Planetary

Just finished re-reading the entire Planetary series thus-far. My god that is a good comic! Seriously, anyone who hasn't needs to check it out. I would start w/ the first trade. It's not the kind of story you can just jump right into. If yr a little hesitant, check out the Planetary Fan Appreciation Page for a complete listing of issue summaries & analyses (spoilers galore). It'll give you an indication about what's going on, but you'll have to read the actual book to fully experience it.

This book soldifies both the pure genious & madness of Warren Ellis. If your a fan of Transmetropolitan, there's no guarantee that you will like Planetary. Maybe if you liked Orbiter, but that again is no real guarentee. When I first started reading the book I thought it was great because I thought I understood what it was: revisionist/deconstructionist superhero stories tying together the vast history of fantastic fiction/mythology under a single redefined continuity. No. That's not what this is. Planetary is completely different from things like Astro City (which is also great, but in a completely different way). Robert Emmons over at Sequart.com wrote a really wanky column/essay/dissertation on Planetary that got me thinking about it in different terms.

Ellis is really playing w/ some new & interesting ideas here. Information as the "underpinning of the universe"? Universes being 2-D planes w/in a 3-D construct making up the multiverse? Hmm. Seriuosly. I've only begun to fully understand what is really going on in the book. I mean beyond the plot. The issues come out so sporadically that I'll probably have more than enough time to re-read the whole series maybe two more times before issue #26 comes out & I'll probably get something completely new & different as I did from all previous readings.

With this particular reading I mostly got that Scott Patterson would be great at playing Elijah Snow.