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!




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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"?!




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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.

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?

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!

Planetary #10 (June 2000)

This issue looks like a fun time.

Planetary #10 (June 2000)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura Depuy Martin, David Baron, and Ryan Cline
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

This issue is called "Magic & Loss". Isn't that the name of the four panel comic with the guy rushing into the hospital to see his girlfriend who just lost her pregnancy? Or is that just called "Loss" and everybody thinks it's "Magic"? Or the opposite of magic? Science?

Maybe I should begin again but more confidently. This issue is called "Magic & Loss" which reminds me of that heartbreaking comic strip that everybody applauded as one of the most sensitive portrayals of a miscarriage in comedy web cartoon strips. Nobody ever made fun of it and it never became an attempt to embarrass the artist or his work. Giants in the field like that bald human-sized thumb and his scrawny hunchbacked friend didn't shit all over it in an attempt to distract from their dick wolf comic that they'd publish two years later. Nobody attacked Tim Buckley and his superb artistic expression at every opportunity and nobody's feelings were ever hurt and everybody on the Internet held hands with everybody else forever after. And everybody was happy except the two people on either side of Jerry Holkins. Because I imagine his hands are both sweaty and sticky.

Whew. That was much better. I saved it! I'm the hero!

This first page is just as depressing as the cover, isn't it?

Seems to me if you put "Loss" in the title of your comic book and/or strip, you drastically change the tone of the thing. We're we having alternate history fun in this comic book just a few issues ago? Giant monsters, giant ants, radioactive ghost women, guys named Leather, God's Hong Kong Cum Sock, First, Second, Third, and Fourth Men, and all the cool science fiction stuff that I've already forgotten? Why's everybody suddenly got to start dying? I bet I should blame it all on Ambrose Chase's reality distortion field. He activated it at the end of 1997 and everything just went off the rails after that. Now I have to witness Alternate Dimension Superman, Alternate Dimension Green Lantern, and Alternate Dimension Wonder Woman die?!

Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. They could just be tossing all of their shit on the floor because they're about to fuck each other.

Or the reality: the items in the previous panel were all part of Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four's collection. The Planetary Clean-up Crew are taking apart Dowling's lab which the Field Team secured a few issues ago when Jakita was thrown out of the window and Elijah kicked Leather in the balls.

Sidebar: I have a theory that one of the reasons Gen-X have become the worst voting demographic is that, aside from so many of them already being the bad dudes in the John Hughes' movies, is that when Covid and the vaccine came about, they were just getting to the age where cancer risk increased. So they began seeing friends and family being diagnosed with cancer simply because they were aging into that risk group. But what they saw was a bunch of people getting the Covid vaccine and then being diagnosed with cancer and they were all, "A-ha! I am the great British Detective John Holmes! I know exactly what caused this cancer!" Another part of my theory is that a lot of people are just stupid morons. And, funny enough, all of the dumbest guys I was friends with when I was younger were all the ones to fall for Fox News propaganda. Who would have thought?! End Sidebar.

Was that a sidebar? I wished I'd watched more lawyer television shows so I'd know. The only one I ever watched regularly was L.A. Law and that was because I loved Larry Drake's character. He was always bringing them doughnuts!

After some techs look at the pile of super hero accessories and before they piss on it (or whatever lowly blue collar workers do to things on the job¹), Warren Ellis turns this issue into the origin stories he would have written for Superman, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman.

This is gay sex so powerful that the orgasm destroys Krypton.

Warren Ellis's take on Kryptonians is that they're so arrogant and proud that they destroy their planet by sending their art, poetry, and history into space to be enjoyed by all the other civilizations. Krypton explodes because every launch uses a gravitational system that destabilizes a black hole at the center of the planet. The launch by these two Kryptonians — the ship carrying Superfoetus — is the last straw on the Nightwing's back. The planet implodes. Seems like Alternate Dimension Superman, being responsible for the death of Krypton, is going to need more therapy than Alternate Dimension Batman (whose origin we're not going to get. At least not here).

Alternate Dimension Green Lantern is actually a Blue Lantern and actually uses a lantern instead of a ring. I guess they haven't gotten to the point in their organization's existence where somebody said, "Why are we carrying these stupid lanterns around? Can't we refine this shit down to something smaller? Like a brooch or a pocket watch?"

I think one of these Blue Lanterns is Arseface!

Judging by the group shot, it seems each individual member is allowed to modify the lantern for their own ease of use. But it's still essentially a "lantern". Even when it's on a guy's finger!

Alternate Dimension Wonder Woman decides to visit mankind's world from her secret island because she got tired of watching them fuck space with their rocket dicks.

Alternate Dimension Wonder Woman's Mother doesn't know about Artemis.²

Man. That one image of Wonder Woman looking back over her shoulder makes me wish John Cassaday had done a Wonder Woman run.³

Timeout: I just realized I should be selling my comic runs as I read them so I can afford to buy more old comic runs to read! I should create a WhatNot account?! Time in!

After the origins, we learn how the Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four dealt with these powerful beings. Leather incinerated Alternate Dimension Baby Superman and stole his cape. Dowling captured and dissected Alternate Dimension Green Lantern who, interestingly enough, has an, um, uh, well, err . . . you know.

I'm blushing so deeply right now!

Dowling mentions selling the Blue Lantern's lantern to Henry Bendix so that establishes that that jerk knows about Artemis. Or at the very least, the Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four.

Kim, the Nazi daughter of the Nazi, kills Alternate Dimension Wonder Woman as soon as she steps out from the shield keeping Alternate Dimension Paradise Island safe. So what we've learned is that the Earth where Planetary resides never had a chance to learn about hope and inspiration through super heroes. It's timeline was kept firmly pointed at shadowy bullshit, dark futures, and shepherding the masses into the slaughterhouse by the Artemis Project and its four mad keepers.

The Ranking!
There was one page left which I hadn't read when I got ready to write this ranking bit that doesn't have any real identity as a separate section of the review. I know it says The Ranking! right there as a demarcation to show that we've gotten to the point where I assess what I've just written but do I ever really do that? Fuck no. That's, like, bullshit review work where you suddenly have to repeat yourself over and over again using review terms and standard review tropes that everybody understands. I just want to point out that my assessment of this story was how this "timeline was kept firmly pointed at shadowy bullshit, dark futures, and shepherding the masses into the slaughterhouse" was done before I read Elijah Snow's final word on his realization that Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four has been actively keeping his world from hope, joy, and enlightenment.

See? Sometimes I comprehend the things I read!

I forget who John Stone is but we'll find out next issue, I guess. From the cover of Issue #11, it looks like John Stone is some kind of James Bond or Human Target figure. Maybe it's Martian Manhunter, eh?!


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¹ I'm pretending I don't know even though I've never worked a non-blue collar job in my entire life. It's just that if I talked about jerking off on the items during some boring downtime, people might begin to look at warehouse workers and burger flippers differently. Even if they shouldn't.
² I'm talking about the evil Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four's Artemis which has basically established a base on the moon as well as Mars but if you want to think I'm talking about our 2026 Artemis, that works as well.
³ Do I need to search out The Wonder Woman 100 Project just for Cassaday's Wonder Woman cover art?!

Planetary #9 (April 2000)

Now playing in a fictional comic book that treats fiction as reality: Planet Fiction!

Planetary #9 (April 2000)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, David Baron, and Michael Heisler
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

Because our time as human beings is finite, every interest we take during that time means we're sacrificing a potential interest in every other interesting thing. That was an obvious statement but it led to me thinking about what our interests project to others about ourselves, our choices, and, ultimately, our secret inner being. I suppose I'm just using deconstruction¹ to analyze others by decentering the very thing that they provide as their center. Sure, nobody is just one thing they love or embrace or build their lives around. But when you actively, and on purpose (which seems maybe slightly embarrassing?), portray yourself as "a Disney adult", you're telling me about the parts of you that are missing — which *must* be missing — for you to embrace such a paltry and corporatized persona.² I'm going to assume that you've never read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (at least not while thinking about Goofy and Minnie to such an extent that the words you read never actually reached your brain³). Not that Heart of Darkness means anything here (or does it? Why would I have picked it? What could you possibly extrapolate from my choice of such an ambiguous and — let's face it — fairly boring text?); it's just if you get off on Disney coffee in your Disney mugs on a sunny Disney morning in your Disney pajamas⁴, you might as well set up a flashing neon "No Vacancy" sign on your head.

Sorry! Sorry! I didn't mean for this to become a "Let's bash Disney adults" bit! It's not the fault of Disney lovers that their love of Disney had to become an all-consuming passion thanks to the Internet! Some of you older folks remember the days when you could be the biggest fan of something without it consuming your entire life because you only had to prove your love of that thing to, at most, one or two dozen other people. But now with Instagram and Tik Tok and Facebook and Bluesky, you really need to ratchet up your fandom to unheard of levels. So that's not helping with the amount of things you're missing out on to your top interests in life. I feel bad for kicking Disney adults when they're probably already huddled on the ground in a fetal position because they saw me coming their way with my Kaiser Blade of Epic Judgment at the ready. I feel bad! I just meant to say that no matter your interest, vapid or academic or philosophical or hedonist, it just means the energy you're expending on that interest cannot go to engaging with other things. It's simply impossible to engage with everything life has to offer. And, often, the thing you are noticeably engaged in tells other people things you probably aren't engaged in. Like if you're a Crypto bro, you're probably not big on social justice. Or community. Or anything that doesn't have to do with you explicitly and your extra-fake currency (being that, you know, all currency is a fantastic metaphor which we've all agreed to simply to make living among others easier).

My interest in comic books and self-pleasure probably tells you more about me than you'd like to know (but not enough to believe that I'd ever jerk off into a sink. Why would you even think that?! So gross). But I have to admit that sometimes knowing what a person is missing out on isn't as easy as when you see somebody super worked up by Conservative politics or Christianity. You always know what parts of humanity and our shared experience are missing from them! Like when a person I know is so into music that they recognize more bands than I ever knew existed. What have they given up to have listened to so much music? I have no idea! I couldn't even guess! I just know that the whole of music⁵ is something I've missed out on due to my pursuit of literature, comic books, and computer roleplaying games. Imagine how much more music I could have experienced in my life if I hadn't replayed Wizardry uncountable times?! And, sure, I could have listened to music as I played but that wouldn't have helped because music played while you're doing other things becomes almost nothing. You cease to hear it on an experiential, memory inducing level and it just becomes the thing that's happening around you as you concentrate on the actual thing you're doing.

I'm not sure I've worked through this thought on a level that would be acceptable to a newspaper editor or a college English teacher but I'm done with it now⁶. This introduction to my comic book review was brought to you by the term "Planet Fiction" and The Pixies' version of Neil Young's "Winterlong". I'm just providing the alchemical ingredients that brought me to that line of thinking. And now boredom and my short attention span are moving me away from it!

Hmm. I wonder if the idea of a "line of thinking" is a way to view some of the themes in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon?

This is how it begins. Beautiful.

Ellis and Cassaday dedicated this issue to Grant Morrison for some reason. I wonder if Alan Moore read that and let out a massive fart⁷?

The story begins with a fictional farmhouse pierced by a fictional rocket under an actual moon (fictionally stylized). Is this a retelling of the Superman story? I don't remember! The only thing I remember is the title "Planet Fiction" which excited something primal in me, as if the cells of my body hold the memory of how great this issue was but my brain couldn't be bothered to remember because it was thinking, "I wonder how quickly we could defeat Werdna if we started up another run of Wizardry?"

This story begins in England, 1997. So if it is a retelling of the Superman story, it'll be more critical of class consciousness than "a boy from rural America would obviously be honest and compassionate and, um, hate queers, probably". That third thing wasn't supposed to be there but then my cynicism was all, "Fuck that rural people propaganda bullshit that they're honest and hard working and the backbone of the country!"

I just realized that I should have wished for the death of my cynicism when that genie gave me three wishes. But no! Instead, I'm stuck with these three eight inch tall pianists. Stupid idiot!

Ma and Pa Kentshire were never got a chance to teach little Clarkson about compassion, responsibility, and how shit Margaret Thatcher was.

The ship seems to be one of Britain's own having returned from a mission to who-knows-where. It contains one more crewmember than when it departed. It crashed in Norfolk on its return, mystifying the team behind the mission. They suspect that one of the "creative team" who was from Norfolk wrote this return into the mission knowing that the "creative team" would be silenced by the government to ensure secrecy of this fictional mission. Is the UK government now exploring fictional worlds? Is that the actual final frontier?! To go into the space of our dreams? To explore art? To rise above the mire of reality and learn about ourselves through our artistic endeavors?

Hmm. Sounds about right, actually.

Before the ship can be opened by the UK Government, mission central is breached by Planetary.

This is 1997. Elijah Snow is still self-exiled to a desert in Nevada. Meet Ambrose Chase.

I decided to go with the actual page from the comic book when introducing Ambrose Chase instead of the first thing my brain wanted me to use to introduce Ambrose Chase because I told my brain, "Nobody would fucking understand what you're doing, you stupid piece of shit." If you're into seeing my first take on things, enjoy the next image. If you don't give a shit⁸, just skip it and begin reading again after the next image.

This is 1997. Elijah Snow is still self-exiled to a desert in Nevada. Meet Ambrose Chase.

Ambrose Chase has a reality distortion field. That means he, um, distorts reality. It's good for not getting shot and people thinking you have a massive dong. Even with what sounds like an extraordinary power to do whatever he wants, Ambrose realizes Planetary may be in trouble. They know the UK ship has brought back something from Planet Fiction and I'm guessing "warping reality" doesn't mean "warping fiction" so Ambrose might be powerless to whatever came back with (and killed!) the ship's crew.

"Dr. Dowling" is mentioned by the head of Project Fiction as he discusses the project with the creature brought back from the story they created simply to see if they could explore it. Does this mean the UK also has their own "Project Artemis" run by Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four? Is Project Artemis a joint program between white supremacist imperialist nations? Does the fictional person brought back from the fictional world have three eight inch dongs like every fictional person⁹ I create in my stories?

Ambrose, getting overconfident and not relying on his power, gets himself killed. During his death scene, parts of his life flash before the reader's eyes: learning about his power as a kid; consoling Jakita about somebody who's missing (possibly the Fourth Man); raising a baby girl (which might be Jakita's baby) over his head; meeting the Fourth Man (who loves white suits) in 1994; joining the field team as the Third Man.

Doesn't the scientist who overreaches also always die?

Ambrose Chase uses his reality distortion field as he dies and his body disappears. So he's probably not dead then, right?

Jakita kills the overreaching scientist who relies on his singular knowledge of the plot being plot armor. Jakita doesn't give a fuck about the plot so, you know, his plot armor does him know good. She figures they'll sort it out later. And because Jakita leaves the reader slightly unsatisfied by killing the only guy who could end it in a meaningful way, Warren Ellis ends the story with a small information dump.

This sounds like a word problem. Should I be able to come up with a syllogism that answers the mysteries so far from these four premises?

The Ranking!
Interesting issue that wasn't really a complete story which might be why my brain didn't fully remember it but my body remembered it was important. This is just a reminder that Planetary existed before Elijah Snow joined and the history that he missed is important. Plus we're given a little puzzle at the end! The Fourth Man missing in 1997 and then Elijah Snow was found in 2000? Elijah Snow has never heard of Ambrose Chase but Ambrose Chase used his reality distorting powers as he died so maybe he caused Snow to forget about his existence? Jakita Wagner was already a member before Chase joined and Chase met the Fourth Man which almost certainly means Jakita met the Fourth Man before he disappeared so she knows more about Elijah than he does¹⁰. And the last premise given, that the fictional creature is still at large, is just, um, foreshadowing for a future encounter, I guess? Probably doesn't actually fit in with the other premises, right?!

Um, anyway, just thought I'd close out with a letter to show that it didn't take the Internet to get Conservative fans angry when their stupid political ideas are called out.

Oh! Poor Mr. Bill "Snowflake" Fartrand needs his safe space!

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¹ Correctly. Or, at least, more correctly than it gets used on tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook.
² This might sound like I'm subtweeting some friend or relation who constantly posts about Disney (and it very well could be) but it's not; I sincerely just picked "Disney adult" off the top of my head as I typed my way through the void of my Abyssian thoughts.
³ I don't mean this as an insult to the person's intelligence! I mean this as that thing we all often do as we read where we know we've gone through the motion and read the words but the meanings of those words didn't actually stick and you suddenly realize, like a literate form of highway hypnosis, that you've missed your exit and you have to go back five or six pages to get back on track. Ugh. That metaphor just caused a ten car pile-up.
⁴ No judgment as I sit in my Hot Topic women's cut Wednesday pajamas, a show that I've never seen but, after discovering that Enid, the other character on the pajamas, is a werewolf, has me pondering looking into it.
⁵ I don't mean I've missed out on "all music" by saying I've missed out on "the whole of music". I mean I've missed out on much of the landscape of music, or the whole of it, because time? Where is it? How do I have so little left to me?!
⁶ Like a cat leaving a still breathing mouse lying on the pavement with its guts hanging out.
⁷ Non-magical
⁸ Although if this is the case, how did you even read this far into the "review"? These reviews are nothing but my stupid takes!
⁹ Yes. Every single one.
¹⁰ Still working on the assumption that my memory is correct and Elijah is the Fourth Man unless that's not my memory at all and just the simple deduction which the comic book is leading everybody to.

Planetary #8 (February 2000)

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.

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!"

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?

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!


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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.