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Underground > Comic Books >

Planetary - The Secret History

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15:07 / 26.06.01

Sorry if this all comes off as very obvious, but while there have been a lot of reference listings for Planetary, it doesn't seem as if anyone talks about what those references mean.

"We were given the world in 1961. We know all the things that you've struggled to uncover for decades. We are all those things." - William Leather, from Planetary #6.

In November of 1961 the Fantastic Four were born. They brought with them an excitement and a legitimacy that hadn't been seen in the comic book world since the demise of EC, and before that, the popularity of comics during WWII. Alongside the other comics in the Marvel stable, the FF cemented the position of the Superhero genre as the dominant comic book archetype for the next 40 years, often at the expense of all other subject matter.

In Planetary, a small group of investigators search out the weird, hidden history of their world in an attempt to understand what went wrong. Their mission has been primarily one of information gathering, and they have only recently started taking active measures to reinstate the other, forgotten wonders of the world back into the fold. Their opponents are the Four, a group with presumably enough power to kill half of the inhabitants of North America before lunch time. They have eliminated numerous rivals to their throne, stolen their enemies' technology for their own use, and have even co-opted one of the original heroes from the early years of the 20th century as a member of their organization. Anyone too big to ignore is brought into their ranks, killed or suppressed.

The premise Warren Ellis originally pitched for Planetary was "One Hundred Years of Superhero History, Slowly Leaking Into The Modern World..." What I believe he's actually putting across is Comic History, not Superhero History, or a History that could have been if we're willing to expand our vision beyond the narrow stereotypeing of Comics as Superheroes. Planetary is a metacomic, commenting on the medium using the medium itself. The Four are obvious, and the world Planetary moves within is the potential, shunned, ignored, and forgotten. So who are Team Planetary themselves? I have my own ideas, but I'll wait to see what others have to say.

It's a Strange World. There should be Strange Comics. Of all kinds.

Ellis

18:36 / 26.06.01

Hmmm...

I think Planetary represent comic boook readers... They're angry at The Four for having all this glorious technology and not helping people... Don't really have anything else to back up my theory but there you go.

Whats urs then?

22:44 / 26.06.01

quote:Originally posted by moriarty:
...(the Four) have even co-opted one of the original heroes from the early years of the 20th century as a member of their organization.

Sorry, you lost me there... who is this early hero that they've coopted? Hark? Stone?? Snow??? I don't recall anything about it in the series...

must be the memory blocks

Other than that, that's an interesting analogy between the series and the comics world and history. And I definitely agree there should be more Strange Comics...

23:46 / 26.06.01

quote:Originally posted by Ellis:
Hmmm...

I think Planetary represent comic boook readers... They're angry at The Four for having all this glorious technology and not helping people... Don't really have anything else to back up my theory but there you go.

Whats urs then?

Jakita could represent the existing readership. She is indestructible but is in danger of getting bored, so joins planetary to see all the secret stuff shes been missing out on. Sort of the bored comic reader starts looking for all the stuff left outside the mavel/dc circle.

Snow could represent the bored comic creator, ie Ellis himself. Made to forget himself by the industry (whoring for work maybe?). Searching for all the lost ideas destroyed or hidden by the superhero juggernaught. By uncovering these mysterious relics and bring them to light he hopes to undermine the juggernaught.

The drummer? My theory falls apart here. Maybe he is the 'new' reader.

Regrettable Juvenilia

07:17 / 27.06.01

The Drummer is a strange bearded young man who talks to computers, eats junk food, doesn't really fit in with the rest of the world and is generally considered a bit mad.

Jakita Wagner is a gorgeous young woman of immense physical prowess who wears a black leather outfit with red trim and shags mysterious, morally dubious London magicians.

The fact that you seriously believe that the latter, and not the former, represents the current comics demographic scares me beyond measure, Fool.

10:36 / 27.06.01

Elijah-Ghost of Comics Past.

Drummer-Ghost of Comics Present.

Jakita-Ghost of Comics Future.

?

Ellis

11:03 / 27.06.01

I think maybe the Drummer is the future of comics, he's all mad and weird and all...

Whil Jakita is the present, sturdy and strong, like a tree stuck to its roots...

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:24 / 27.06.01

In what parallel universe is the current state of comics "sturdy and strong"????

11:35 / 27.06.01

Ok. Instead of "Sturdy and Strong", try "been around a while and is very easily bored".

11:52 / 27.06.01

quote:Originally posted by Zenith Despairs Of All But A Few:
The Drummer is a strange bearded young man who talks to computers, eats junk food, doesn't really fit in with the rest of the world and is generally considered a bit mad.

Jakita Wagner is a gorgeous young woman of immense physical prowess who wears a black leather outfit with red trim and shags mysterious, morally dubious London magicians.

The fact that you seriously believe that the latter, and not the former, represents the current comics demographic scares me beyond measure, Fool.

That's the funniest single post I've read in ages.

Do you mind if I put it on my email signiture or something?

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

15:55 / 12.09.02

And lets not forget that the Drummer is "connected to all information systems". Comic book internet geek deluxe.

14:00 / 14.09.02

well from the smell of the planetary/jla thing planetary are the ff:

moriarty - 'the Fantastic Four were born. They brought with them an excitement and a legitimacy that hadn't been seen in the comic book world since the demise of EC, and before that, the popularity of comics during WWII.' planetary are the rebirth of that innit? finding all the forgotten cool stuff and letting us like it again? i like your whole theory, the good thing about planetary is it allows all these interpretations without any wrong ones.

Matthew Fluxington

14:11 / 14.09.02

It seems most obvious to me that the Drummer is a caricature of what Ellis hates in comics fanboys, Snow is what he'd like himself to be, and Wagner is the girl he'd want to shag if he were that guy.

Case closed.

00:09 / 15.09.02

Nah, the Drummer's cool - just finds it difficult to communicate on 'normal' terms.

00:56 / 15.09.02

I think in looking at who Planetary themselves are, one really ought to look at the 4 person incarnation, as that's what the actual set-up of the organization is.

Are they all representations of various facets of pop culture? Ambrose is the badass action movie, a la the Matrix, Jakita is the superhero, Drummer is the crazy underground guy. Perhaps Snow is the century long history of the odd, or of pop(ular) culture (Fort, Lovecraft, Wells) that gives rise to these various current facets.

Maybe I'm talking out of my ass.

I always see Planetary (the comic) as an examination in the form of narrative of not just comics, but of pop culture. Of the things that fascinate us. Being in the medium of comics it obviously leans towards comics culture, much as a TV version of the series would have to reference television history.

Again, I may be talking out of my ass.

I have a question that I'm afraid is a content one, rather than a context one: What was in the 3rd helicopter? In the first issue, there's three choppers that come in. One for them, one for the brain and one that Jakita won't tell Snow about. Has what wasin there ever been revealed?

Zoom.

13:10 / 15.09.02

the escaped fiction-monster? the thing? the story is so twisty there'll probably be a bit where we find jakita's not all she seems, been working for the 4 since the start or some shit. if there's still an outstanding question from the first issue i wouldn't expect it to be answered till the last. when we're all about a hundred.

15:00 / 15.09.02

I always figured Jakita was the daughter of the general from the preview issue. That could explain why she's so nice to him in one panel.

Zoom.

18:17 / 15.10.05

So, somewhere in my backbrain this marinated for however long its been since the issue came out, but I just connected Planetary #21's Melanctha (which is an unusual name, at least, so far as I can tell) and the Gertrude Stein story. Which, is a very magicky story of essentially a magicky, shamanesque witchy type witch... that never has anything explicitly magickal about it.
Is this an intentional connection with some sort of deep commentary about literature and pop-lit-history, or did Ellis just steal the name and luck out. His attention to other tropes and types would make the synchronicity, if unintentional, unlikely, but....
And it was Mike Moorcock's 'War Amongst the Angels' that sprung it back to the fore of my mind, with his Rose and her lovely but temporary and forever man.

19:31 / 15.10.05

Melanctha, according to Enlis:

"We've used a friend of mine, the violinist/thereminist Meredith Yayanos, as the visual inspiration for that issue's central character. Mer is enjoying being Dr. Strange. I had a bunch of loose ideas floating around for that issue that didn't come into focus until Mer sent me a camphone shot of her in her then-new forest-green dreads, looking like the only Brian Froud faerie in Brooklyn. This is how it works, sometimes -- a single visual, a single line, a minute of music can suddenly nail down a pile of chaotic notions into a story. Ditko, Dr. Strange, Terence McKenna and his DMT exegeses, the Ghost Cop from #3 and the Century Babies, magic as something creeping and primal and destabilising and intertwined with reality... And then that picture, and remembering her playing a theremin solo in London last summer, mesmerised Mer plucking notes out of thin air, wide-eyed and sorcerous."

Taken whole from rkkman's fantastigreat Planetary page

19:39 / 15.10.05

That's her visual influence/cop, yes, but thematically, ficto-historically, and so on... anything out there that would converge these, other than my damaged thinking processes?
Similarly, any thoughts on my the thirties private dick deal isn't apparently going to be given a focal-issue?

19:47 / 15.10.05

Couldn't tell you, never read that Stein story. But what the text was meant to show is the seperate elements Elnis said he patched the character together from.

Try e-mailing him?

21:08 / 15.10.05

Yeah, sorry 'bout that. Read too quickly and skipped to much.
Am now wondering if it's just another 'Jakita' where the sound stick with him.
Anybody actually seen anything of late that might specify or allude to what the last few issues will tackle in a thematic, pillaging-the-ficto-history sense? The last, year-after issue has to pillage and play the 'Planetary' card, itself, and we know the 'Planet Fiction' Morrisonian rescue mission thing is shaping up in the background, but what major tropes of the twentieth century pop-narrative are left to scour? There are, certainly.

23:06 / 15.10.05

P-24

"I'm nine or ten pages into the new script (24), and right away I've wrapped up the connections between the Hong Kong cop, the Melanctha issue and John Leather, hopefully clearly explicated what the Century Babies do, explained why the Four let Planetary live, given a fairly strong hint about what The Drummer is, and described the above and below of the protective systems existing around life on Earth in the Planetary "universe".

So, an endcap to Death Machine Telemetry that should've been one issue in the first place. Pad it, you fuck.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

01:55 / 17.10.05

Curious: other than Jenny Quantum, have any other 21st century babies been identified? They'd be little kids, but it'd be interesting if the Four suddenly decided to track down some of the latest crop of little buggers.

As long as they're not as plot-devicey as Jenny Quantum.

03:12 / 17.10.05

The fact that you seriously believe that the latter, and not the former, represents the current comics demographic scares me beyond measure, Fool.

Eh gad! Important lesson to self, posting hair-brained theories off the top of your head on the internet can lead to serious embarrasment, and then return to haunt you again many years later...

06:20 / 17.10.05

Only "Jenny Fractal", Jenny Quantum's evil twin, who is now actually Jenny Quantum due to Midnighter going back in time and giving Jenny Fractal the snappy-necky right after she was born causing Jenny Quantum to reincarnate in... Jenny Fractal's body, despite it being dead years previously and... eyes... hurt head... help?

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

06:39 / 17.10.05

Sounds like a horrible Jim Lee/Claremont 90s X-Babies comic.

06:50 / 17.10.05

Midnighter killed a baby? Why didn't I read about this in the Daily Mail?

07:04 / 17.10.05

The whole idea was Jenny Quantum was dead, so Midnighter kills her twin sister at birth to make her alive.

A beautiful tunnel of ghosts

12:14 / 17.10.05

In one of his Q&As at Millarworld, Ellis has identified the Planetary team as analogues of the Challengers of the Unknown, and revealed that the fictionaut was extracted from The Quatermass Experiment.

In addition, from photos of John Cassaday, he seems to have based the Drummer visually on himself.

12:48 / 17.10.05

Yes, but Midnighter. Killed. A. Baby.

They'll never let him and Apollo adopt now.

00:54 / 22.02.06

Right, then. Having read all twenty-four issues of 'Planetary' and the three cross-overs, more or less all at once, I have some thoughts/questions to throw out here:

Planetary #6 - the cover, the Four reflected on the faceplate of a fifth spacesuit's helmet. Who went, or was supposed to go, with them to space? Snow?
Also; woman on the Nautilus?

Plantary #24 - is the whole thing engineered by Snow to piss off Jakita and The Drummer? From his reveal of Wagner's father, with his casual insult of him and the notion that he doesn't really have any intense interest in 'protecting' her, because she isn't his kin, to his good cop/bad copping with Drums, through letting all those people above them die, he just seems to be leading them along. Stringing them along and pumping them up with conflicting, intense emotions 'til they just want to kick out some spines.

When Snow suggests that if we could check, we'd probably see that Dowling's got a full set of the Planetary Guides. And I think he does. I think we're looking right at them on the pages where Snow is talking.

More general than that...
Snow's not the Fourth Man, is he? His memories aren't complete, the memory-rewrites just subtly brush over stuff that's missing to make it seem like he's fully remembering.
Jakita in issue twelve: "Don't say it," and "You don't know what you're putting into motion" and "You're memories not complete, yet."
And Ellis told us ages ago that he wasn't.
And, taking a great leap off from that... Ellis also said, somewhere, apparently, that we'll not be seeing a return of the fictonaut. And we won't. Because the fictonaut's never gone away to be returning.
Snow's then fictonaut. Hence the history full of fictional characters. Hence him never knowing Ambrose Chase, who, if he really were the Fourth Man, he'd certainly have.
That 'Planet Fiction' ending doesn't say a thing about him not remembering, but simply that he never has met him.
How does the stuff with Sparks and Snow, or various other things work with that? Does history rewrite for a fictional fellow distended from his proper context? Am I simply barking up - not the wrong, but - an entirely unreal tree?

Or is the whole thing mindgaming from John Stone?

09:33 / 22.02.06

I think the fictonaut was another of his "one-shot ideas" like the half-life girl. Everyone seems to be giving it more credence than it deserves.

11:08 / 22.02.06

Fictonaut's identity no-reveal and mystery as the point, rather than a launch-pad to something else? Eh, I can buy that. Fits the Quatermassy tone. Still, that everybody writes it off so quickly in-story as a ruse for Chase, a ploy engineered for no intrinsic gain, makes me suspicious. And, I dunno, it was just an effective issue.

14:08 / 22.02.06

It's not impossible Ellis is lying (he's done it before). But pulling a "Fooled you! He's important after all!" at this point can only further alienate an already frustrated fanbase.

(and when _will_ #26 be solicited, Mr. Ellis?)

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