Last week at Popdose, I wrote a bit about Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's secret history of the 20th century in Planetary:
Warren Ellis and John Cassaday know where the bodies are buried. Not literal bodies but the fictional corpses of the 20th century heroes and legends. In a 1998 short introductory story, Planetary literally began with a buried body at the bottom of a missile silo; a victim of a radioactive bomb who became a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde kind of character. In that story, Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and The Drummer investigate an Army general’s involvement, trying to discover exactly what happened to a once brilliant scientist that turned him into a raging monster. That was the first body, or story, that Ellis and Cassaday dug into, showing us a familiar story from a slightly different point of view. And that’s what they continued to do over the next 10 years as Planetary explored the stories and histories created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Woo, Alan Moore, Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Walter B. Gibson, Ishiro Honda and so many other 20th century storytellers.
