DON’T YOU REMEMBER? I’M YOUR PAL!
Bank Holiday means no comics until Friday, so I’m late. And speaking of late… PLANETARY. I know people who disagree with me on this, but PLANETARY was a very, very good comic that had people itching for the next issue. However it would take a mutant superflea of the kind that Judge Dredd used to fight off so butchly to keep me itching for as many months as it’s been away. There are enough folk out there endlessly scrabbling and biting their own flanks like diseased dogs over the ins, outs, whys and wherefores of the PLANETARY hiatus, but we at Freaky Trigger are made of sterner stuff. We shall turn our backs on these fools and simply note that this patient has been in a coma the like of which few recover from. Is PLANETARY still alive?
Yes. It’s relying on people to have kept up with it, but on the other hand it isn’t the kind of thing you can really pick up halfway through. You wouldn’t start watching 24 at half-three in the afternoon and expect it to brim over with exposition. It picks up where it left off, moves the plot forward, points out a couple of mysteries that might keep readers interested, and Snow has half an issue to remind us what a fine character he is. All well and good. That’s the second half. The first half is taken up with what I can only describe as a welcome-back to John Cassaday, who was good before and has since become like unto some kind of God. It looks like Ellis examining martial arts through the pop-culture lens he uses for PLANETARY and coming out with a mixture of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Tekken, complete with a slow-motion ‘finishing move’. It lasts ten pages and if Rob Liefield had turned his hand to it he would have ended Ellis’ career for good, but Cassaday makes strong men weep as he illustrates new ways of expressing movement on paper. Ellis does a lot of action without using ‘action lines’; you may want to pick up RED – easily the best so far of his three-issue epics – if you want more of that.
Still, the days when PLANETARY was the best comic of the month may be over. There is a new king and that king has the hydra-like double head of Andy Diggle and Jock. Of which more later.
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • 286 views