A Week of Wonderful Comics 4

Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, Planetary #10 (DC/Wildstorm, June 2000).

A graveyard. Why a graveyard?

The central characters in Planetary are three superheroes: weather-controller Elijah Snow, speedster Jakita Wagner, and information specialist "The Drummer." They dub themselves "Archaeologists of the Impossible," a viable career path in a world where Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Tarzan, Doc Savage, Godzilla and the 50-Foot Woman have all turned out to be true. The stories of these fabulous beings--their places in history--have, however, been suppressed by The Four, a group of astronauts who gained unimaginable powers from a trip to outer space and, upon their return to Earth, became despots bent on eliminating super-beings and subjugating the normal masses to their rule. (Sound familiar, but with a sinister twist? We're deep into Alan-Moore-doppelgangers-for-Big-Two-heroes territory here.) Like the good archaeologists they are, Planetary wants to bring to light these suppressed stories, and the struggles between the Planetary Three and the not-so-fantastic Four give a shape to the overall arc of the series. My favorite aspect of Planetary, though, is its pulpy, everything but the kitchen sink tone. It's a speed-freak version of Philip Jose Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973) coupled with Warren Ellis' profane imagination and the best art John Cassaday's ever done. The covers themselves, no two alike, are alone worth the cost of the comic. One example: a magnificent, pseudo-Constructivist cover, a recruiting poster for the Four, for issue #25 (June 2006):

"Magic & Loss," issue #10, my favorite of the run, begins with Elijah Snow and Planetary spear carriers emptying out one of the Four's old headquarters, where they find a red cape, a blue lamp, and a pair of gold wristbands. The story then seamlessly transitions into four flashbacks that explain what the objects are. In the first flashback, two aliens with gray skin and elongated skulls precipitate the destruction of their home planet when they fire a rocket carrying their child towards “a world high in the north spiral arm"--presumably of the Milky Way, in our celestial neighborhood--"with perfect environment." These aliens are unnamed, but it's OK with me if you want to call them Jor-El and Lara. This flashback bleeds into the next, where a corps of interstellar police watch the planet die, mourn, and then send a new recruit to Earth. (Each of these police officers is powered by a blue lamp--a riff, of course, on a certain green lantern, but also a very British allusion to the Ealing Studios' police drama The Blue Lamp [Basil Dearden, 1950].) Here's John Cassaday's extraordinarily precise rendition of the esprit du corps:

The third flashback whisks us away to a “secret female society” invisible but present off the shore of the United States, where two women, a mother and her daughter, discuss the daughter's plans to become an ambassador to the world of men. Nudge, nudge, say no more, but just in case you miss the reference, Cassaday draws a splash page of the daughter mystically summoning weapons with her magic wristbands, while Ellis writes for her mother the subtle-as-a-flying-mallet line "You are a wonder, my daughter."

The issue then ends with five pages of desolation. The alien spaceship carring the child lands, and first on the scene is William Leather, Planetary 's Human Torch surrogate, along with the Four's shock troops. Leather opens the ship, sees the child swaddled in a red cape, and responds thusly:

Leather is speaking with Randall Dowling, the scientific genius of the Four, who is conducting an autopsy on the Blue Lamp. Dowling mentions in passing that another member of the Four will murder "the wonder daughter" as she emerges from the Amazonian city. The graves on the cover of Planetary #10, then, belong to Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and the hundreds of other superheroes murdered by the Four. Now we understand why Snow and his team defy the Four and attempt to recover the stories of the fallen.

Beyond its visceral impact, this Planetary story contains a metaphor tucked within a metaphor. In his fine book How To Read Superhero Comics and Why (2002), Geoff Klock argues that a central theme in most contemporary superhero comics, particularly Planetary, is the almost overwhelming influence of the Silver Age super-comics of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Key here is Harold Bloom's concept of "the anxiety of influence," the idea that new artists in any creative field must digest and respond to the towering shadows of earlier creators. In turning the Four into murderous psychopaths, Ellis and Cassaday take a playfully hostile, Oedipal stance towards Lee and Kirby. In order to clear a space for their own work, Ellis and Cassaday degrade and pervert the Four, the most popular characters of their metaphoric daddies. Added to this subtext in Planetary #10 is another layer of comics history; William Leather's killing of the baby Superman is a thinly-veiled, hysterical, hyperbolic reenactment of Marvel's rise to the status of the best-selling comics company in America during the 1960s. "Magic & Loss" is an elegy for both the lost heroes of Planetary's world and for a lost time when DC Comics were the best-selling aesthetic trend-setters of our peculiar little medium, and I'm glad that the story was originally published as a floppy, in a publication format itself headed towards cultural obsolescence and oblivion. Welcome to the graveyard.   

Runners-Up: For smart superhero thrills 'n' chills, either Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson, Astro City #4 (first series, Image, November 1995) or Paul Grist, Jack Staff #3 (Dancing Elephant, October 2000). For a Warren Ellisgasm (along with Ben Templesmith), try Fell #5 (Image, May 2006).

Note: I might have to delay my final entry in the "Week of Wonderful Comics" series a day or two. I'm blowing my self-imposed deadline for a good reason, though: my wife Kathy and I have decided to drive to Asheville, NC and go to Art Spiegelman's talk at the Asheville Art Museum on Thursday night. It's billed as Spiegelman's traditional "Comix 101" talk, but since he's speaking on 9/11, I expect other topics will come up. I will dutifully write and post a TB piece about the event next week.

Comments

[Jonathan Bass]

Hi Craig,

I also find #10 one of the more wonderful issues in the Planetary series, and was happy to be reminded of it. But I don't see Ellis and Cassaday's eviling of the Fantastic Four as a space-clearing action in response to the "elder comics" of Kirby and Lee (at least not one necessitated by a specifically Bloomian anxiety).

I'm not convinced that the Lee-Kirby influence is "almost overwhelming," that it is an essential *problem* that all Anglo-American artists working in super-hero genres feel they must negotiate if their work is to survive.

The creative relationship with Lee-Kirby seems more appreciative (or pilfering) than agonistic -- a source for ideas or tropes and a template for permutation. (If there is an agonistic relationship for Ellis, then I suspect it might be with Alan Moore [as your second paragraph seems to hint] and not with Lee-Kirby.)

One of the motives of the Planetary series, I think, is finding out what interesting fictional, symbolic, and visual things will happen if, for instance, the authors make the Fantastic Four, not foundational heroes, but the primary villains of their universe. This is a creative motive for Ellis and Cassaday, something that inspires and constrains what they make, but it is also a motive for the readers (for our involvement), as we want to see -- over all those months of delay -- what weird and clever things the authors will do with their wicked Fantastic Four.

[Craig Fischer]

Hi Jonathan--

When I mentioned the "anxiety of Lee/Kirby influence," I was citing Klock's argument more than my own (though I do find Dr. Klockhammer's book interesting and persuasive). I wonder: maybe the question of influence isn't an either/or question? Maybe superhero writers and artists simultaneously feel that (a.) the Lee/Kirby comics wonderful, and (b.) consequently, the bar has been set very high for their own work. Hell, I'm intimidated by Kirby, and I'm only a dimestore critic!

I'm really fascinated by your mention of an antagonistic artistic relationship between Moore and Ellis. How so? And how does PLANETARY #7--with its celebration of the Moore/Morrison British fantasy explosion--reflect this antagonism?

I think you're absolutely right, Jonathan, that one of the joys of PLANETARY was seeing the "clever" ways Ellis and Cassaday twisted the FF. My biggest disappointment with the series is that we never saw Randall Dowling in full action. At the end of #25, John Stone gives us some mighty creepy deatils about Dowling, and while I was reading #26 I kept expecting Dowling to "extend" and try to lay eggs in Snow's brain...!

[Jonathan Bass]

Hi, Craig.

What I was getting at was just that Ellis strikes me as being more concerned with distinguishing his own revisionary superhero work from Moore's revisionary work than he is (consciously or otherwise) with struggling to set himself apart from Kirby and Lee. Partly this is because Kirby and Lee now exist more as classical authors than as near precursors. (The compressed comics tradition, perhaps like the film tradition, seems to allow for this odd temporality.) They are models of an important foundational idiom and for many a nearly essential resource. Functionally, at least, their collaboration is for recent writers and artists more like Homer for Joyce, or at least more like Joyce than Pynchon for contemporary novelists: i.e., the possibility of being seen as just a lesser imitator of Pynchon is still a problem for fiction writers in a way that being seen as another imitator of Joyce is not (and cannot be).

On the other hand, the relation with Moore -- and the danger (for Ellis, etc.) of being seen by fans and critics as a "weak" imitator of Moore, of doing no more than a version of what Moore did with Swamp Thing, Marvelman, or the Charlton heroes, is felt as (and often really is) a danger and an artistic problem. (And this may be part of the significance of the "time-to-put-the-eighties-behind-us" theme of Planetary #7.) How to make self-conscious, revisionary superhero comics without looking too Moorish was, I think, a problem back in the 1980s and 1990s -- at least for those cartoonists who wanted to, or for reasons of employment simply had to, make that kind of comic. (I think this is not too far from at least some of what Klock argues.)

I suspect there are similar problems for those making design-oriented comics with not looking too much like an epigone of Chris Ware or those making drawing intensive, art brut comics with not looking too much like an epigone of Gray Panter (or Fort Thunder).

But I'm doing a lot of claiming here, and not much supporting; so I'll have to think this through a bit more. In the mean time, I continue to enjoy your "Week(s) of Wonderful Comics."

Cheers.