Time to learn that sci-fi B movies are real!
Planetary #8 (February 2000)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura Depuy Martin, and Ryan Cline
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman
In Issue #1, we learned that secret organizations that control the world are real. In Issue #2, we learned Kaiju are real. In Issue #3, we learned Hong Kong action films are real. In Issue #4, we learned Alternate Dimensions are real. In Issue #5, we learned Doc Savage is real. Okay, maybe we learned he was real even earlier than that and actually learned that Ming the Merciless's daughter's corporation is just another secret organization and that we'll be learning about a lot of them before this is all over. Also did we learn about Daemonites? It seems like we should have learned about them by now. Maybe they don't matter as much as all the other Wildstorm books want you to think they do. Small potatoes, those Daemonites. In Issue #6, we learned that the Fantastic Four are real. And sexy. In Issue #7, we learned that John Constantine, magic, and British authors are real. And now it's time to learn that sci-fi B movies actually happened! Every last one of them, even Little Shop of Horrors, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Night of the Lepus. Possibly even Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura Depuy Martin, and Ryan Cline
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman
In Issue #1, we learned that secret organizations that control the world are real. In Issue #2, we learned Kaiju are real. In Issue #3, we learned Hong Kong action films are real. In Issue #4, we learned Alternate Dimensions are real. In Issue #5, we learned Doc Savage is real. Okay, maybe we learned he was real even earlier than that and actually learned that Ming the Merciless's daughter's corporation is just another secret organization and that we'll be learning about a lot of them before this is all over. Also did we learn about Daemonites? It seems like we should have learned about them by now. Maybe they don't matter as much as all the other Wildstorm books want you to think they do. Small potatoes, those Daemonites. In Issue #6, we learned that the Fantastic Four are real. And sexy. In Issue #7, we learned that John Constantine, magic, and British authors are real. And now it's time to learn that sci-fi B movies actually happened! Every last one of them, even Little Shop of Horrors, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Night of the Lepus. Possibly even Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
This is Allison. She's been in hiding since 1960. Her boobs are lopsided.
Allison glows blue. Is she a ghost? She's certainly too young looking to have been in hiding for 40 years unless babies often go into hiding. Maybe she's irradiated because she's hanging out in one of America's secret Science Cities¹ where they do secret radioactive experiments which make ants and bunnies and right boobs grow to tremendous size. She spoke with Jakita on the phone about something. As the reader of the comic book, I have not been let in on that conversation yet. It seems she wants to blow a whistle.
Giant ants attack while they're trading introductions with Allison because Warren Ellis wanted to skip writing a few pages and instead scribbled in the script to John Cassaday: "Jakita battles Giant Ants for four pages. She should look like Jakita and not me. Don't make her look like me, you asshat. You piece of shit. Draw what I tell you to! Don't put in some kind of visual hint that I'm a perv who only mentors young female writers who don't flinch when they walk into my office and find me upside down and naked in my Orgone Swing. You prick. You treacherous swine. I have a prescription for that swing!"
Giant ants attack while they're trading introductions with Allison because Warren Ellis wanted to skip writing a few pages and instead scribbled in the script to John Cassaday: "Jakita battles Giant Ants for four pages. She should look like Jakita and not me. Don't make her look like me, you asshat. You piece of shit. Draw what I tell you to! Don't put in some kind of visual hint that I'm a perv who only mentors young female writers who don't flinch when they walk into my office and find me upside down and naked in my Orgone Swing. You prick. You treacherous swine. I have a prescription for that swing!"
Allison is a ghost. She still might also be radioactive.
This issue came out in the year 2000 so when Allison tells Elijah, "You know what it was like, living in a country driven mad with fear of nothing?", he can say, "Yes, I was there," instead of a post-9/11 person saying, "Fucking do I?! I'm alive, right? I have ears. I have eyes. I have a penis turtled from fright of a terrorist attack thanks to the 24 hour news cycle scaremongering the shit out of my sex drive!" If you want to be really cynical, even in the year 2000, somebody could have replied, "Yeah, I know all about the fear of nothing. We just barely survived Y2K², right?!" Obviously our country is back to way too many people living with the fear of nothing. That doesn't mean they don't fear anything! It means the overwhelming fear they're full of is caused by nothing actually dangerous or scary. They're tilting at windmills. Is that why Trump hates windmills?
Science City Zero was a place the American government took dissidents³ and disappeared them. Then they experimented on them and turned them into monsters and giant ants and irradiated ghosts and werewolves and teenage Frankensteins and blobs. All those monsters in all those '50s B monster movies? Actually women who knew how to (and often did) bring themselves to orgasm.
Allison describes how she was killed by a firing squad and then brought back to life by a Doctor Randall Dowling otherwise known, in other universes, as Reed Richards. They ask if Science City Zero was part of the Artemis Project⁴ but Allison says it was actually a Hark Corporation thing (working with the government). So if Planetary didn't already realize the horror of Science City Zero and the atrocities committed there, they now know definitively that it was run by monsters. Or, to be fair to Jonathan Hark's daughter, Randall Dowling, and Randall's three compatriots, run by Planetary's rivals. I probably shouldn't assume that Planetary are the good guys, right?
Science City Zero was a place the American government took dissidents³ and disappeared them. Then they experimented on them and turned them into monsters and giant ants and irradiated ghosts and werewolves and teenage Frankensteins and blobs. All those monsters in all those '50s B monster movies? Actually women who knew how to (and often did) bring themselves to orgasm.
Allison describes how she was killed by a firing squad and then brought back to life by a Doctor Randall Dowling otherwise known, in other universes, as Reed Richards. They ask if Science City Zero was part of the Artemis Project⁴ but Allison says it was actually a Hark Corporation thing (working with the government). So if Planetary didn't already realize the horror of Science City Zero and the atrocities committed there, they now know definitively that it was run by monsters. Or, to be fair to Jonathan Hark's daughter, Randall Dowling, and Randall's three compatriots, run by Planetary's rivals. I probably shouldn't assume that Planetary are the good guys, right?
Allison is radioactive. She still might also be a ghost.
Allison explains that Science City Zero was simply a place to experiment on humans and see the limits of science and the human body. She came to them now because her half-life is almost up and nobody can retaliate for having exposed their secrets. She disappears in a flash of ozone and Planetary have a massive base for the Drummer to pull all the information from.
The Ranking!
There wasn't a lot of meat on this bone. B Movies mixed with Nazi experiments on humans and the revelation that the Hark Corporation was already working in the '50s side-by-side with the Other Dimensional Fantastic Four. I guess the issue also helps solidify that Planetary are the good guys in that at least in their apathy they're not experimenting on humans and making the world a worse place. They're just not actively making it better with the information they dig up. At least that's how it's been! But now that the Fourth Man is back on the team, um, I mean, now that Elijah Snow is on the team, things are going to change, baby! Time to get proactive instead of inactive!
__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ Science City Zero, to be precise. The ur-science city, I guess.
² Some people might not think anybody really lived in fear of Y2K. But then those people didn't have to help their father bury an oil drum full of guns and ammunition in his backyard because they wouldn't fit in the garage full of bags of rice, cans of bean, and tons of water. "The first thing to fall apart will be the supply trains, son! And once people can't buy food, the rioting and looting will begin! Also, have you read this truly informative book, The Mark of the Beast? Explains everything!" Living in fear of nothing. What an appropriate statement for the way so many Conservatives live their lives today. I wish they'd all find a hobby that wasn't attacking our fellow trans citizens, immigrants, and Satan's dick suckers. I mean liberals.
³ You know what that means: anybody they didn't like. Anybody who disagreed with whatever traitorous bullshit the government was up to. Anybody with even the slightest amount of compassion for their neighbors. Also women who enjoyed sex. The worst thing of all to powerful men who never learned how to eat pussy.
⁴ Don't worry! The current actual Artemis Project probably has nothing in common with Planetary's secret government Black Ops project which paralleled the Apollo missions. It's just the whole unimaginative naming of programs after Ancient Greece and Roman myths! Obviously Artemis would both be the opposite of Apollo but also, in our reality, the more appropriate name for a moon mission. Who came up with Apollo?! Fucking dorks.
The Ranking!
There wasn't a lot of meat on this bone. B Movies mixed with Nazi experiments on humans and the revelation that the Hark Corporation was already working in the '50s side-by-side with the Other Dimensional Fantastic Four. I guess the issue also helps solidify that Planetary are the good guys in that at least in their apathy they're not experimenting on humans and making the world a worse place. They're just not actively making it better with the information they dig up. At least that's how it's been! But now that the Fourth Man is back on the team, um, I mean, now that Elijah Snow is on the team, things are going to change, baby! Time to get proactive instead of inactive!
__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ Science City Zero, to be precise. The ur-science city, I guess.
² Some people might not think anybody really lived in fear of Y2K. But then those people didn't have to help their father bury an oil drum full of guns and ammunition in his backyard because they wouldn't fit in the garage full of bags of rice, cans of bean, and tons of water. "The first thing to fall apart will be the supply trains, son! And once people can't buy food, the rioting and looting will begin! Also, have you read this truly informative book, The Mark of the Beast? Explains everything!" Living in fear of nothing. What an appropriate statement for the way so many Conservatives live their lives today. I wish they'd all find a hobby that wasn't attacking our fellow trans citizens, immigrants, and Satan's dick suckers. I mean liberals.
³ You know what that means: anybody they didn't like. Anybody who disagreed with whatever traitorous bullshit the government was up to. Anybody with even the slightest amount of compassion for their neighbors. Also women who enjoyed sex. The worst thing of all to powerful men who never learned how to eat pussy.
⁴ Don't worry! The current actual Artemis Project probably has nothing in common with Planetary's secret government Black Ops project which paralleled the Apollo missions. It's just the whole unimaginative naming of programs after Ancient Greece and Roman myths! Obviously Artemis would both be the opposite of Apollo but also, in our reality, the more appropriate name for a moon mission. Who came up with Apollo?! Fucking dorks.
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