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.