- Title: Planetary #1
- Comic Vine: link
- Writer: Warren Ellis
- Artist: John Cassaday
Wayback Wednesday takes us back to the introduction of the Archaeologists of the Impossible. Debuting in 1998 under the WildStorm brand, Planetary #1 opened the door to a world of possibilities introducing a secret organization who investigated all kinds of weird and amazing things over the comic’s 27 issues. We start with the recruitment of the grumpy Elijah Snow, born on January 1, 1900 (an important date for not just this comic by the wider WildStorm Universe) now spending his days in the middle of nowhere. Enter Jakita Wagner offering the old man a job, to work for Planetary and investigate the weirdness of the secret history of the world beyond what anyone knows is possible.
All the building blocks of the series are presented here including our team (Snow, Wagner, and the Drummer), the allusion towards the Fourth Man who runs the organization, the idea of the Multiverse (in this case being “a theoretical snowflake existing in 196,833 dimensional space“), and a trip into the bizarre involving a survivor from WWII who has stayed awake for half a century to keep a giant computer capable of rewriting existence, and opening doors to parallel worlds which could destroy this Earth, from falling into the wrong hands.
The first issue does a tremendous amount of work in introducing our three main characters in Snow, Drummer, and Wagner, explaining the idea of the Planetary while also foreshadowing mystery beyond the separate adventures of each issue, and kicks us off with a great first adventure setting an impossible bar that the comic somehow managed to meet more often than not.
Like many guest characters over the course of the comic’s run, our WWII hero Axel Brass was based on a classic comic characters or those drawn from pop culture (here we get a version of pulp hero Doc Savage from the 1930s) as were the cameos of his team which we see during a flashback which also gives us a murderous version of the Justice League. More than a quarter of a century later, it’s still as enjoyable read as the first time. And inexplicably, it’s a comic property that seems tailor-made for adaptation which has been ignored in the glut of comic book series and movies churned out in recent years.
[WildStorm, $2.50]