragonés to my house with the contract. Thanks, the usual gang of idiots!
⁴ See Footnote #3. It's right up there. Just above this line.
⁵ I will not apologize for making a Fighting Foodons reference while quoting a Sifl and Olly⁶ song. Unless this footnote somehow counts as an apology. But if that's the case, God help us all.
⁶ Speaking of Sifl and Olly, just yesterday I was singing, to the tune of their "Fake Blood", "Fake Boobs." "They scare me like the real thing! But if they were the real thing! They'd scare me more!"
⁷ Should that have been a footnote instead of a parenthetical reference? What about a clause behind an em dash?

Ninja High School Talks About Sexually Transmitted Diseases #1 (September 1992)

What with panda girl being one of the students, I bet one of them STDs is rabies.

Ninja High School Talks About Sexually Transmitted Diseases #1 (September 1992)
By Dr. Joeming Dunn and Ben Dunn
Cover by Ben Dunn and Robert DeJesus

This comic must be worth at least as much as my copy of The Walking Dead #1, right?! It had a print run of 30,000 comic books and it was free which means most people probably through it in the trunk of the car, never read it, and then died of syphilis. I wish I could remember where I picked it up but that important moment is lost to everybody but the future civilization of time travelers who have based their entire culture on my blog. I bet if I could remember the moment I picked this up, I'd remember a small group of strange looking people in odd fashions suddenly erupting into applause nearby.

I'm fairly certain this is the only issue of Ninja High School that I own (being that it was free). But I did read my cousin's copies because it had horny teenage girls in it. It was like Archie if Betty were half-panda and Veronica sucked cock. At least that's how I remember it. I think the guy in it was a total prude who never wanted these girls to sit on his face or rub their pudendas on his stiffening cock as they danced at prom. Although somebody had to do something with somebody if they're about to catch every fuck disease known to mankind do that I could learn about them and get them myself! That's the part I'm most interested in. How do you even get into a position to get an STD? And I'm not talking about missionary! Ha ha!

The tagline on the cover, "WHAT PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW", makes it sound a bit self-important. Like this is the only way a comic book nerd is going to learn about AIDS. They do realize that Death did one of these comics too, right?! I guess this one came out first though. I bet Neil Gaiman saw it and thought, "Nobody reads that shit. I'd better write one with my super popular character! If I refused to take that responsibility, I might as well be out on the street injecting AIDS directly into people's veins!" Then he rubbed his boner on a passing lady. Allegedly. But, you know, probably?

Of course she doesn't want to talk about it. Her pussy is five different colors and smells like a cheesesteak.

Fucking Jeremy. Don't begin a conversation with a woman by accusing her of being moody! I think that's sexist. Especially after Asrial explains that Ichi is on her period.

Wait? Is menstruation a sexually transmitted disease?!

I guess Asrial, being half-panda, could smell that Ichi was on her period and has been dying to maul her all day. Jeremy, being the sensitive prude virgin loser he is, exclaims, "I'm glad I don't have a pussy! Having a dick is great! It hardly bleeds at all!"

The ladies leave Jeremy so they can go sit in a pan of butter or whatever the cure for the common period is. Since it's not an STD, Joeming Dunn doesn't explain it to me. Just like all of my elementary school teachers who would kick me out of class when the girls learned about their lady voids. Why couldn't I learn about the lady void?! Didn't the ERA mean anything to them?!

Oh shit! Veronica cucked Archie!

Rich, as you can tell by his appearance, is the antithesis of a gentleman. He goes on to say exactly how far inside of Veronica his dick went. Or he starts to before his tummy begins hurting him. I think he's pregnant!

Jeremy rushes his friend to the doctor in the hopes that Rich's life can be saved and he can continue with his sexy story. Rich's sex story is like a PornHub video that doesn't show the cum shot because it's all, "VISIT US AT COMEONBATGIRLSFACE DOT COM!" Which I did and now my fucking computer has so many STDs! Why couldn't Ninja High School have done a comic book about avoiding computer STDs?! Anyway, the doctor checks out Rich while Jeremy hangs around like he's his spouse.

"Yes, Jeremy. Exactly right." BIG ANIME WINK

The doctor must actually think Jeremy is Rich's spouse because she sits him down and spills all of his sexually transmitted beans. A doctor wrote this and thought it would be okay for the doctor in the story to give somebody else all the information about her patient's rotting penis?! I'm not saying Dr. Joeming Dunn should have lost their medical license because of this script. Of course I'm not. I'm just typing it.

"Have you seen the movie Alien? Yeah. Veronica implanted a monster inside him and his guts are going to be on the ceiling in a few days."

The doctor explains that she thinks Rich has a sexually transmitted disease. So she's not even sure yet but she's going to speculate to some kid who shouldn't have access to Rich's medical history at all! But I guess she saw an opportunity to teach Jeremy a thing or two so that he won't also one day have a tummy ache after fucking Ichi or Asrial or Ichi & Asrial.

Oh! I just fucking got it. The doctor thinks Jeremy is the one who infected Rich, right?!

You'd think Jeremy would have cut her off at some point and said, "Hey, Doc? You do remember that it was my friend Rich with the possible STD, right? I've barely even touched my own butthole!"

The first "disease" the doctor discusses is a Urinary Tract Infection or as it's known to the common layman, a dirty pee-pee hole. It's not too interesting because the doctor's trying to be cool about it instead of telling Jeremy to wash his fucking foreskin on the reg or else he's going to give every girl he'll ever be with a UTI. Also maybe wash his grubby hands after going to the bathroom or barely touching his butthole, you know? Here's a poem written by one of my cousin's ex's many years ago: "What did he ever give me except a broken heart and a urinary tract infection." That's better than anything Keats ever wrote!

The second disease is gonorrhea. Based on Ben Dunn's artwork, you might think it was super sexy. But it's not! It's gross!

Maybe we have different ideas about what's sexy.

The doctor also explains that you can get gonorrhea in your throat or butt if you're cool.

The doctor goes on to explain that sometimes people have gonorrhea and chlamydia at the same time because they've had so much awesome sex. But then she also points out that you can get chlamydia without getting gonorrhea so I don't know why she lumped them together. Jeremy is all, "So even if you cure one of my diseases I got from having too much sex, I still might have more diseases because of all the sex I had with hot and horny girls?" And then the doctor is all, "Yes, Jeremy, and why are you rubbing my pussy?"

I get it, Jeremy. She's totally flirting! Why else would she be revealing all of this stuff due to your friend having eaten too many Oreos at lunch?

The doctor discusses syphilis next but I keep getting distracted by thinking about the movie Sybil so I don't learn anything about it. Also there weren't any pictures of anybody in their underwear so I lost focus. Also there's a huge spider that keeps coming out of a small hole in the wall of my office so I'm super on edge right now. I can barely even maintain a boner while reading all of this sexy medical stuff!

Finally she gets around to discussing AIDS which is when the comic book becomes mostly words. Probably to show how important it is not to get AIDS. The doctor is all, "Antibiotics cure all of these things so have as much sex as you want! The modern era is astounding!" And then she's all, "Except in this one case where you're almost certainly going to die. Unless you get the kind of HIV Magic Johnson got and then, well, who the fuck knows, really?! Also if you live long enough by somehow getting the right cocktail of drugs and avoiding getting a disease that your body can't fight, you might live to the 21st Century where HIV seems to have become a minor nuisance?" Most of my knowledge of AIDS these days comes from commercials airing during Svengoolie for HIV preventative drugs that seem to let people live their lives just fine with a few shots a year.

I know it seems like something Reagan and Bush would have done but you didn't actually have to wear a shirt declaring your HIV status in the '80s and '90s.

The doctor stays out of politics and doesn't explain how AIDS was a tragedy that could have been ameliorated if Reagan and the Conservative party weren't a bunch of fucking homophobes who, believing AIDS wa a homosexual disease, had no interest in stopping its spread or finding a cure. And then Jeremy learns the final lesson from the doctor, a lesson that Ichi and Asrial are not going to be happy about because they want his dick so badly.

Wait. Does she mean "altogether" or "everybody on Earth fucking at the same time"?

Lastly, the doctor teaches Jeremy about condoms which causes him to think about Ichi and Asrial for some disgusting pervert reason. What a sicko!

The Ranking!
This was the best comic book I've ever read in my life. I can't wait to put all this information to good use!

Planetary Loves The Authority: Ruling the World #1 (August 2000)

Why is the only thing I can remember about Swift is that she spent twenty grand on a boob job?

Planetary/The Authority: Ruling the World #1 (August 2000)
By Warren Ellis, Phil Jimenez, Andy Lanning, Laura Depuy Martin, and Ryan Cline
Cover by Phil Jimenez and David Baron
Edited by John Layman

I forgot I had this book while I was reading through The Authority. It was released between Planetary #10 and Planetary #11 (or close enough, anyway). It came out after Warren Ellis had ended his run on The Authority and Mark Millar (or whoever!) took over. Hopefully I'll be able to ferret out the reason Ellis wanted to dip back into The Authority enough to bring them to the page one more time. It's definitely a crossover that I think everybody wanted (if not expected) at the time. I actually can't remember anything about it and have no idea where it might lead. So that's the preamble. I know usually my preamble is all, "I wrote a song about a raccoon and possum having a Romeo and Juliet-esque romance but it didn't end in their suicide; it ended in all the cats in the neighborhood pregnant." My brain decided to be more aware of my tone this time and thought, "Let's class this shit up, motherfucker! Reviews are usually boring! Go for boring, butthead!" And then I was all, "But what about my epic nocturnal vermin love song?!" Then I felt a sharp pain in my right temple and decided maybe my brain wasn't fucking around. So boring it is!

This issue begins like Watchmen ended (or, at least, thirty-five minutes before the part I'm thinking about?) with a massive octopus creating havoc in an urban center. Although this octopus has attacked Rhode Island and I'm not sure how many urban centers exist in Rhode Island so maybe it's attacking a seaside town. Also, it probably didn't teleport in out of nowhere. I bet it was summoned up from the depths by the oddly fishy residents of the town. It doesn't have long to live because Jenny Sparks and The Authority have already arrived to turn it into deep fried calamari.

The attack takes place in Judgement, Rhode Island, even though it's an American town so you'd expect it to be Judgment, Rhode Island. Stupid Warren Ellis! What a stupid! Maybe I should blame editor John Layman for not catching this. Or, being that Rhode Island is part of New England, it's just one of those olde time leftovers from when they were a colony. Maybe I shouldn't have even noticed it? Especially when Angie's tits are right there for me to notice. What happened, testosterone? Why did you abandon me in my old age?! Is this why old men become so overly concerned with kids walking on their grass? Because they've stopped enjoying tits?!

Sorry, my gay friends, I don't mean to erase your experiences! I'm just speaking from the perspective of a long time tit lover. Although, really, butts are much better. I should have just stuck with butts so we could all be nodding along while also shaking our fists at those damn kids.

Planetary is also here "helping" out.

Halfway through the battle with the massive octopus and its flying piranha army, the narrative takes a quick trip back to Judgement, Rhode Island, in 1931 when Elijah Snow met with H.P. Lovecraft about a strange vision H. (can I call him H?) had while writing. A snowflake-shaped portal opened before him and he saw the terrible rectum of the universe. When it finally disappeared, he was left with a present from the abyss.

Um. Wut?¹

These eggs were why Elijah Snow was kicking the shit out of The Drummer seventy years later. He warned The Drummer not to touch them and The Drummer went ahead and touched them. That probably means they were full of flying piranha and not, um, you know. That other thing.

Planetary seems like maybe they're keeping a low profile. Or maybe they're just trying to avoid getting decapitated by The Authority's use of extreme violence. Either way, I suddenly can't remember what was annoying me.

And everything's suddenly right with the world.

I think it's okay for artists to portray Angie's nipples because they're actually mini gun barrels and it would be un-American to censor guns. I would love to say it's un-American to censor titties but our leaders have all the ethics and morality of a Reverend Dimmesdale: nipples for me but not for thee. That was his philosophy, right? It's been over thirty years since I saw the movie. I mean read the book. I mean saw the movie with my lesbian college professor while we were reading the book. I'm pretty sure she only wanted to see it for Demi's tits².

Angie breaks through Cthulhu's reinforced brain case with her tit bazookas so that Apollo can slam into the Elder God's brain with his entire body. The Authority loves to kill things in exactly two ways: decapitation and blasting themselves through their enemies. Even Swift does it! I think maybe that's all Swift can actually do though.

Planetary watches the battle from a basement stairwell because they're a secret organization, remember?

Seventy years ago? That's when H. to the P. found his alien space eggs!

Planetary decides they want to infiltrate The Carrier because it's sure to have loads of lovely information for them to steal. The Authority picked up on signals at the fight similar to those they found in the Adirondack Mountains a few years ago. So both teams are beginning to focus on the other team although The Authority don't quite know what they're investigating. They've witnessed unmarked helicopters all over the world in places nobody should be and they have some pictures of people Angie took when the Adirondacks first became a focal point for those unmarked helicopters. Those people are Elijah Snow and Jakita Wagner. Jenny Storm recognizes Elijah from somewhere but she can't quite place him.

Fucking another Century Baby must be like fucking a sibling. It's hot right up until the moment you come.

Meanwhile some serial killer has infiltrated Planetary working on as one of their information analysts while waiting for an opportunity to open a portal like the one that opened on H.P. Lovecraft's basement. He finally found one in Doc Brass's team's secret base in the Adirondacks where the multiversal computer is housed. He plans on destroying the world with it because world-ending threats are the only things The Authority bother with. If this guy were going to just kill a few more scientists (which he just did and The Authority didn't notice at all), The Authority wouldn't notice at all. But killing the entire world?! That's what they do! I mean, that's the kind of thing the thing they do is meant to stop other people from doing. And when the serial killer initiates the multiversal computer so he can kill the world, they notice immediately! As does Planetary.

All that is to say that "the most powerful heroes" and "the world's smartest"³ are about to have one of those good guy misunderstandings that lead to them punching each other in the baggage. Plus a serial killer will wind up without his head. Although Mark Millar isn't writing The Authority here so maybe they'll think of a different way to end the maniac's existence. Something way more creative. And sexual.

Both teams use The Carrier's junction room teleporter to arrive at the site but because Planetary knows exactly where the multiversal computer is, they wind up inside the mountain while The Authority wind up outside. The Authority is greeted with scads and scads of maxi-nano-machines⁴ while Planetary find . . . um, I'm not sure what Planetary finds.

A dead serial killer and, I think, the womb that gave birth to the maxi-nano-machines?

Angie calls the maxi-nano-machines "self-replicating war robots" so disregard the footnote where I said, "Fuck you!", to any readers who thought "maxi-nano-machines" might have been a stupid term. I want to to change it to "super fuck you" because I was proven correct. The original "fuck you" was just me being defensive because I figured I was being ignorant and dumb. But now I'm confident and smart because the comic book agreed with me!

While The Authority tries to decapitate the extradimensional invasion's ass, Planetary tries to cut the invasion off from its head. They figure the war machines are still connected to from wherever they came from via the multiversal computer's snowflake portal and The Bleed. But before Drummer can cut the connection, the womb decides it wasn't done being pregnant.

If this is a literal depiction of a baby being born, birthing babies should be outlawed.

I know that's not a literal depiction of a baby being born because one of my ex-girlfriends when I was about 21 showed me her mother's birth video of her youngest sister. Or at least tried to show me. Maybe halfway showed me? It's not a memory the brain is conditioned to retain. The depiction of birth in that panel is more like if your nose had diarrhea.

Angie connects to one of the maxi-nano-machines and realizes it's called a Worldruler. It was designed to simply destroy every world in every parallel dimension it could find. And it was created by her. Or a version of her, I mean.

This Authority comes from a parallel dimension where the only difference is that everybody's nipples are inverted.

Jakita Wagner dropkicks the womb back into the snowflake where it takes off inverted-nipple Jenny Spark's head. I should probably add that to The Authority Decapitation Counter, right?! It basically counts even though it was Jenny who lost her head and Jakita who did the losing.

Outside the mountain, The Authority finish off the maxi-nano-machines. They then rush in to destroy the Worldruler to find it already gone. As is Planetary. The world is safe again. At least until the next womb slips into their reality and begins laying fish eggs or self-replicating war robots or, I don't know, sentient penis whips covered in barbs?

The Ranking!
At the end of this issue, Elijah Snow recalls when Alex Brass told him that "if you save the world, it will repay you every second of every day." We see the seed planted by Brass begin to grow as Elijah Snow get his first taste of being an active participant in moving the Earth toward a better future. Planetary will not long remain in the shadows doing nothing but collecting knowledge and dust. I mean, sure, they'll continue to remain in the shadows! But now they'll be fucking useful for once.


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¹ Like, um, seriously. Wut?!
² See? It all comes back to tits! And negro eggs!
³ I put these descriptions of the two teams in quotes because that's how the back cover refers to them.
⁴ Fuck you. It's my blog and I'll use language however the fuck I want!