Planetary #27

It's been almost precisely three years since Planetary #26 and here - finally - is the conclusion to Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's classic postmodern superhero series.

The Planetary team made their first appearance in September 1998, in a short teaser episode that heralded the ongoing series. In the eight-page preview, three no-nonsense super-types break into a top-secret military base, rough up a few goons and menace a grizzled old general into revealing the specifics of a 1962 military cover-up. The incident in question is a clear reference to the secret origin of Marvel's Incredible Hulk, the notable divergence being that Wildstorm's analogue was overpowered and dropped five miles down a concrete nuclear test shaft, eventually expiring after two decades without food or water.

Introducing themselves as 'Mystery Archaeologists', the three members of the Planetary field team outline their mission to map the secret history of the twentieth century, uncovering fantastic secrets and righting age-old wrongs along the way. The leader is Elijah Snow, a sarcastic curmudgeon [the protagonists of Ellis's work are often grumpy, middle-aged men] whose clown-buttoned zoot suit matches his tousled mop of pure white hair; Jakita Wagner is the muscle, a stunningly attractive, latex-clad woman who can effortlessly punch holes through brick walls; support and intel is provided by The Drummer, a begoateed slacker apparently able to interface directly with any kind of information system.

Planetary was the understated flipside to the massively hyperbolic approach of The Authority, Ellis's parallel Wildstorm project of the time: an outrageous, over-the-top action series that saw the titular superteam punching jaws off, kicking opponents in half and summarily executing their defeated enemies. Ellis's controversial millennial rebranding of costumed superheroes in turn spawned the early-noughties concept of 'widescreen comics', which featured multiple outsized images of ultra-detailed action scenes. An early Authority episode called for a double-page spread of F-16 fighter jets taking on the invading aerial fleet of an alternate Earth in the skies above Los Angeles: Ellis's script apparently read 'The ships engage', which curt instruction subsequently took artist Bryan Hitch several days to fully illustrate.

Planetary undoubtedly has its moments, but even the large-scale violence is invariably brief and brutal, simply another contingent necessity factored into über-strategist Snow's meticulous pre-planning. The main attraction of the series stems from its neatly realized insinuation of existing fictional characters and concepts into a single universe, in much the same way as Moore and O'Neill's sublime League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series continues to do. The oddities unearthed by the Planetary organization are instantly recognizable to any pop culture connoisseur: Godzilla, James Bond, two-fisted pulp heroes, Hong Kong action and kung fu movies, Victorian sci-fi, '50s Cold War paranoia - the series can be read as Ellis's personal homage to many of the most influential landmarks in imaginative fiction.

With an eclectic set of superpowered characters and an almost inexhaustible pool of fictional subject matter to explore, the series was an immediate hit. A large part of its appeal lay in the fact that each issue was more of an experience than simply an individual episode in an ongoing story. The covers, for instance, conform to no particular format, instead uniquely summarizing each issue's theme in a complementary art style, right down to the era-specific logo designs. The series benefits from the instantly identifiable artwork of American artist John Cassaday, whose unique, ornate costume and environment design infuses the series with a palpable sense of strangeness and wonder. Equal praise has to go to Laura Martin for the rich vibrancy and subtle graduation of her digital colouring, which lends further weight to the impact of Cassaday's imaginative linework. It's additionally telling that, since their early collaborative work on this series, Laura Martin has been the exclusive colour artist for almost all of Cassaday's subsequent interior art.

This being a comic, there are naturally several nods to the mainstream institutional superheroes of the major US comic publishers. Planetary's quartet of nemeses, The Four, are twisted mirror images of Marvel's Fantastic Four, their physical forms mysteriously altered during an exploratory space voyage. Unlike the benevolent team that inspired them, Ellis's Four are truly evil individuals, bent on the acquisition of knowledge for their own sake, power-crazed and responsible for a catalogue of horrific crimes. Among many and varied transgressions, Snow uncovers evidence of The Four having murdered the entire population of one world simply to create the requisite storage space for their otherworldly arsenal; they're also responsible for the systematic extermination of a raft of recognizable DC heroes [Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Superman], in a neat fictional re-enactment of the Marvel-dominated, flawed Silver Age superseding DC's clean-cut Golden Age. In much the same way, the first issue saw an analogue lineup of DC's Justice League engaging the foremost pulp heroes - Doc Savage, Tarzan, The Spider et al - in mortal combat, in the same way as those two genres had fought for supremacy of their era's cheap, disposable entertainment. The unflattering way that costumed superheroes are presented in the series has also been seen by many as a comment on Ellis's recorded distaste at the dominance of the genre in Western sequential art. This interpretation founders somewhat - or could at least be dismissed as a snapshot of Ellis's mindset some years ago - since he has of late embraced the hands-off editorial approach championed by Avatar Press, and has once again begun rattling out creator-owned titles such as Black Summer, No Hero and Supergod, all of which burst with exuberant, if cynical, contemplations on the notion of the superman.

Like much of Ellis's work, Planetary is peppered with references to the latest thinking in brain-bending theoretical science, as made available for popular consumption in New Scientist and the books of Marcus Chown or Michio Kaku. These ideas form the solid basis for the Planetary continuum, where the nature of the multiverse of parallel realities is revealed very early on to be "a theoretical snowflake existing in 196,833-dimensional space". This is a reference to the Monster Group, a pure maths theory that apparently explores the nature of reality. Even the most basic explanation of this principle causes me instant brainlock, so I won't attempt to regurgitate it here. More understandably, The Drummer explains magic as being "the cheat codes of reality", a much more palatable videogames reference.

Structurally, the first few issues are self-contained episodes that see the team investigating some Fortean anomaly or other, with Snow spouting cynical Ellis-isms, Wagner smacking someone or something really hard in the chops and The Drummer tapping into a computer network, telemetry or some unfathomable alien data system to reveal startling truths about the nature of reality. Planetary documents the evidence and Snow wraps it all up with his trademark "It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way." The seeds of an overarching plot, however, are sown in #6, Strange Harbours, when Planetary make the link between the discovery of an interdimensional shiftship [Ellis's second, after The Authority's Carrier] and the nefarious machinations of The Four. This is the issue in which Snow gains his first cryptic hint that he might actually share a history with The Four - a history about which he has absolutely no recollection. From this point on, it becomes clear that The Four have been instrumental in suppressing pretty much everything Planetary are now making it their business to expose. This is where the team begins to gather its key allies, and where Snow begins to put together a long and patient plan to remove their ideological opposites from the equation, leaving the way clear to finally put an unfathomable wealth of hoarded knowledge to good use.

Without giving too much of the intervening plot away, that necessarily long and deliberately-paced storyline came to its natural end in #26: a fittingly bombastic denouement replete with massive explosions, witty one-liners, well-deserved come-uppances and heroic triumphs, the final few pages of which were sufficiently open-ended for it not to feel like The End. As such, this issue can't help but come across as something of an afterthought, albeit one that feels entirely appropriate for a series whose instalments have mostly been self-contained, and which has undergone lengthy hiatuses along the way.

The fold-out, wrap-around cover by Cassaday and Martin [a diminutive version of which can be found at the top of this post] amalgamates practically every notion explored throughout the series into one massive gatefold mosaic: the Planetary team occupy a circle at the centre, with the seven pulp heroes arrayed in a semi-circle beneath them and The Four glaring menacingly from each corner. This arresting graphic recalls both the more generic montage cover used for the first introductory episode and the more series-specific images that appear on the collection covers.

A year has passed since the events described in the previous issue and the Planetary organization has become a global public entity, issuing press releases about cancer cures and cheaply-fabricated aid stations. Against this triumphal backdrop, Ellis revisits the more readily accessible of the dangling plot threads from #9, Planet Fiction, which featured a Four-run experiment to bring a character out of a fictional world and into their reality, and which saw the apparent demise of Ambrose Chase, Planetary's erstwhile 'third man'. Snow is still obsessing over Chase's disappearance and believes the key to his salvation might be found in The Four's labyrinthine archives. The Drummer outlines one useful entry he has unearthed - the basic method for and limitations of time travel - and there, in its essence, is the binding theme for the final issue. Given the cutting-edge physics involved in time travel theory, the first half of the issue understandably contains a lot of expository dialogue. Ellis has made an effort to understand the theory and tie it into the Planetary framework in terms that even a simpleton like me can understand, and while it could be argued that this is evidence of Ellis's self-absorption, it also contributes to the sense that this instalment is an added extra - a special edition bonus feature for all the diehards.

Some critics have cited Ellis's clearly decreasing interest in the series, apparent from lazy plotting and a dwindling sense of excitement, but I have to disagree with that interpretation. As the series nears its conclusion, closer adherence to a coherent plot and the need to resolve the central conflict necessarily narrows the broad scope of those earlier episodes, changing the focal point from the wild, fun concepts to the major players themselves. However interesting they are, we saw them doing pretty much the same stuff in the previous issue and they still look and sound the same. That doesn't really equate to the series having lost its spark - all the crazy, big stuff is still there, but rather than taking centre stage it now forms the scenery for the developing story. That's actually rather a neat trick - along with the team, the more we have seen of the strangeness, the more we have become inured to it.

There has also been some suggestion that the protagonists have unknowingly supplanted The Four, continuing to use their hoarded knowledge and technology to further personal ambition. In some ways this is true, but that level of overwhelming power does ultimately demand some degree of control, which will be unavoidably and arbitrarily decided by its custodian, and the marked distinction between the villainy of The Four and the bad-tempered altruism of Elijah Snow remains resolutely in place.

This issue is noticeably more introspective than previous episodes, from small in-jokes such as a restless Jakita Wagner bemoaning the fact that, now things have settled down, there's nothing left for her to hit [although Ellis does throw her a bone towards the end], right down to the big reveal being the appearance of tweaked future incarnations of the Planetary team itself. Given the number of external ideas that have been showcased throughout the series, and given the generally contemplative nature of this final chapter, it's only fitting that the big final concept should be entirely autoreferential.

So, in summary: not the most essential episode of the series, but definitely a neat restating of the aims and tone of the title. Heavy on the dialogue and high-concept science, light on the action, possibly slightly self-indulgent but not in the least bit incongruous when read in sequence. The second oversized, slipcased, hardback volume of Absolute Planetary is already listed on Amazon, but personally I'm looking forward to the fourth trade paperback, at which point I'll probably re-read the whole thing in one go, doubtless experiencing a shivery fanboy frisson as I do so.