I think the basic premise, as I understood it, was pretty good: Planetary are The Four. Whether this implies that the "real" planetary are potentiall EEE-VILL is, IMHO, irrelevant. But it's a nice twist to see them caste in the roles of the baddies and to have the JLA characters as the heroes. I had no problem with this. It basically seemed, especially given the Wonder Woman stuff, that Ellis had decided to elaborate a bit on the rather brief tour that the gave the DC big guns in Planetary #10.
That being said, I enjoyed the story right up to when the heroes teleport to the Planetary watchtower. Everything from that moment on was just monstrously cliched. Plus, for no apparent reason, Superman/Kent turns out to have a much reduced set of powers and they put him down incredibly easily. But why spring this change on us? It's not like Planetary couldn't've found out about Kryptonite. So they could've brutally murdered Supes without randomly garbling the continuity any further. The evil-villain-deathtrap-headquarters was silly, to say the least, and the [SPOILERS] he-can't-kill-you-but-I-can ending [/SPOILERS] made me wince.
To be honest, there's really not much to recommend this. I quite like Jerry Ordway but I don't think he did a particularly great job here. Large chunks of this are very Old School, and not necessarily in a good way. The pacing is poor. And, most heinously, it doesn't really DO anything. Oh, so it's the JLA vs Planetary. But who really cares. There wasn't a shred of originality in it beyond the premise. No expansion. Just the tired Elseworlds riff of, "But no, [Jack the Ripper|Sir Mordred Pendragon|Villain De Jour] killed Batman's parents!". A dud. |
