"Just Us"

“Just Us”
Excavating, reappraising, and cataloging Planetary early in the 21st Century


[The third in what should be a comprehensive series, both these small essays and the related annotations will not include a summary but will drop spoilers without warning, as necessary. Events and concepts discussed out of their order of first-appearance, and general summaries of stories will not be provided. All of these posts may be subject to severe and dramatic rewrites without notice, as new things occur to me, and of course, I welcome any further annotation suggestions or general feedback at . If I include an annotation derived from someone else, from this point on, I will gladly credit the provider. If I don’t credit an annotation, it means I derived the conclusion myself, or I simply cannot recall where I got the information first.

This project could not exist without the fine work of The Planetary Appreciation Page, the now defunct Warren Ellis Forum, the slowly-defuncting Barbelith messageboard, and the Planetary team of Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy/Martin, John Layman, David Baron, Scott Dunbier, and the many letterers, designers, and other contributors.

This project is dedicated to mystery archeologists everywhere, of every walk and a myriad of tastes, habits, and ingenuities.]


“You people came looking for a mystery,” says Shek Chi-Wai in the third chapter of Planetary, “but there is none. There’s just us.”

Just us.

“Dead Gunfighters”, the third chapter of the series, has the same simple message at its heart that many of the Heroic Bloodshed and Yiqi films of the golden era of Hong Kong action movies: Do right by others, because we’re all we’ve got. Chi-Wai was a man who did right, lived right, and he still died in tragedy, with family and a lover screwed over severely in the process. And he’s still doing right after death, because you aren’t doing it for you but for us. It’s that simple.

See, Chi-Wai is a riff on hero cops, but he’s also an analog for a very particular hero cop, DC Comics’ the Spectre. We forget, looking at the Spectre, that he’s a dead cop, some days. It’s easy, when he’s dressed in white tights (or is that just green shorts and death bleached him?) and a hood, being hit with the whole Earth by a devil on covers like Showcase #61. But that’s what the Spectre is, he’s a dead cop who gets smacked in the face with the whole planet. And, that’s what Chi-Wai apparently has to look forward to every day, each night, the whole of the world, all its joys and everything stupid and wrong, right on the chin like the backhand of an angry drunk just trying to bull past you, none of it for him.

The righteousness and necessity, as expressed in the films Tsui Hark and John Woo excel at, it really means something to me. It resonates. When I saw The Killer in a theatre (double-bill with Peace Hotel), we were the only grouping in that latenight showing who weren’t just using the showing as a pretext for indulging in exhibitionism and voyeurism, making out listening to others get it on. We were riveted. One girl had seen both movies on VHS, I owned The Killer, but we were just as stuck on the screen-happenings as the gal for whom it was all new. Hand in hand in hand through both flicks and full of equal parts swagger and responsibility for the rest of that night. A year before that, a friend of mine had somehow insisted on a John Woo Day while we were in high school, which meant we sat in a classroom watching Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow, all that good stuff, learning more important things than whatever algebra and social studies we might have picked up that day from proper classes.

Because, it’s true what they say; give a man enough guns, he’ll think he’s God. All someone needs to kill is one, though. One gun, one bullet aimed in the right place can change any game, alter almost any course of action. In a world of intimidation, rules and consequences, of saving face and laying down the law, in the panopticon of the world, trust should be resonant, shouldn’t it? If what is worth punishment after death is not the same, in your view, as what is worth it during life, I’d have to ask if you have really thought this through.

It may be too much to ask of most people, to live selflessly in respect to everyone, to first do no harm, and second, do what you see the person next to you cannot do alone. Not everyone can be blamed for, if the moment came, not jumping in to take a bullet for a total stranger. American police forces are not required by law or statute to actively protect everyone, for reasons of this very same unfeasibility. But, if you can’t stand by your friends, your brothers and sisters, and do right by them? When you burn your allies, majorly or casually? That’s something else, isn’t it?


***

[From Volume One, All Over the World and Other Stories

03.00 The cover panel mimics widescreen theatrical aspect ratios, and the scene is mid-action to emphasis not the mid, but the action part.

03.01 Of course, the issue working with Hong Kong action movie tropes has a trailer/teaser.

03.02 The widescreen-mimicking panels here and the general atmosphere allude to Hong Kong action flicks, of the sort that Tsui Hark excels in directing and producing.

03.02.02-04 A cinematic issue about trauma starts with a montage of the injury to the eye motif and spent shells, with a smoking gun present and in hand.

03.03.04 Chi-Wai, who is introduced via his badge, is the combination of HK action flicks and the standards of Chinese ghost stories, combined to make a ghost cop working God’s vengeance… which makes him DC’s the Specter.

03.010.04 The Weekly World News is a real publication. They print mostly good-natured nonsense.

03.11.03 This conflict of music, and the positioning of the Planetary office near a disco is another nod to the HK action movies, particularly Tsui Hark and John Woo.

03.15 The Snowflake (or stack of hard drives, sheaf of pages, et cetera) is here represented as being a massive jar full of people. Reality is a bunch of interrelating two-dimensional planes, but it is also, just us.


[Click here to see further annotations for Planetary]

"This is Holy"

"This is Holy"
Excavating, reappraising, and cataloging Planetary early in the 21st Century

[The second in what should be a comprehensive series, both these small essays and the related annotations will not include a summary but will drop spoilers without warning, as necessary. Events and concepts discussed out of their order of first-appearance, and general summaries of stories will not be provided. All of these posts may be subject to severe and dramatic rewrites without notice, as new things occur to me, and of course, I welcome any further annotation suggestions or general feedback at . If I include an annotation derived from someone else, from this point on, I will gladly credit the provider. If I don’t credit an annotation, it means I derived the conclusion myself, or I simply cannot recall where I got the information first.

This project could not exist without the fine work of The Planetary Appreciation Page, the now defunct Warren Ellis Forum, the slowly-defuncting Barbelith messageboard, and the Planetary team of Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy/Martin, John Layman, David Baron, Scott Dunbier, and the many letterers, designers, and other contributors.

This project is dedicated to mystery archeologists everywhere, of every walk and a myriad of tastes, habits, and ingenuities.]


Trash fiction is holy. Our kitsch is our prayers, or so close a parallel to them so as to be identical in execution and interests. Yukio Mishima posing in his swim trunks for a calendar is the same Yukio Mishima who hijacked a building and preached self-responsibility, pride, and military before suiciding. Godzilla is not the trauma of the Second World War and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan because someone got cute sixty years after his arrival on the scene, but because that was how his creators and his initial audience processed him. Kelly’s Heroes and MASH were conversations about Vietnam, America’s hopes and fears about the war they were currently in, made safe by distancing it in a separate form. Across the world, we use new forms and never-was creations to talk openly and honestly about the things that amaze us and those that scare the crap out of us.

Jakita Wagner says, “They stood as a warning, really,” of the kaiju in “Island”, the second chapter of Planetary. No one knows where they came from, why they are or how they are, and everyone knows that they are dead. And, of course, one flies overhead in the end. Because our fears and our wonders defy us. They belie us.

“I know no ‘novels’,” says Ryu, “They are scripture now.”

Can’t argue with that, can we? They’re likely to be somebody’s. I mean, that isn’t even the prerogative of the author, it’s the whim of the reader most the time. We have all encountered more than one person who swears by some fiction, who treats a movie, a novel, a comic as if it is exactly scripture. We all buy into the small truths reiterated film to film, story to story: the urban legend, the city story, that drain cleaner cocktail, that loose parts sound that all firearms make in movies, et cetera. We adopt facts from fiction on the assumption that a throwaway factoid, if presented as such, must have been researched and verified, even if there are flying zombies or rampaging seven stories tall armadillos in the same scene.

And, of course, we get too witty for ourselves, sometimes, too pretentious for our fictions, and then we doubt even the truths as they are given. Explains the opposition to the Monster Group, carried into Planetary by Ellis as “The Snowflake” and the series’ preferred model for the multiverse, the shape of reality. The automorphism group based on the Monster Group, the Snowflake, is representative of all the planes of two-dimensional information that are perceived by us as three-dimensional existences, and there is good, hard science behind it. A certain portion of Planetary’s readership, highly trained and greatly experienced in understanding how mcguffins, metaphors, and Checkov’s armories function, cannot help but reflexively dismiss the science, then, from something which also provides an aesthetic appeal, a great deal of metaphoric content, and furthers the story while defining its parameters.

Familiarity, does not just breed contempt, it also inspires apathy. I have yet to see one person criticize Ellis’ science usage here on the basis of something like, say, the number being wrong (196833 dimensions instead of 196884), and most simply dismiss it because.

Which is how we handle scripture, too, right? We don’t follow every suggestion to the letter, we don’t believe in the integrity and truth of every story presented. We pick out the bits that work for us and call the rest lessons, metaphors, or era-specific, without necessarily taking the time to justify or reprove our decisions based in concrete evidence or functional analysis. And, in the end, the fiction doesn’t care anyway. The fiction keeps on, it carries on and continues without our permission, on the strength of its resonance – again, not with what we can say about it or without it, but – with those elements that we can only safely admit through the fiction.

***

[From Volume One, All Over the World and Other Stories


02.01.04 Ryu (as is confirmed later in dialogue) is a fictional counterpart to nationalist/spiritualist types such as Yukio Mishima.

02.04-05 This monster is analogous to Toho’s Mothra. Mothra returns when needed and otherwise tends to sacrifice herself.

02.06.01 The apple emblem is the Mac trademark, the three-eyed smiley is an symbol of the Transient Movement from Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, and Zard are a Japanese pop group.

02.08.02 Island Zero is similar to Monster Island, which was home/preserve for many of Toho’s giant monsters.

02.09.03 Yes, in the really real world, Japan and Russia have a history of claiming each other’s (and other nation’s) land as their own.

02.11.01 The skeleton is similar to Toho’s Monster Zero, also know as King Ghidora.

02.14.03 This would be pretty much what a dead Godzilla would look like if you stood in its ribs.

02.17.03 The troops who just showed up are bearing WW2 era Nazi firearms.

02.18.04 Of course the Mishima stand in and his doomsday cult would die here (in this place of dreams).

02.20.04 The giant monster movies of Toho are a deliberate response to atomic weaponry, and culturally resonant, in part, due to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the United States.



02.22.01 Rodan, whom this monster is a callback visually to, is frequently involved in a generational story involving a set of parents and their threatened egg(s). Rodan has actually taken in other giant monster’s eggs, specifically Godzilla’s in Mechagodzilla 2.


[Click here to see further annotations for Planetary]

"This is the Shape of Reality"

"This is the Shape of Reality"
Excavating, reappraising, and cataloging Planetary early in the 21st Century


[The first in what should be a comprehensive series, both these small essays and the related annotations will not include a summary but will drop spoilers without warning, as necessary. Events and concepts discussed out of their order of first-appearance, and general summaries of stories will not be provided. All of these posts may be subject to severe and dramatic rewrites without notice, as new things occur to me, and of course, I welcome any further annotation suggestions or general feedback at . If I include an annotation derived from someone else, from this point on, I will gladly credit the provider. If I don’t credit an annotation, it means I derived the conclusion myself, or I simply cannot recall where I got the information first.

This project could not exist without the fine work of The Planetary Appreciation Page, the now defunct Warren Ellis Forum, the slowly-defuncting Barbelith messageboard, and the Planetary team of Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura DePuy/Martin, John Layman, David Baron, Scott Dunbier, and the many letterers, designers, and other contributors.

This project is dedicated to mystery archeologists everywhere, of every walk and a myriad of tastes, habits, and ingenuities.]


One thing I find interesting with Planetary, is that, while three systems of power are very focused on (specifically: breeding, gift, and mutation), that education can be empowering is left largely implicit, though just as – if not significantly more – important to the development of the narrative and the arcs of our primary characters. Elijah Snow is a detective through his delight in discovery, in research and putting the pieces together, gaining moral (and corrective) elements only as they develop alongside his other pleasures, some of the nastiness and shortsightedness of the world around (him and the kind of people frequently running it) being revealed to him. It is as significant and prominent in every issue of Planetary as the power of storytelling or the importance of naming things.

And, that’s the thing people miss about the series, when they suggest it would be better served as a didactic, reactive prose essay. The best ideas of the series are communicated by example, not by declaration.

Axel Brass, like Elijah Snow, was not content being born with abilities exceeding his neighbors, he did not stop with a specialized diet and exercise regime handed him by his parents, rest on the laurels of an engineered genetic inheritance; he learned to go without food, to heal wounds with his mind.

The Aviator, “fought unknown things and black technologies simply to learn of them,” we will be told in a later issue, and in this issue, we see their group of remarkable individuals includes Edison, the boyish adventure spirit of “Electric America,” the inventor/adventurer. Jakita Wagner claims she works for Planetary because it “stops [her] from getting bored,” and it is implied that this is more concerned with physical stimulation, than intellectual, but we see from the next issue, forward, that it is primarily an aesthetic issue. Jakita’s flight from boredom into novelty is no different than Snow’s, except that she appears to lack the drive to apply her discoveries to further ends, preferring the immediate responses or admiring or hitting them.

Axel Brass and his friends share Snow’s drive, though, in full force – except, arguably, The Millionaire, Bret Leather, who sees his work as a crimefighter, killer, and newspaper publisher in Chicago as “serious business” he has to get back to. Saving the world from World War Two isn’t serious enough, or maybe it is not business enough. But, he, too, colludes to use their intentions and a quantum brain picking out a true existence from all possibilities. Shortsighted or farsighted, the best it seems the pulp heroes analogs can attempt is policing, correction. For them, saving is correcting, they are exchangeable concepts. So, they turn on the computer, the quantum brain they are sitting in, that it might generate an answer, an equation for a perfect world, knowing fully that the mere processing towards that answer, or the accomplishment of it, might transfigure the answer into objective truth. The world may be (re)made to fit the answer the brain decides on. The evidence may be generated by the deduction. The map may necessitate the territory into being.

The first collection is called All Over the World and Other Stories, perhaps, not entirely because the first issue was entitled, "All Over the World", but because, whatever that world happens to be, we understand, as audience, that it’s also another story. There will be others.

The definition of the real, the isolation of truth, the purification of concepts and actualities is central to Planetary from the first issue through the last. The fictonaut issue will suggest to us that we fear we are being taken over by fictions, being led by entertainment and imagination, and when we come to the JLA crossover oneshot, we do, as readers, begin to fear, as if it’s take on our protagonists as villainous cruel people might actually infect them in the main narrative. In this very issue, when we see the pulp heroes against the ersatz Justice League, the fight is motivated by fear of ending, fear of removal and death, though we know that, as fictional constructs, all of these characters will see new life in various mediums, with a myriad of origins and arcs, sequels and reboots.

The drive behind Planetary, the organization, and Snow, personally, is preservation. He goes out of his way to avoid replacing or entirely removing anything or anyone. This mystery archeology gig is to facilitate rescue operations, recovery missions, and exploration of the unknown, cataloguing the wonders of life and, yes, ultimately, preserving their integrity. It’s not about trophy rooms, running the show, policing the world, or even, ultimately, self-preservation, but self-sacrificing preservation of everything else, sharing what is admirable and useful in all the world with as many people as possible. The Planetary Organization is working towards a sort of socialism of wonders, not a republic, a monarchy, or even a theocracy of wonders, but a socialism.

“It’s a strange world,” as Jakita Wagner and Elijah Snow say it first, “Let’s keep it that way.” They aren't keeping it that way for only themselves, or any other set of elites to enjoy, but for all our sakes.

***

[From Volume One, All Over the World and Other Stories, "All Over the World"]

01.08.04 The holographic masking of the entrance to a cave used as a preterhuman adventurer’s base of operations may be a reference to the similar arrangement DC Comics’ Batman has utilized. Mountain bases for secret plotting and world-action are second in prevalence, only to volcano islands, of course.

01.08.05 Doc Brass, Dr. Axel Brass, is an analog of pulp fiction icon Doc Savage, with whom he shares his bronze skin, his wonderful physique, brilliance, and willingness to institute himself as instantaneous moral authority.

01.12.02 The Vulcania Raven God definitely infers, Vulcania, the smithy of the Roman gods. It also may be a reference to Vulcan Raven in some way I am incapable of fathoming.

01.12.03 The “hull of the Charnel Ship” is a bit of a shiftship, but also, an allusion to various boats and ferries used to cross the river between the lands of the living and those of the dead du jour.

“The vestments of the Black Crow King” likely refer to the sorts of hidden-kingdom rulers Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four continually encountered, most particularly, Blackbolt of the Inhumans and the Black Panther, Tchalla, of Wakanda.

01.14.01 Analogs of the major types of the pulp fiction era that operated terrestrially and in the then-contemporary era (barbarians, space travelers, and the cowboy are left out).

Left to right:

Hark is an analog of the Fu Manchu Oriental menace. He is also named for writer/director/producer Tsui Hark.

Jimmy stands in for Jimmy Christopher, the Operator #5, but also contains a costuming nod to Will Eisner’s The Spirit, and has James Bond’s facial scar and (most likely a happy coincidence due to the abovementioned Operator connection) the name of the protagonist as given in James Bond’s first moving picture adaptation.

The Aviator, like the character for whom he is a touchstone, G-8, has virtually no presence and definitely no “real name” given. He pursues “dark things,” super-technological and supernatural threats, generally to identify and curtail them.

Edison is every Edisonian boy inventor hero, from Tom Swift on.

Lord Blackstock (born Kevin Sack) is an analog not only of E.R. Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, but also Marvel Comics’ Kazar (born Kevin Plunder), and every other aristocratic White man who was brought up from childhood in the jungle amidst subhumans, animals, or Natives. The purple of his clothes reminds one of the Lee Falk’s The Phantom, whom also had a cave base, aside from the requisite-here jungle-raising and animal connections.

The Millionaire, Bret Leather, is a callback to every rich angry man who fought crime viciously and vigorously during the era, from The Spider to the Shadow and Batman. He is morally conflicted, perhaps terminally traumatized, extremely dedicated, violent, and may possess the power to cloud men’s minds. He possesses a silhouette-inspiring set of tails and headgear, the Spider’s hiss and false fangs, and the Shadow’s false nose. Plus, his father was a costumed adventurer in the Old West, analogous to the Lone Ranger, thus establishing The Millionaire’s position as a Green Hornet reference, as well.

01.19.01 The “group of people in a mountain hideaway” are analogous to DC Comics’ major characters, whom together form the most traditional JLA membership.

Clockwise from the top: Superman, Wonder Woman, the Martian Manhunter, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and Aquaman.

Some of the characters appear to possess traits or references to other characters related to their mythos/worlds: the not-Batman is colored and designed similarly to Black Orchid, not-Flash is colored similar to Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash, Aquaman is physiologically similar to Universal Studios’ the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and as a shield-bearing blonde, Wonder Woman bears connections with Marvel Comics’ Captain America.

The threat to these newcomers’ universe is similar to what the DC characters experienced in Crisis on Infinite Earths, which served as a line-wide reboot of their stories.

01.20.01 The Man of Bronze (Brass) and the Man of Steel (not-Superman) are fists-first at each other.

The Billionaire, whom is quite partial to his special guns, shoots not-Batman, who presumably has Batman’s traditional opposition to standard firearms.

01.20.02 Blackstock, whose precedents are all traditionally sorts of ambassadors, fights directly with the Wonder Woman analog, Wonder Woman, herself, being usually an ambassador for her homeland.

The not-Flash is killed similar to the way the Barry Allen Flash died in Crisis on Infinite Earths, but he is also shot with a lightning-like blast by a blond scientist in a labcoat, which is a common visual representation of that Flash, as well, being by profession a police scientist.

01.20.03 The Aviator guns down not-Green Lantern, just as he would anyone else using a super-technology to threaten what he wanted to protect.

The Manhunter analog kills Hark, who – as a Fu Manchu analog – may as well have been inhuman or alien, given the narrative treatment of such characters at the time.

01.21.03 Doc Bronze believes he is getting rescued from that cave around 1970. Doc Savage did have a resurgence around that time, including the fictional biography, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, by Philip Farmer.


[Click here to see further annotations for Planetary]

Whatever Happened to... That Guy Still Releasing a Lot, Who is All Over the Place

This isn't the biggest thing wrong with comics, being a thread where the question is asked, "Whatever Happened to Warren Ellis?" when Warren can be found all over the interwebs at potentially any and all hours and has released work under more than half a dozen serialized titles as well as oneshot comics, essays, short fiction, photography, and commentary in the past couple years. It's a pretty bad streak across the face and brain of comics' readership, though.

Look, there's an Alfred Bester bit quoted right in the thread, via Warren Ellis' Doom 2099, and no one ever asked "Whatever Happened to Alfred Bester, he's only released fifteen pieces of fiction and some serialized essays this year?" That draws unintentional attention to the seriousness, the heaviness of the problem.

We say, "Where the Hell is Alan Moore" when he's got League of Extraordinary Gentlemen coming down the pipe and a Lovecraftian piece, Neonomicon, with Jacen Burrows, aside from his massive music/photo/text beastie. Five minutes past some servicing of a corporate-owned character or chronicling a trademarked city, we declare them retired, missing, absent from the scene.

We ask, "Whatever happened to..." for people who had work out the month before. And, then we wonder why quality work takes so long, as if it's owed to us in monthly dosages. Or, if it's corporate work, we're owed conclusive endings or for artists, writers, colorists and editors to hang on while they're getting bored, losing money they could get from better projects, or actively getting screwed by a company, because, well, we like them on this book, with this cast, with this set up. And we are owed.

And if they simply don't want to do work on a monthly schedule, perhaps telling stories that do not interest them, with little to no royalties being available, and final say always with the publisher, because you can't haul off your Spider-Man pages and call them The Awesome ArachNebbish (well, you can, but you know, courts and stuff), if they don't want to do that, there is something wrong with them. Did you know Frank Miller quit comics after he wrote and drew Batman vs the Reagan Era? Trufax, all the way until they started making movies of the comics he'd been doing, released and available in many many countries and many many booksellers, for all those years in between. That's what our reaction, as a readership, looks like, when you don't separate one reader from another and take us as bulk.

And, oh, I know, it's because we all grew up on trademarks being perpetuated in serial form, men and women telling stories about characters they don't own. That's traditional comics.

It's not. It was for maybe, what, ten to fifteen years, between The Comics Code being instated and the explosion of "Underground" Comix? That's the era where the bulk of quality material, the bulk of notable material, was singularly owned by someone other than the writers and artists and creators working on the material at hand. Before that, ownership is a little hazier, as it's pre Work for Hire clarity, but you see strips in newspapers doing massive numbers, really moving the papers, which are sometimes owned by the paper and sometimes only licensed, you see anthology books, some adapting short fiction or nonfictional material, with the adaptation being owned by a publisher but not the original, or occasionally neither. You see tijuana bibles and single-panel comics in magazines or on posters. In the Sixties, you see the "underground" stuff, findable pretty easy for the most part, if you were in the right city, the right shop.


A Contract With God came out before I was born. So, if you're my age, if you are even juts under thirty, you never had that atmosphere you claim to have been trained in, you just had a childhood of it. Creator participation, ownnership of property, bookstore positioning for comics, have existed my entire life.

This is not to say I didn't experience this early indoctrination into worlds where everything is owned by a company and people are brought in to put new legs on or provide a facelift and a plot as it goes along. Virtually everyone has a childhood of that, because children's characters are by and large owned, manufactured, and kept on life support by corporations, they are advertisements for dolls, greeting cards, sticker books, action figures, playsets, water wings and home media releases. But, if you can get past that with your films, your television, your prose and poetry and paintings and stageplays, you handle it with comics. New episodes don't have to come out every Saturday morning, a director or actor's next picture may not arrive once every Summer, a novelist may not publish a new five hundred pager every year, and the world will not end, the material will not suck more.

And that's me ranting on a thread on a messageboard about Warren Ellis and a release schedule, because I'd like to see more like Crecy and am glad Planetary took as long as it needed to. If this had been a thread about Dwayne "He should be glad they let him write DC characters at all" McDuffie, well, this could have got ugly.