466 PLANETARY
Field Team, but the entire Planetary Foundation in direct confl ict with the four who
destroy an entire Brazilian Planetary offi ce building in an attempt to kill Snow, Wagner,
and the Drummer. Snow methodically removes two members of the four, Leather and
Greene, before fi nally confronting Dowling and Suskind and retrieving all of their
hoarded knowledge.
Planetary is unique with respect to its covers, which change in both format and style
with every issue and lend themselves to the contents of each issue much more so than
typical superhero comics. For instance, the cover of Planetary #2 alludes to Japanese
monster movie posters, while Planetary #3 suggests the widescreen still of a Hong
Kong action fi lm. Other covers hint at Neil Gaiman’s Sandman ( Planetary #7), Doc
Savage paperback reprints of the 1970s ( Planetary #5), and 1950s monster cinema
( Planetary #8).
In Planetary , Ellis digs at the roots of the superhero sub-genre, what he terms
superhuman fi ction, and spotlights many of the early 20th-century pulp antecedents
for modern superheroes. He also utilizes thinly disguised versions of existing char-
acters such as Superman , Green Lantern , Wo n d e r Wo m a n , the Shadow , Ta r z a n ,
Doc Savage, and the Lone Ranger in an attempt to show why these characters have
endured. By stripping the characters back to their respective cores, Ellis illustrates
why the “mad and beautiful ideas” that spawned these characters remain compelling
decades later.
Ellis brings a modernist sensibility to Planetary. Snow, in particular, seems very
much a representative modernist man cast adrift in a postmodern world, unable to ini-
tially place himself in that world. He suff ers from the postmodern condition of a lack
of historicity in that his memories (his past) have literally been taken from him, at least
until he recovers both his memories and sense of purpose in Planetary #12. With or
without his memories, though, his driving motivation remains to discover a history that
has been lost or hidden, and to put the pieces of the puzzle of history back together.
Th is is no more apparent than in the cover of Planetary #26, which depicts Snow staring
at the reader, holding the last piece of the puzzle which comprises the cover. In discov-
ering the secret history of the 20th century, he rediscovers not only his own history, but
a unifying sense of purpose that will carry him far into the future. Snow is dedicated
to keeping the world strange, as he believes it should be. He and the entire Planetary
organization fi ght what the German sociologist Max Weber called rationalization, or
the tendency of capitalism to strip the world of magic, reducing all aspects of life to a
routine sameness.
Selected Bibliography: Ellis, Warren, and John Cassaday. Planetary: All over
the World, and Other Stories. Vol. 1. La Jolla, CA: WildStorm Productions, 2000;
Ellis, Warren, and John Cassaday. Planetary: Leaving the 20th Century. Vol. 3. La Jolla,
CA: WildStorm Productions, 2004; Ellis, Warren, and John Cassaday. Planetary: Th e
Fourth Man. Vol. 2. La Jolla, CA: WildStorm Productions, 2001; Ellis, Warren, and
John Cassaday. Planetary: Spacetime Archaeology. Vol. 4. La Jolla, CA: WildStorm
