Planetary (1999-2009)
"You want to know the secret of the world?"
Reread Planetary. This is my favorite comic: a twenty-seven issue series created by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, running from 1999 to 2009. Planetary outlived the century it began in, and outlived the reputation of its author, Warren Ellis. Times change, yet fifteen years after ending, Planetary moves and inspires still.
The series concept is simple: a three-person team of superpowered archaeologists, the Planetary organization, finds buried mysteries. Because Planetary’s search takes place in a comic, our heroes are not investigating the landscape of reality, but 20th-century pop culture. A perfect concept for a book published at the close of the millennium.
Elijah Snow, our amnesiac protagonist, is recruited in the first issue. He teams up with a woman who hits things, and a man who hacks machines. From the word go, there are so many unanswered questions: who is Snow? Why was he recruited? What is the Planetary organization, and who funds it? As Snow learns about the world, we learn about it too. And what a world it is.
Instead of digs in Sumer or Egypt, the protagonists encounter the geological time scale of the past hundred years: the Planetary organization discovers an island of Godzilla-size monsters, a ghost cop in Hong Kong, the secret mountain fortress of the old pulp magazine heroes. Sharp-eyed readers will understand these finds to be analogues of pop culture in our world: there are issues dedicated to ersatz versions of Wakanda and Frankenstein's monster. We are seeing nothing less than the spelunking of our collective unconsciousness. An exhibition into the dream country.
There's a phrase repeated throughout the series: "It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way." And that's the point. As the story progresses, Snow discovers that the wonderful oddity of the world is being exploited and hampered by some unseen force: someone is culling the miracles.
When the villains are revealed to be a superhero team -- an effortlessly scary version of Marvel's Fantastic Four -- the parallel is clear. Delightful as superheroes can be, they (and the companies that own them) have limited the potential of comics, and of pop entertainment. Planetary invites us to speculate: what might we have, if we broadened our horizons, just a little? What have we lost? What might we gain? How has the boundary of your imaginary been constrained? How would you even notice?
Planetary is a mystery, an adventure serial, a history. But above all else, it is a testament of wonder: a heartfelt letter about the relevance of shared fantasies.
In short: Planetary is a love story, in the best sense of the word.
Many people think of great works as mountains to be scaled. In my experience, masterpieces are old friends you revisit. If you're lucky, they ride-or-die with you across the whole span of life. They teach you. Not just once, but again and again. Ellis and Cassaday are showing us our own cultural history from a new angle: Planetary is both a summary and defense of what popular entertainment is, has been, and could be.
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
