A man sits in a diner in what appears to be the middle of nowhere. The blacktop is being consumed by the desert sands, and based on his complaints, the coffee would be just as well buried, too. A woman in black arrives with a job offer, and Elijah Snow accepts. Now he's working for Planetary, an agency dedicated to keeping the world strange, funded by a mysterious "Fourth Man."
As it turns out, there's a lot of strange stuff out there, including Elijah Snow, who is a "Century Baby," a person born on January 1, 1900, along with several other notable individuals they come to learn about during the series 27-issue run, not counting a couple of crossovers with the Justice League, Batman, The Authority, none of which I own. Ellis, Cassaday and DePuy peel the mysteries back as they go along, delving into Snow's past, Planetary's past, the world's past, and the four individuals that have spent decades keeping every bit of the strangeness they could get their hands on for themselves.
In practice, the creative team repurpose characters from the pulps, the comics, movies, whatever to their purposes. One issue is concerned with an island where all the kaiju just suddenly appeared in the 1950s, then seemed to die out 20 years later. The first issue reveals there was a secret society of guys - all Century Babys like Snow - that created a super-computer in the 1940s that inadvertently created or unlocked (I was unclear on that part) new universes, including one that had its own protectors. The secret society is basically characters like Doc Savage, Tarzan, the Shadow, with the serial numbers filed off, and the other universe's protectors are basically the Justice League, But Not.
Likewise, the "Four" that Planetary finds themselves in opposition with are the Fantastic Four, But Not. Ellis taking the notion that Reed Richards' inventions never seem to actually improve or change Marvel-Earth beyond what our world is, and attributing that to selfishness and malice rather than editorial diktat.
Cassaday and DePuy absolutely illustrate the hell out of the book. Need a ghost cop to shoot bullets of fire that move at right angles, with a close-up on the target as the bullet ignites them from the inside-out? They can do it. Need to draw back, show a single man wandering inside an immense ark from another reality, full or pillars covered in shiny gold wrought into intricate patterns? They can do that. Enormous rotting monster corpse, or people having a philosophical argument inside said rotting corpse? They got you covered.
There are times I wish Cassaday's style was a bit more exaggerated. Like he would let his lines get more jagged or loose for things that might beggar a human's perception. But overall, I think the fact he kept that steady, smooth line, tending more towards a photo-realistic approach, really works. Part of that is that Ellis' characters, even when confronted by some of this strangeness, never seem all that shook. Jakita or Drummer might get excited, in the way a child is with a new toy, but no one's sanity is in danger. They aren't gibbering in tongues or clawing at their faces. In general, the people affected like that by what they encounter end up dying shortly thereafter. For Planetary, what they encounter might be something they've never seen before, but they've certainly seen things as strange before, if in a different way.
Likewise, while DePuy's colors are strong and vivid, she doesn't really go for anything bizarre. Nothing day-glo or technicolor, blinding you with how garish it is. Things are not muted, exactly, but not something that makes you avert your eyes. The idea is for you to see the strangeness, and maybe comprehend it.
Similar to the artistic approach, Ellis using all these knockoffs both works for and against the book for me. At times, it's interesting to see what he does with, essentially, James Bond, or in the case of the issue above, the trope in Hong Kong cop flicks of the honorable cop being killed by his bent partner. At others, I'm distracted by my mind's, "Oh, that's the Lone Ranger. Oh, that's the ship from Jules Verne's story about going to the Moon," and so on.
That said, while Elijah Snow is definitely a Warren Ellis protagonist - he smokes, he's sarcastic and rude, likes to get on his soapbox while also threatening to kill people he perceives as disrespectful to him - the book itself is also more optimistic than I might have expected. Snow concludes that simply cataloguing strange artifacts and phenomenon isn't enough; they need to use these things to make the world better. (We don't really get to the part where they do that, but I think we're meant to assume it will start happening.)
This is (part of) his issue with the Four: They help no one but themselves. They resented that they weren't granted special abilities, so they went and got some (which, I don't think is an issue in of itself), but then decided to close the door behind them. There was no ideal beyond, 'get that bag,' and this is what Snow finds unacceptable. He even chides Jakita at times for regarding the things they find as nothing more than a way to alleviate boredom, like all these discoveries are just like trophies you collect in a Grand Theft Auto game to pass the time between running people over.
There are certain parts that don't mean anything to me, most of which I assume are related to the larger Wildstorm Universe, of which I have little-to-no interest. The Bleed, for one. There's also an issue where Snow's mind is sent into a sort of microverse that underpins all existence. Except he learns that as a Century Baby, he is somehow not part of it. But the place underpins everything, so how is he not part of it. Snow later mentions something about all the members of Planetary being parts of different "systems" of defending existence or the universe, but I don't really follow that, either. I don't think any of it is necessary to read the comics. It's probably enough to grasp that Snow rediscovers his purpose, then goes to war against the group that he feels stands in the way of said purpose.
The book suffered from a lot of delays, though that wasn't much concern for me, seeing as I bought used tpbs a decade after the series concluded. Two years between issues 15 and 16, three years between issues the final two issues. I would assume that was Cassaday, but he was also drawing that Joss Whedon-written X-Men book during part of the decade (1999-2009) the book spans, so maybe Ellis took his sweet time getting scripts to him? Obviously, this was written by Ellis, but at this point I imagine you could find a used copy of the original set of tpbs for fairly cheap, thus ensuring he wasn't getting any of your money. Or pirate it. I'm sure that's also an option, if the book interests you and you've somehow taken even longer to investigate it than I did.
