Waiting for Planetary
- Posted by Johanna on January 19, 2006 at 3:49 pm
- Category: LinkBlogging
Dave Lewis ponders Waiting for Planetary in a piece (link no longer available) that explores the nature of serial comics.
I wonder now if Planetary shouldn’t be kept off schedule. I wonder now how long we can delay the inevitable. I wonder if, with less than a half-dozen issues remaining, how many more years Planetary can be sustained.
It sounds tongue-in-cheek, I know, but I’m being sincere. Has anyone stopped buying Planetary because of the delays? Have stores stopped ordering it? Have the stories themselves devolved in quality? I haven’t, they haven’t, and Planetary hasn’t.
(PS, love the title — I’m a sucker for a good Gene-Wilder-as-Willy-Wonka quote.)
January 19, 2006 at 5:46 PM
I haven’t read the linked essay – getting my copy tomorrow – bu-ut…here’s a question:
Part of the series raison d’etre was to reexamine a century’s worth of fantasy fiction, right? I mean, like The Authority, it had that whole fin d’siecle, fin d’Ellis-on-superheroes thing about it. Does that mean that Planetary gets less relevant, the further from the 20th Century we travel? Does anyone else feel that the direction of the series has changed since the hiatus?
//\Oo/\\
January 20, 2006 at 7:09 AM
I’m not a dedicated fan, so I don’t pay a lot of attention, but I’ve gotten the impression that the other genre parody/recreation aspects have gone away in favor of more straightforward superhero plots and battles.
It’s certainly a fascinating example of how release schedule, both planned and actual, can influence the content of the work, because I don’t believe that the book we’re getting now is the same as the book as originally planned.
January 20, 2006 at 4:35 PM
I stopped reading Planetary when I realized it was a self-serving screed against a company that’s giving Ellis a lot of money.
January 20, 2006 at 4:38 PM
Ummm… what? Are you referring to Marvel?
The Planetary stories I remember best are those about Hong Kong action movies and Godzilla, which have nothing to do with any comic company.
January 20, 2006 at 7:32 PM
I gave up Planetary early-on. After a while, it just got to be too many stand-in characters without enough original story for my tastes. I think I dropped the book after a story about some JLA stand-ins who are easily killed because of their foolish idealism. At that point, I think that was the third Ellis stand-in for the JLA I had seen in a few years’ time and the book was starting to feel like one not worth waiting for.
January 22, 2006 at 9:06 AM
I sympathize, Lyle. There’s a fine line between copying something to comment on it and simply copying it to fill pages, and it’s an easy one to cross.