Planetary #15 (October 2001)

If this were on a British hillside, it would have a massive cock.

Planetary #15 (October 2001)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy Martin, and Bill O'Neil
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

Let's get ready to Dreamtime!

Was that disrespectful to the indigenous peoples of Australia? Can I be sued by Michael Buffer¹ for typing it? How many people in history do you think have shoved a didgeridoo up their arsehole? How many did it while somebody else fucked the other end? Were those questions disrespectful to the indigenous peoples of Australia?! Or do you think they'd read it and wink and go, "Roight on, me old China"?

I grew up watching Dot and the Kangaroo every time² it aired on Showtime in the late '70s. One of my main concerns while watching it was how did In Search Of... miss doing an episode on the Bunyip? It was fucking terrifying!

The main thing I remember about this issue is that Uluru turns out to be a sleeping giant who may or may not have been fucking a didgeridoo. It's hard to tell by the cover because Greased Lightning³ is standing in front of his crotch.

The issue begins telling the origin of the world through the eyes of the Australian indigenous peoples. Giants sang all life into being after the sun exploded into the sky and shit heat all over everything. Ellis may have been less vulgar in his telling but if you wanted to read his telling of it, you'd read his fucking telling. I figure since I'm just repeating what a white man from an imperialist nation is repeating of the legends of those his nation colonized, I wasn't going to respect the retelling even if it sounds like I'm not respecting the original source. But I am! By shitting on the retelling which stole the telling from the source!

The second beginning to the comic occurs when Elijah Stone and Jakita Wagner pay a visit to Ambrose Chase's wife.

I thought Jakita and Ambrose were fucking. That's not the kind of greeting you get from a wife of the man you were fucking! Was I mistaken?!

I guess if you're going to cheat on your wife, it's helpful to have a reality distorting power. You know what a reality distorting power also helps with? Convincing your wife to engage in a three-way. And not a Devil's Triangle three-way! The good kind!

Angie is Ambrose and Larissa's child, the one Ambrose held up over his head in an earlier issue. The one I assumed was Jakita's because I'm a gross pervert who assumes all coworkers are fucking each other. It's why I work alone. Don't worry about how you should parse that! Maybe I just love to masturbate. Maybe I'm too hot to work with people because we'd never get any work done. Maybe nobody wants to fuck me. Maybe it's none of those and I just learned a long time ago that the worst aspect of any job is always your coworkers and/or managers and/or bosses.

The third beginning of the story has Elijah calling up that Wilder fellow to see how things are going on the Planetary's Own Authority Shiftship Front and to ask him about his old boss, Anna Hark.

The fourth beginning has Elijah sitting on the side of a hill watching the sunrise (unless it's setting) with Axel Brass and talking about memories and old times.

What all of these short narrative threads come down to is this: Elijah Snow is doing research on his enemies. He's only got about a years worth of issues left to take them down. He needs to gather as much information as he can and build as broad a team as possible to formulate and execute a plan that will enable him to murder four gods. I wonder if he's going to recruit Angie. I bet she can distort reality too.

But the cover, and the first beginning, concern themselves with Australia. So it's time to get back to the main plot thread.

Captain Marvell was just some guy who was bored with life and decided to commit suicide by entering the Dreamtime.

The Four believe they're using the correct song to open a gate into the Dreamtime at Uluru. But they only have half the song. Since Elijah knows the other half and he also knows what will happen if the song is sung, he fires the rest of it into the Four's version. Instead of a gate opening, Uluru wakes up. The giant stands, head butts Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four's shiftship, and then goes back to sleep. The ship explodes and Elijah is all, "Before you can say it, that's not all I've got, Dowling! I've got so many more inches, dude! And girth!"

The Ranking!
I know! That was it! I guess this was just the slight rise in the graph toward the climax of the story. It'll probably go exponential from here being that basically not a whole lot happened, climactically, in the first half of the story because Planetary were archaeologists and what everybody who has never been fooled by an Indiana Jones movie knows, archaeology is fucking boring. But Elijah finally remembered his backbone and his testicles and was all, "How come we're letting assholes make the world a worse place? It's time to do something about it." Hmm, good idea, Elijah! I wish more people would start doing something about it! I know a lot of people think, "But what can I do?! I have no power!" But those people are also generally the type who don't call out their asshole relatives on social media. They continue to have relationships with terrible fucking people because they're family. You want to know what you can even when you have no power? Ostracize the assholes. Call them out on their behavior. Shun the motherfuckers, man! Shun, shun, shun! Shun like nobody's watching, baby! The amount of family and friends I have that I know are progressive and yet are still friends with terrible fucking assholes simply because they were friends with them when they were young makes me so fucking mad. Although what infuriates me more is how they just ignore how those people believe the worst propaganda and most racist shit. They just don't bring it up. They'd rather pretend their friend isn't a piece of shit rather than rock the fucking boat. But those friends? They say the stupidest garbage all the time. They're not worried about the boat capsizing! Kick those motherfuckers to the curb, man! Tell them to eat shit!

There's a reason I named this blog Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea a decade and a half ago!




__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ I had to look up Michael Buffer's last name (somehow, I remembered Michael) by typing into the search engine, "Let's get ready to rumble dude". I think I had to pay royalties just to type that out.
² Seriously. Every. Fucking. Time.
³ Greased Lightning is a member of the Galactic Hero Corps, a team of heroes that my friends and I wrote about in our early 20s. We put out about eight issues of a 'zine with stories and art. Dan Santat did the art for our #0 issue convention special! If I could bother digging up all the action figures I made of the crew, I'd take a picture of Greased Lightning (a paint job on top of a Wonder Man figure) and you'd go, "Hey! That's the guy on the cover of this comic book!" If Michael Buffer can sue me, I'm going to sue John Cassaday.

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"?!




__________________________________________________________________________________
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.


__________________________________________________________________________________
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.

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!




__________________________________________________________________________________
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?

Planetary #2 (May 1999)

Is the skeletal dinosaur chasing them or is it their buddy and it's also running from the bombs?

Planetary #2 (May 1999)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Bill O'Neil, and Laura Depuy Martin
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

• Last issue we learned Jakita Wagner was the mission leader of a secret organization and Elijah Snow was a gruff old man who reluctantly took the job so he could get coffee that hadn't been pissed in by a dog. Also I guess we learned there was an autistic guy named The Drummer whose job was to talk to machines and not go on missions.

• The big secret from last issue was that some guy named Doc Brass and his friends built a quantum computer in 1945 which Planetary now has access to. Doc Brass managed to survive until 1999 because he no longer eats, breathes, shits, sleeps, or gets erections.

• Oh! We also learned that Planetary isn't first and foremost an organization concerned with saving the world. They're archaeologists collecting hidden knowledge and secret artifacts. For what purpose? That's part of the mystery! Especially since we don't know who the Fourth Man is, the secret guy funding the whole organization. I think it might be Elijah Snow!¹

• This issue begins with a team of Japanese scientists visiting Monster Island.

I think the auto-translator thinks it's a poet. Or maybe this guy just speaks this way.

• I'm not really much of a Mel Brooks fan but I recently re-watched History of the World Part I because it was leaving HBO at the end of the month and I probably hadn't seen it since I was ten. The only joke I really remembered from it was Moses dropping one of the slates and saying, "I bring you fifteen . . . er, ten commandments!" But I think even people who haven't seen the movie remember that bit! I think two bits made me laugh out loud during the whole movie (although I appreciated a bunch of stuff, like the Inquisition song and dance routine). The first was when the Romans began doing the "Lindicus" and the other during the French Revolution (a truly tedious ending to the movie. Harvey Korman's talents are wasted in it) when the Piss Boy acting as king tries to flee the King's bedroom when the mob comes for him and he runs down a production hallway that gets smaller and smaller because it was designed to look like a massive space. I don't think either of those bits were meant to be truly hilarious but my brain is stupid².

• The man speaking in that panel probably does often speak that way as he insists on being called "The Master Storyteller". I guess maybe they aren't scientists? That was probably a racist assumption, assuming the Japanese were STEM guys and not Arts and Literature people.

• I don't think Master Storyteller uses the term but they've come to this island because of its liminal nature. Weird that Ellis wasn't all over throwing that word around. I guess it just didn't have the same traction in 1999 as it does today, probably thanks to the Backrooms.

• Oh, the island is liminal because it belongs to neither Japan or Russia but is claimed by both. It's a nowhere place, a "political football⁵". Also I think it's full of dead monsters!

• Master Storyteller and his followers have come to this island to plan a revolution and take control of Japan. I don't know why they think they're so fucking bad-ass. But instead of making plans, they shit themselves.

Me leaning over to you and whispering in your ear, "That's Mothra."

• Jakita, Elijah, and The Drummer head over to Japan to visit the Tokyo Planetary offices. Me, being smart: "Probably to investigate the dead, giant monsters on that liminal island!" Me, patting myself on the back: "Nobody has ever lived who has been as perceptive as you, my sweet lover."

• Jakita makes a joke about The Drummer being mentally ill and then The Drummer does something mentally ill. I'm guessing The Fourth Man hasn't put any money toward an HR Department?

• We learn Elijah Snow speaks Japanese when he threatens to kick the top of the head off of Shinya Fukuda, the operations manager and only employee of the Tokyo Field Office. Really, really thinking a Planetary HR Department might be something the organization should look into⁶.

• Planetary already knows about Monster Island. Jakita has been there before with Elijah's predecessor. They've been called out to nab the Master Storyteller and his acolytes before they discover the monsters and tell the world about them.

Is it good or bad that I'm getting massive "I'm basically The Drummer" vibes?

• When I was in Japan in 1997, I was not fascinated by insta-print cameras that made stickers out of the pictures. But that's because those weren't yet a thing or I just didn't run into them. What I was fascinated by were the photo booths that didn't just give you pictures but stickers of your pictures. It was a few years later that I saw my first one in the states. At Archie McPhee's in Seattle, if I remember correctly.

• I also like to stick things to my forehead. Is it time for corroborating photos?

Me in 1997 (before Japan) with a guinea pig sticker stuck to my forehead.


Me in 2013 with a Black Diamond stuck to my forehead. Okay, I think it was a Purple Heart. Whatever.

• Those are the only easily accessible recorded moments where I stuck something to my forehead. The amount of times I did it and it wasn't documented are uncountable. Because I don't know how many times I did it.

• Elijah drops a hint that he knows more about Jakita than he's let on previously. And by "more", I guess I mean "anything" because supposedly he didn't know who she was when they first met in that diner. But now he seems to know that she smoke a single cigarette every couple of years.

• The Master Storyteller and his crew discover more dead monsters. They discover Ghidrah's skeleton encased in rock and the corpse of Godzilla (or, more probably, Minya (as a teenager)).

• Jakita shows off a couple of her powers as they hunt Master Storyteller: incredible eyesight and Flash-level speed.

• Hell breaks loose when Master Storyteller blows the head off one of his minions. This causes the Japanese military stationed on the island and who had been keeping a close eye on the invaders to show themselves and try to arrest the men. Realizing that they won't be leaving alive, Master Storyteller shoots a bag at his feet releasing nerve gas into the air and killing everybody.

• Jakita panics and turns to flee. I guess she's not immune to nerve gas! Or she's worried about Elijah although he just dissipates the gas with his cold powers. It's science or something.

• After everybody is dead and their job has been finished for them by the nerve gas, Jakita explains the monsters to Elijah to the best of her ability.

Note the flag patches on the soldier's uniform. America⁷ dick deep in this shit too.

• With all the soldiers guarding the island currently dead, Jakita and Elijah head off to loot the international base of all their tech. Some of that tech has to do with how the guards materialized instantly when Master Storyteller got gun happy.

• On the way to the base, Rodan flies over their heads and Jakita gets a happy hard-on over the fact that the monsters have apparently not all died out.

The Ranking
This comic book is so damn good at being a comic book that you might have missed that each of the first two issues are a complete story in themselves while also building an intriguing and fascinating world! Oh, you didn't miss that? Well, fuck you, aren't you the clever one? I'm not sure how much "Action!" and "Terror!" were in this comic, as the cover claimed, but it definitely had a lot of "Fun!" Reading Planetary is going to force me to publicly apologize for all of the times I insulted the WildStorm universe and its fans, isn't it?! I don't think I'm prepared for that level of humbling! I want to keep judging people for liking WildStorm!


__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ I know the math doesn't work out because then he'd be the third and fourth man. But my brain thinks it remembers something so I wrote what my brain thinks it remembered. It's probably wrong because it's a fucking stupid brain².
² I am not stupid! Your³ stupid!
³ Ha ha! Idiot. Its⁴ "you're"!
⁴ Fucking moron! Is the penis spelling for you now?!
⁵ Since I took that phrase directly from Master Storyteller, I'm assuming he means a political soccer ball. Just trying to clarify that for the dumb Americans reading this.
⁶ I'm joking! We all know HR Departments are mostly political and if you've got a problem in the office, it'll only get solved if you're buddies with people in Human Resources. I once had a manager cry during my work review because she noted that I wasn't trying to be friends with her. I did not get my regularly scheduled raise. I did not go to HR because my boss's sister was head of HR.
⁷ And Russia! The Russian flag can be seen in a different panel.

Planetary #1 (April 1999)

Planetary #1 (April 1999)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Bill O'Neil, and Laura Depuy Martin
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

• I don't actually own the first issue of this series for some reason so I'll be reading the version reprinted in All Over the World and Other Stories. The good thing about this is it begins with an introduction by Alan Moore! And it isn't 1266 pages either! It's a mere two pages!

• I didn't mean that "1266 pages" bit to sound like a critique of Jerusalem. I fucking loved Jerusalem. I loved it so much that when I finished it, I thought, "This book demands to be read twice. But fuck if I'm going to read it a second time." And then maybe a year or two later, I picked it up off of my shelf to just get a little taste of it and WHAMMO! I'd read it a second time. Great fucking book. But it is long and it has teeny, tiny type so I think it's actually longer than you'd think it is. So what I was getting at with the page count commentary was just this: Fuck yeah! Two pages of pure Alan Moore injected directly into my brain? I can read two pages lickety split!¹

• I did not shout "Let's go!" like a piece of shit Twitch streamer before reading the essay.

• I shouted it like a cool and noble Twitch streamer.

• Alan Moore's theme for his introduction is the point of time in which he's given to write the introduction and what that means for Planetary: the very end of the 20th Century blossoming into the 21st. I hate to do this to Moore and cut his entire introduction down into one main line but, well, I'm going to anyway. Probably because I don't really feel anything, hate or love. Here's the line: [Planetary] is at once concerned with everything that comics were and everything that comics could be, all condensed into a perfect jeweled and fractal snowflake." That is all ye know about this comic, and all ye need to know. Bitches.

• Writing about this comic is going to expose my severe lack of comic book knowledge and history, especially that of Marvel. But that's not going to stop me because I'm a sociopathic narcissist with a driving need to communicate to the void. The Non-Certified Wife hears more than enough of my artsy-fartsy thoughts so I try to make sure this blog takes the brunt of them.

• The issue begins in a lone diner in the desert surrounded by not other buildings like you might expect. It's just all by its lonesome. Like a greasy oasis. Is this the diner that the Titans visit in the HBO series? Did I miss some Planetary Easter Eggs while watching it?!

• Was it in the final season of the Titans television show where we got a glimpse of a whole bunch of DC's other worlds? And one of those scenes was just Grant Morrison looking at the camera. But because Grant Morrison looks more like Lex Luthor than the Titans Lex Luthor, 99% of the audience was all, "Oh hey! The real Lex! What's he up to? Hopefully he's not vomiting snakes too! Ha ha!"

• The story begins with Jakita Wagner and Elijah Snow meeting for the first time at the end of the 20th Century. She's got a job for him.

Elijah doesn't mean he wants to change having spent a decade alone, just to be clear. He wants to change having eaten at that diner for the last decade.

• The job is a bit vague. Elijah Snow knows things about the 20th Century that most everybody else doesn't. Jakita Wagner also, presumably, knows some secrets. But she wants to know more. She wants to know them all! And somehow this grouchy old dude who makes everything cold can help.

• Elijah gets set up in the New York offices of Planetary. Apparently they've got offices all over the world since they call the New York office the, um, New York office. And their organization is called, you know, Planetary.

• With a fresh clean tailored suit on him, Elijah's ready to learn a little bit about the organization. It's a three man team if you don't count The Fourth Man which nobody does because he just pays for everything. Also nobody knows who he is. The second man, assuming Jakita is the first man², is The Drummer. Jakita isn't ready to talk about the original third man whom Elijah is replacing.

I'd be willing to bet Ellis's original script read "stop him from fucking television sets" but since I don't own Absolute Planetary, I don't have access to a copy of the script.

• Elijah's first mission with the team takes him to the Adirondacks where a mysterious complex has been found in deep in the mountains. The entrance was disguised with a hologram. It's also the last known location of Doc Brass.

• Who is Doc Brass? I don't know. Some slightly-off version of some pulp hero, I guess? Probably Doc Savage since he was called "the man of bronze" in George Pal's 1975 Doc Savage movie. Remember, this series is about discussing, playing with, and altering well-established characters in comics and pulp stories. There's a reason Alan Moore was picked to write the introduction³, you know.

• Doctor Axel Brass was born on January 1st, 1900. Probably should have been 1901 if he's a real millennium baby but I guess that's just me picking nits instead of simply understanding that 1900 is way cooler than 1901.

• Doc Brass disappeared on January 1st, 1945. The only reason anybody knows anything about him or his inventions or his explorations or his adventures were from a diary kept by an associate of his. Planetary got their hands on the diaries and thought, "Kor! What's this?! Who the fuck is Doc Brass?!" And if Planetary doesn't know about something, it must be super important and super secret. Because they know so much of the secret history of the world that learning something new means they're onto something that was meant to be hidden.

• Soon, we get Jakita's exciting secret origin.

See? It's exciting! Because it's about keeping her from being bored!

• The first thing Jakita and Elijah find in Doc Brass's bunker (The Drummer remained on the helicopter because he's a slacker) is a hall of trophies. A winged skeleton labeled "The Vulcanin. Raven God." A ship that looks like a pussy called "The Hull of the Charnel Ship." A black mannequin labeled "The Vestments of the Black Crow King." And five alien statues (or taxidermized aliens?) called "The Murder Colonels." Are these analogous to any characters in fiction? Are they twisted objects and characters from Doc Savage novels or comics? I don't know! I think they're just meant to be mysterious and flavorful! Mmm! Delicious!

• The second thing they discover is Doc Brass. Alive. And, well, not well, really.

Gross⁴.

• The "they" in Doc Brass's statement in the final panel above are Ellis's version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen³. Doc Savage as Doc Brass working with several other fictional "heroes" and "villains". Tarzan. Maybe The Shadow? Some flying ace guy. Possibly Thomas Edison (the Tom Strong looking guy?). Fu Manchu, maybe? And a West Coast guy in a suit just called "Jimmy" who might deal in strangeness.

• These seven icons have gathered together to discuss the creation of a quantum computer. Ellis has Doc Brass, Thomas Edison, and Fu Manchu explain to the readers of 1999 what a quantum computer is and how it would differ from the regular computers we all know and love. And also how they believe reality is a quantum computer where every state of being, all potential, exists in a constant state of uncertainty which creates the reality we observe.

• Doc Brass and his team created and programmed the quantum computer to end World War II in mere seconds. It would create every possible reality after being fed the variables and spit out the reality that would match the reality they were living in and send it in the proper direction to end the war.

• What they didn't realize was that the quantum computer was not just solving a problem, it was creating every other reality. Creating and discarding them as they were seen as not the answer. And in those realities, time was going by normally. So it was creating and destroying worlds. Near the end, just as it was about to solve the problem, a group of heroes on a doomed world inside the quantum computer looked out and saw the people responsible for their demise. And they did what heroes do: they tried to stop the end of their world.

An alternate version of the Justice League with Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, and Batman.

• Everybody was killed in the subsequent battle except for Doc Brass. He remained after the battle because the computer was still running and he was afraid some other threat might come through. Oh, and also his legs were right fucked.

• So by the end of Planetary's first mission, they have discovered a secret organization, seven heroic people they'd never known about, a high technology secret base in the Adirondacks, and a quantum computer. And Doc Brass, of course! That's a pretty good haul for their first adventure as a team!

The Ranking!
Just so good! Archaeology hasn't been this fun since that guy in the fedora shoved Nazis into propellers and ran them over on motorcycles! One nice touch in the battle with the alternate Justice League is when The Flash is killed by Edison's ray gun, he basically dies like he did in Crisis on Infinite Earths. I'm not sure how the rest died but I think they were all just plain riddled with bullets. Green Lantern's proxy, Blue Fist (or whatever), definitely was shot down by The Flying Ace. I don't know how alternate Batman didn't kill everybody. Pretty shit Batman on that world, I guess.


__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ This bullet point should have been a footnote on the previous bullet point and not its own bullet point.
² Woman. You know what I mean. Don't get like that! Just try to remember that "man" is inclusive of all genders while "woman" is specific! Unless you're calling a trans-woman a man and then you're just being a jerk.
³ The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen technically came out before Planetary. Both had debuted earlier in the year Moore wrote the introduction. The similarities are mostly that each of the creators capitalize on the nostalgia of the characters and stories they grew up with. Also that they're about long-running secret organizations with revolving casts. Moore, of course, uses famous characters as his members; Ellis just made up some people. Unless The Drummer was based on Peter Criss?
⁴ I don't mean to suggest all disabled or injured people are gross! Just this one because ew look at his legs! Ugh! huurrrr . . . hurrrr . . . oh man, I almost just threw up. And, yes, I transcribed the sound I made!