Planetary, v. 1: All over the World and Other Stories

Collects: Planetary #1-6 (1998-9)

Released: March 2000 (DC / Wildstorm)

Format: 160 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9781563896484

What is this?: A trio of archaeologists of the unknown travel around the world, looking at weird stuff.

The culprits: Writer Warren Ellis and artist John Cassaday

Do you like action? Fast-paced plots? Interesting characters? Then Planetary, v. 1: All over the World and Other Stories is not for you.

Those questions aren’t important, though. You’re either interested when you hear the creators are Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, or you’re not. And make no mistake: this is very much a Warren Ellis book. It’s full of big, high concept ideas, investigated by hard-bitten, cynical people who smoke. Ellis has refined the style, but that’s the skeleton version of most of his work.

Ellis’ stories are almost entirely built on fictional analogues and familiar genres. Recurring character Doc Brass is strongly reminiscent of pulp hero Doc Savage. Island Zero, in issue #2, reminds readers of Toho’s Monster Island. Issue #3 is a Hong-Kong action movie crossed with a ghost story, although it is nowhere near as cool as that sounds. Since Planetary started in the late ‘90s, Ellis is beginning to lash out at superheroes, and All around the World features superhero analogues that border on the antagonistic. In issue #6, Ellis sets up the Fantastic Four (Voyagers Four?) as major villains, and in the preview issues, reprinted as a bonus, Ellis rewrites the origin of the Hulk. (I personally prefer the massive cancer beast Ellis cast the Hulk as in Ruins to Planetary’s indestructible monster.) And Ellis ties Planetary in with his other Wildstorm work, The Authority.

There’s nothing wrong with using well-worn ideas, especially when having new ideas or new characters intersect with them. In All over the World, Ellis introduces the Planetary team, a trio of “archaeologists” of the fantastic who investigate the weird under the mandate of the mysterious and fabulously rich Fourth Man. But they refuse to do much of anything. In the first four issues, everything works itself out before they get a chance do anything — although Elijah Snow, the new guy, does promise to help someone at some future date. Issue #5 is a conversation between Snow and Doc Brass. Only in #6 does Planetary do anything that poses any danger or involves effort beyond boarding a plane. There are hints and whispers of a larger conspiracy, but there is nothing compelling about it. If you are not captivated by Ellis’s reconceptualization of those older ideas, then there is little in this book that will interest you.

Each “adventure” seems unconnected, with little to suggest the links between them that is the hallmark of serial comic book stories. Even the action in #6 — which should be a welcome relief — is connected to #5 only tenuously, almost as if there is an issue missing.

Planetary features the early art of John Cassaday. How early? The author bios at the end mention only his work on Union Jack, X-Men / Alpha Flight, and Desperadoes. I think it’s safe to say those works are mere footnotes in his career now. His designs for the protagonists and Doc Brass are memorable — except for Jakita Wagner, the leader of the Planetary team, I immediately recognized them, more than a decade after the last time I had read an issue of Planetary. His work with Hong Kong ghosts in #3 manages to balance the ethereal and the real impressively. His one-page illustrations of Doc Brass’s career in #5 are fabulous and easily the highlight of All over the World. However, either the script or Cassaday himself seems to lack confidence in the art. The layouts rarely seem to include the spreads that would allow an artist to cut loose on Ellis’s big ideas, and occasionally important reveals are minimized or kept off the page entirely: the Hulk analogue in the preview story, the monsters on Island Zero, the spaceship in #4. DC even replaced his vivid original cover of the trade with the drab one pictured above.

Planetary has a great reputation, but I didn’t see why in All over the World. There are a lot of ideas here, but faith in Ellis is the only way a reader would believe they would coalesce into anything.

Rating: (2.5 of 5)

The Three Stages of Man: Stage Two: Wolverine: Not Dead Yet

Collects: Wolverine #119-22 (1997-8)

Released: April 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 120 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785137665

What is this?: Wolverine must confront an old friend / threat from his past. Shocking, right?

The culprits: Writer Warren Ellis and artist Leinil Francis Yu

Continuing from the last post, we move on to the next stage in the three stages of man, as exemplified by Wolverine:

Stage Two: The Badass, as represented by Wolverine: Not Dead Yet.

After discovering who he is, it is time for man to be the best he that he can be at what he does, even if it isn’t pretty. If that means composing symphonies and choral works, so be it. If your burden is that you have an outstanding mechanical aptitude, it’s up to you to embrace, not shirk, that destiny. If, like Wolverine, killing a lot of people is what you do, then you need to do it, and do it as often as possible.

Striving to reach the pinnacle of your profession is not without its dangers. If you are one of the greatest composers of your time, a rival might try to drive you insane and then kill you with rheumatic fever. If you are a great mechanic, a rival might decide to crush or lop off your hands. And if you are one of the great killers of the world, well, another great killer might decide to end your life, especially if you left the man alive after trying to kill him.

I mean, it just stands to reason.

Yet another old acquaintance coming back into Logan’s life to kill him / get killed is a hoary trope that was getting old even when writer Warren Ellis and artist Leinil Francis Yu collaborated on this four-issue storyline in 1997. Somehow, though, Ellis makes this idea work. Wolverine is the X-Man best suited to Ellis’s approach, a low-power hero with a boost from weird science and haunted by a conspiracy. Ellis doesn’t touch upon either of those elements, but they are still in the background, in their way.

Not Dead Yet comes at an odd time in Wolverine’s history. After finishing the main story of the Operation: Zero Tolerance crossover in Wolverine, Larry Hama ended his 80+-issue run on the title. His last storyline was cut off in the middle — not that it looked very promising, to be honest — and suddenly the man who had defined what kind of stories the book would tell was gone. The luster gone from Hama, whose stories had been going downhill for a year or more, Marvel went for their newest badass, Ellis.

It wouldn’t be an Ellis story without a character from the British Isles; in this case, it’s McLeish, a Scottish killer from Logan’s past. In four issues, Ellis has to establish McLeish as a threat and disguise that most of the story is just faceless mooks trying to kill Wolverine. (Not faceless as in “wearing ninja masks,” but faceless as in “not very important” — an important distinction in a Wolverine story) Ellis does this masterfully, alternating between flashbacks to the charismatic but evil McLeish in Hong Kong and rapid action in the present. The middle issues are either fight scenes, with adamantium bullets and auto accidents, or McLeish ranting about killing. OK, there’s also a love interest who buys it, but that’s fine: Logan is also probably the best there is at getting former lovers killed,⁶¹ which we must agree isn’t very pretty.

Still, if Yu wasn’t an excellent with action scenes, then there’s no way this storyline works. Fortunately, Yu is up to the task, with action shots that seem to pop off the page. (A little bloodless, though.) Yu’s first American professional comic work was Wolverine #113, and I remember Usenet going crazy for him at the time. (I remember Usenet. I’m old.) His McLeish is threatening, despite not doing anything violent on the page, and slightly deranged without being cartoony.

My main complaint with this story is the price. Twenty dollars for four issues? Even if it is a hardback, that’s much too much. This Marvel Premiere Edition adds almost an issue’s worth of Yu’s other Wolverine covers, which does help — but it doesn’t help that much.

Rating: (4 of 5)

Next: Stage Three: Wolverine First Class: Ninjas, Gods, and Divas (forthcoming)

Nextwave: Agents of HATE, v. 1: This Is What They Want

Collects: Nextwave: Agents of HATE #1-6 (2006)

Released: January 2007 (Marvel)

Format: 144 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785122784

And checking in from what seems like the Quesada / Jemas reign at Marvel is Nextwave: Agents of HATE, v. 1: This Is What They Want.

Well, it feels like something Quesada / Jemas would push to fruition, something made when Grant Morrison made the X-Men new and Peter Milligan and Mike Allred were X-Statix, but it’s not — it’s actually a Warren Ellis / Stuart Immonen collaboration from 2006.

Nextwave is gloriously over the top, full of explosions and punching. Nominally, Nextwave is a team of heroes battling HATE, an antiterrorism group similar to SHIELD and funded by the Beyond Corp.,which is essentially a terrorist group. I say “nominally” because the book is more interested in making fun of the heroes and Dirk Anger (leader of HATE and a thinly veiled Nick Fury stand-in) and having fun with the concept of superheroes.

Fortunately, Ellis is hilarious at it. He has to mangle the characters he uses to make them funnier, but that’s all right — everything he does to them will be forgotten whenever someone else wants to use them, and Nextwave doesn’t seem to be in continuity anyway. Monica Rambeau, the former Captain Marvel and Photon, is the leader who won’t stop banging on about how things were better when she was leading the Avengers. Meltdown, formerly of the old X-Force, is made into a Britney Spears type, in that she’s gone from stereotypical trailer trash to a shallow, consumeristic pretty trailer trash. Aaron Stark, Machine Man, is on a robot power kick who calls humans “fleshy ones” while being constantly mocked by his teammates. Elsa Bloodstone is an uber-lethal monster hunter; I have no idea how Ellis’s characterization accords with her previous appearances. She still has her dignity and is, not coincidentally, the resident Brit on the team.

The less said about Captain *!?*, the better.

Even though I find Nextwave hilarious, it’s not perfect. Ellis is adolescently obsessed with Fin Fang Foom, a giant dragon who wears shorts; Meltdown using the phrase “tick tick tick Boom” whenever she uses her timebombs grows tiresome as well. And I admit, other than Monica, I’m not sure why it wouldn’t have been better to use new characters instead of changing the old. But as I said, it’s hilarious, and it does no real harm.

The art from Immonen fits well with the title — cartoony but able to tell the story. The style is reminiscent of Samurai Jack, which is appropriate for a story with a lot of the ultraviolence but without realism. (Immonen’s death bears — superdeadly koalas — and Samuroid Batch 23 are simultaneously funny, creepy, and wonderously weird, and he does a great job with all the Beyond Corporation’s bizarre organic weapons.)

Nextwave ran 12 issues; the next TPB will finish off the series. Get it. Get this.

Rating: (4.5 of 5)