"Planetary is an organization billing themselves as "Archaeologists of the Impossible", tracking down the world's secret history. Funded by the mysterious Fourth Man, who it is said could be anyone from Bill Gates to Adolf Hitler, the field team consists of three superhumans: Jakita Wagner, who is strong, fast and nearly invulnerable; The Drummer, who can detect and manipulate nearby information streams, most commonly used to manipulate computers and other electronics; the new recruit Elijah Snow, who can extract heat from nearby substances at will, freezing them; and the former third man Ambrose Chase, who has a "selective physics-distortion field".
"The idea of the series is to create a concise world in which archetypes of superheroes, pulp fiction heroes, science fiction heroes, and characters from just about every possible mass media format, live in one large universe while the Planetary team investigates them and ties together the ends. As Warren Ellis wrote in his proposal for the comic series: "[W]hat if you had a hundred years of superhero history just slowly leaking out into this young and modern superhero world of the Wildstorm Universe? What if you could take everything old and make it new again?"
Warren Ellis and John Cassidy's "PLANETARY" (another creation published by IMAGE comics) is one of the comic properties being touted as the next "WATCHMEN" for a film treatment. It certainly has the weird intellectual vibe all sewn up and is underappreciated and limitedly read or known. It also has the possiblity for a franchise since the over-all mystery that fuels the series can easily be extended over three movies or more. The heroes of the comic are not your usual cowl and cape superheroes and their motivations/methods are not always black or white. My favorite PLANETARY one shot is BATMAN/PLANETARY-NIGHT ON EARTH which is also one of the great crossovers of the decade.(I totally need to do my decade's best list before the decade actually ends)Check out these great versions of Batman that the Planetary crew encounter during one very strange Gotham night.
