by Duane Spurlock
Recently I reviewed Kevin Conran's film, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and complained that it was unbalanced by pulling in too many pop-culture references. This time around, let's take a look at another project that relies on every pop-culture reference (including many pulp references) it can find to advance its plot – Planetary, the comic book series written by Warren Ellis, drawn by John Cassaday, and published by Wildstorm, an imprint of DC Comics.
Planetary is introduced to the reader as a group of adventuring investigators who chart the "secret history of the world" – the behind-the-scenes, covert history that the mass public isn't aware of (for a pulp-world example, the sort of stuff that The Nine Unknown might have their hands in). The three members of the Planetary field team – Planetary is actually a globe-spanning organization, as befits its name – ring a mental echo of the late-1950s Jack Kirby comic book group, the Challengers of the Unknown, by darting around the Earth and investigating secrets and mysteries of an unearthly type.
To understand how Planetary relies on pop-culture references to carry its plotlines along, imagine that all those 1950s bug-eyed monster B-movies actually happened – that they were unpublished adventures of Doc Savage, which were recorded and stored in his secret archive deep in a near-inaccessible sub-sub-basement of the Empire State Building. Then Monk Mayfair would cull out exciting reports from the files, and Ham Brooks would handle the legal hopscotching necessary to sell the plot to Hollywood, making sure names and details were changed to protect Doc's interests and the innocent.
Warren Ellis pulls in Hong Kong action movies and ghost stories, Godzilla-style Japanese giant-monsters, many comic book references (the aforementioned Challengers; the Fantastic Four [who serve as the basis of Planetary's evil masterminds trying to subvert earth's powers and histories to their own power and glories]; Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern [whose Planetary counterparts meet fates that are heartbreaking to a longtime comics-reading fan]); James Bond; Fu Manchu; Captain Marvel; John Carter of Mars and other pulp-era interstellar travelers; Tarzan and the lost world of Opar; the Justice League of America and the whole Crisis on Infinite Earths concept; Sherlock Holmes; Dracula; a Tom Swiftian-version of Thomas Edison, which nods to Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, itself a pop-culture reference librarian's feast of many courses; and a clutch of pulp heroes, with a Doc Savage counterpart (named Axel Brass) prominent among them.
The Planetary field team battles the evil machinations of a group called The Four. Like similar heroic groups battling conspiracies in past adventure fiction forays (P.J. Farmer's versions of Tarzan and Doc Savage battling The Nine in his Burroughs/Dent pastiches, which owe a debt to Talbot Mundy's tales of JimGrim and his gang of heroic buddies facing The Nine Unknown; Sax Rohmer's Nayland Smith and his pals facing the terrors created by Fu Manchu; the battles of Jimmy Christopher, Secret Service Operator 5, against the Purple Invasion; and many more), the Planetary team deals with complex clues and mysteries as they attempt to foil the plots of The Four and subdue its members.
Elijah Snow, leader of Planetary, has a particular debt to pay. Flashbacks reveal that before the launch of the series, he was captured, tortured, and brainwashed by The Four to forget about their existence. Snow, a particularly long-lived individual with an ability to control temperature, had launched Planetary early in the 20th Century and recorded his discoveries in a series of annual private journals titled Planetary Guides. The Four had stolen and used his information to gain its covert stranglehold over the world's destiny. Snow's battles with The Four eventually led to the brainwashing. The first dozen or so issues of the Planetary series recount Snow's discovery of the deception, his regaining his memory, and his renewal of the fight against The Four.
Warren Ellis does a nice job of using his pop-culture touchstones. He builds his plot piece by piece over the course of each issue, and drops clues and mysteries into each story so that fans of the series analyze and unravel and dissect each minute piece of information between issues in many Internet discussions. Ellis has a good sense of plot, of suspense, and pacing. (Unfortunately, a near-two-year hiatus in his writing for the series left fans up in the air and rather frustrated for some time. The series has resumed, however, even though the publishing schedule seems to be a bit irregular. But so long as a new issue is eventually going to appear, rabid Planetary fans won't go on a killing frenzy.)
Reading these issues is great fun for pop-culture fans. Sideways takes of familiar icons – handled well – bring an extra pleasure to such endeavors. (Just consider how P.J. Farmer struck a chord with his Riverworld series.) And while Ellis seems to handle the iconic characters and concepts with some respect, I detect a background tint of cynicism – as if he's saying, "Look, I'm killing off/crumbling the image of your childhood hero in the background of this panel simply as an afterthought"; or, "If I keep tossing in pop-culture references, all you nerdy fan-boy types will buy it and drool over it, no matter what silly story I tell." I'm not sure I'm even close to correct in this opinion – maybe my notion is colored by my fan-boy frenzy being frustrated by the series' two-year hiatus!
One can't talk about the fine qualities of the Planetary series without mentioning the wonderful art provided by John Cassaday. It is realistic and dynamic in a way that recalls and incorporates (while reaching far beyond) the understated but marvelous art of Curt Swan on the Superman family of titles, and his ability to depict fantastic elements so well in a realistic setting makes them seem even more fantastical and surprising.
Just as the Planetary series relies greatly on references to many pop-culture icons, each issue's cover is cast in homage to a different format. The first issue is pure comic book posing – the perspective is angled, the three members of the field team facing the reader, chips on their shoulders. A head shot of the distinctive looking Axel Brass also appears on the cover as an inset; Brass is drawn with a widow's peak, identifying him with the Jim Bama version of Doc Savage that appeared on the Bantam paperbacks.
Issue 2's cover nods to the giant Tokyo monster film poster. Issue 3 is wrapped in the widescreen format Hong Kong action film shot. Issue 4 is a retro-looking Argosy All-Story homage. Issue 5 features Axel Brass in all his Bama-torn-shirt glory, and even the Planetary logo adopts the swooshing font of the Bantam Doc Savage paperbacks. Issue 6 is an SF tribute cover, with perhaps a nod to the 1960s TV show Time Tunnel.
Issue 7 harks to the Dave McKean-style covers executed for DC's Vertigo imprint comics of the 1980s and '90s. Issue 8 is a poster for a 1950s giant-bug B-movie. Issue 9 appears wrapped in newspaper banners, hinting at The Daily Planet. But I don't think that's really what the intended effect is supposed to be.
Issue 10 is a somber, haunting scene of hillsides covered with graves marked by lines of crosses – similar to the Flander's Field, the American War Cemetery in Belgium, where the crosses of buried war dead stretch far as the eye can see. Issue 11 is an homage to Steranko's terrific graphic work on the Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD comics for Marvel.
I don't know what Issue 12's cover references. But some answers come clear in this issue, making it important for the plot, so maybe this cover is supposed to refer to nothing but the story itself.
Issue 13 is a retro-recreation of a Strand Magazine cover. A fitting reference, because Sherlock Holmes appears in this issue. Issue 14, then, is a paraphrased visual quote from Issue 13. This issue also brings in the Warp Master concept that Alan Moore rolled out in Miracleman, his super hero series that revived a British version of Captain Marvel after Fawcett Comics scrapped that character to end legal shenanigans by DC Comics (National Periodical Publications, at the time). Marvel Comics' Captain Mar-Vell also used this dimension-switching trick for a time.
Issue 15 borrows the style of Australian aboriginal rock drawings. Issue 16's cover is a Photoshopped montage that includes a suggestion of Fu Manchu's global reach.
Issue 17 is a retro-recreation of the cover for the October 1912 issue of All-Story, which featured the complete novel, Tarzan of the Apes. Nicely done. Issue 18 looks like the cover for a dime novel. Issue 19 recalls the movie poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. Issue 20: a guess here. A Hulk homage? Issue 21 is a psychedelic poster homage. Issue 22 recreates the Lone Ranger in all his black-and-white glory.
There's plenty of fun in Planetary for the pulp and general pop culture fan.
Links:
Individual issues of Planetary have been collected in trade paperback format, and they’re available from Amazon.com.
Planetary Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories can be purchased by clicking here.
Planetary Vol. 2: The Fourth Man is available by clicking here.
Click here to learn more about Planetary Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century.
Outside the regular Planetary continuity are some cross-over stories in which DC Comics/Wildstorm try to perk up sales. In this volume, Planetary: Crossing Worlds, the field team encounters The Authority (one of PLANETARY's sister team magazines in the WILDSTORM line), a version of the JUSTICE LEAGUE and BATMAN. Click here.
You can find my review of Sky Captain elsewhere on The Pulp Rack. Click here.
Jess Nevins has created a great site in which he annotates and dissects some comic series that are as reference-laden as Thomas Pynchon's novels V and Gravity's Rainbow. Click here to see his marvelous insights into Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Likewise, his Pulp and Adventure Heroes of the Pre-War Years site is chock-full of fun info. Click here to visit it.
Jess' marvelous book, The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, which examines the pre-super-hero foundations for the pulps and comic books, is a great reference. (At 1200 pages, how can you get by without it?) You can purchase it at Amazon by clicking here.
For The Pulp Rack's articles on Talbot Mundy, click here.
Posted by ds at March 3, 2006 02:30 PM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://pulprack.com/mt3/mt-tb.cgi/17
