Monday, June 20, 2005
Planetary
So i bought the first three paperbacks of Planetary and read them. It's really not doing it for me. Now, i'll have to admit that i kinda read them out of order because i had found the second book at the library and that i didn't pick up on the fact that the Four are the Fantastic Four but i don't think it's my thing.
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I like Planetary, but it's really, well, a meta-comic and suffers because of it.
He's riffing on a bunch of old themes in comics and saying, "Aren't these spiffy?" and commenting on what he thinks of other comics.
A particularly good example is the episode where the Hellblazer character dies off and becomes the Metropolitan protagonist at the end.
The wild shifts between his trying to establish a sense of wonder ("Save the world and it'll thank you every day." and Jakita (sp?) looking up at the monster island folks) and establish a believable dark conspiracy often falls flat.
Basically it seems that his desire to comment on other comics gets in the way of his writing this one. I keep hoping Ellis will come up with something as good as Metropolitan, but I'm not seeing it here.
It's almost enough that I wish Ellis would just get a montly column in the Comics Journal to get the commentary out of his system so he can keep his fiction a bit cleaner.
Oh yeah, that was me. Ben.
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