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Planetary is an incredible exercise in uncovering and exploring—and occasionally exploding—the big narratives of comic and popular culture. Every issue / chapter is self-contained, taking a trope from the schlock culture of the past and interrogating it a bit. You could view it like a few volumes of short stories each one taking a code concept that we're familiar with and doing something wild and new and fascinating with it and you'd not be far wrong.

Partly it's about adding human emotion and resonance to things that were cheesy as hell (the woman experimented upon by mad scientists in the fifties leaps to mind). Sometimes it's about trying to fit the kind of highly optimistic narrative of the sixties into a more cynical environment (the exploration of the Fantastic Four for example). Sometimes it's just about getting the core premise of a narrative and really playing with it. You could view Planetary as Warren Ellis doing the kind of superhero deconstruction and reconstruction that eventually will result in DC completely rebooting their universe, and the Marvel Ultimate line turning up out of the blue. And I think that would be fair because what separates it from Watchmen and stuff like that, is that it's still entertaining, relatively light and not self-consciously 'adult'. It's just *interesting*, dense and cool. And that sense of balance between big concept and intelligence with the superhero suspension of disbelief is pretty much what everyone's been aspiring for since...

I may be alone in thinking that Ellis' gradual attempt to turn these individual one off issues into a conspiracy and one big narrative is a pity and unnecessary, and I think the later volumes get a bit less witty and intriguing and a bit more generic - a bit more of the stuff that previously they'd been interrogating. But the first few volumes are pure and unadulterated pop culture gems.