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Earlier this year I went and reread some old Warren Ellis comics (NextWave) as a sort of antidote to some other stuff (X-Force), and even though all that I got out of it was realizing those old Ellis comics weren't as good as I remembered, here I am again. I just read the newest volume of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, and it was awful, and it made me think about other comics with mysterious supergroups exploring the uncharted unknown.

So of course Planetary, a book I never really liked before, but that works better as a rebound comic than it does a comic on its own.

Like NextWave, Planetary is very much of-its-time -- not because it's offensive or anything, but because its concerns reflect a very specific moment in comics postmodernism. The late 90's were all about reconstruction. The 80's had torn superhero stories apart and discovered them wanting. The early 90's was an orgy of speculation and hologram covers, while every reputable comics creator worth their salt ran as far away from writing superheroes as possible. But by the end of the 20th century the mini-zeitgeist of the comics world explored how to, like, like superhero stories again. Kurt Busiek's Astro City, Alan Moore's Top 10, and Planetary all approached the problem similarly -- in order to rediscover the past, rewrite.

All three series engaged with superhero comics with a mix of mirrors and tracing paper -- all the heroes you like are here, from the Justice League to the Fantastic Four, but for copyright reasons and postmodernism reasons, the names and costume designs are altered (mildly) and then a new framing device is applied. In all three titles, one aspect of this frame is the 20th century itself. But while Astro City and Top Ten follow the adventures of living heroes in a living world, the "mystery archeologists" of the Planetary group mostly explore the ruins of old stories. The Hulk was created in the 60s, but died in captivity in the 80s. Doc Savage is a forgotten hero, alive but buried underground. Godzilla and his brethren are dead, rotting carcasses on an abandoned Monster Island.

It's interesting that the book that brought me here, The Invisibles, shares a similar loose premise with this, its complete opposite: both series insist that the world we know is not the world, and that only a small cell of superbeings who don't even know who they work for are equipped to deal with the weirdness out there. Said this way, it's not a unique premise in the least (and one could argue that there was likely an uptick in this sort of story following the success of the X-Files juggernaut that consumed the culture around this time). I suppose what I find jarring about both books is their assumption that you, the reader, will be on board with the nature of the mystery. I recall the first time I read Planetary that I was completely annoyed with it; I asked my then-roommate, "Is this all it is? Dead Godzillas and stuff? But that's just stupid."

He shrugged and said, "I dunno, you kinda have to think it's fun to geek out on retro stuff, I think."

"Well I don't," I said. "And it's stupid."

But I hated The Invisibles too, at the other end of the spectrum, for being so ephemeral that it wasn't really about anything -- if Ellis' big reveal was underwhelming for its hokey concreteness, Morrison's was equally weak for its sort of magickal-hoodoo tilting-at-windmills approach. And I think that part of what I reacted to back then, as a reader, was that I had already begun to decide what I thought the nature of the mysteries these authors would explore should be. That's sort of the danger of writing mysteries, in general -- if you wait too long for the reveal, the reader has already come up with something much better than anything you'll ever write.

But in rereading Planetary, and more importantly in knowing ahead of time what it is, I think it's not such a bad book. The art is super beautiful and Cassadayian, and the characters are all grumpy and snipe at each other in very Ellisian ways. Because of the series' structure, I still find it difficult to enjoy each new chapter until I riddle out that chapter's retro homage, so at times the book is more of a puzzle than a reading experience, which is frustrating. So I'm not sure if I'll try to read more than just this volume this time around; I don't exactly have better things to do with my time, but I also feel like I could be trying a little harder.

Which is also sort of this book, really, in a nutshell.