Waiting for Planetary

Planetary

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.)

Planetary



4 comments

  • 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/\\

  • 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.

  • Lyle

    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.

  • 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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *