Gun Machine (2013) by Warren Ellis: Warren Ellis, a long-time comic-book writer (Transmetropolitan, The Authority, and Planetary, among many others) and acerbic futurist, creates one hell of a smart Pop detective thriller here.
Lonely, burned-out, never-was NYPD detective John Tallow starts Gun Machine with a bad day that quickly gets worse. The violent events of the first few pages open a door into a secret Manhattan world of murder and weird maps. And guns. Lots of guns. Hundreds of guns from flintlocks to modern, near-metal-less handguns. An otherwise empty apartment filled with guns arranged into a mysterious, incomplete pattern. And every gun attached to either an unsolved murder or a murder now known to be incorrectly solved.
Tallow's detective instincts get jump-started by this room of mystery, especially after the case is dumped on him because the NYPD not-so-secretly wants Tallow to fail and the cases to vanish as quickly as possible. A bad detective gets born again, though that rebirth may be short-lived. Conspiracies of power don't want the secret of the guns solved.
Ellis' prose is as pungent and cynical as ever, densely packed with information. The plot rockets along. Tallow and the other characters are sharply drawn. Sharply drawn, too, is our attention to the secret maps of Manhattan which Tallow discovers. A financial map based on the time it takes for financial offices to communicate with Wall Street. A map of gun crimes in Manhattan and the other boroughs. And the map the killer carries in his head, of Manhattan before Europeans came, a map that still surfaces in surprising places in the postmodern landscape.
It's a dark romp that engages with social and technological questions as it zips along, dialogue crackling and sparking, the narrative casting a cold eye on the modes of NYPD evidence collection, the surveillance state, the technical specifications of guns used in famous murders, the difficulty of parking in New York, the meaning of Occupy Wall Street, the malign rise of private policing, the dangers of too much exercise, an assortment of Native American tribes and rituals, and the politics of the police bureaucracy.
Gun Machine is too densely packed to make a great movie, but it would make one hell of an HBO miniseries. Highly recommended.
Planetary Volume 1: All Over the World and Other Stories; Volume 2: The Fourth Man; Volume 3: Leaving the 20th Century; Volume 4: Spacetime Archaeology; written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by John Cassaday, Laura Depuy and others (1998-2009):
One conspiracy has stolen humanity's future, systematically eradicating potential heroes and benevolent scientific advances, all in the name of power. That's The Four, a quartet of astronauts gifted with astonishing powers during a secret attempt at a lunar landing in 1961. They are the worst humanity has to offer.
The other conspiracy is attempting to stop The Four and help humanity progress as it was supposed to. To do so, secrets must be unearthed -- of the Four, and of all the strangenesses of the world that have been lost, misplaced, or stolen. That's Planetary.
It's the end of the 20th century when we begin and the beginning of the 21st century when we end. Planetary offices span the globe, but its central investigators appear to be three people: Elijah Snow, born on January 1, 1900 along with a host of other superpowered individuals, able to control temperature and mysteriously bereft of a number of his memories; Jakita Snow, super-strong and super-fast; and the Drummer, who can see, store and manipulate all forms of information.
First they investigate, as the 20th century goes to sleep, a lost world of strangeness and charm, a world familiar to us from popular culture but subtly changed. An island of giant monsters north of Japan. A ghostly, avenging Hong Kong cop. Giant ants created to guard the mysterious Science City Zero in the Arizona desert. The lost space 1851 capsule of the Baltimore Gun Club. 1930's renaissance man and adventurer Doc Brass and his six amazing compatriots, stopping the end of the world on New Year's Day 1945, with the world unaware. A multiverse of extraordinary fractal complexity, shaped like a snowflake. The lost African super-city of Opak-Re. An entire Earth murdered to provide the Four with storage space.
And the loathsome Four. Forged by Nazi science and a hatred of everything human and superhuman. Four extraordinary humans who have spent their lives destroying or stealing the extraordinary. Why? To what purpose? And where did their powers come from?
And who is the mysterious Fourth Man of Planetary, the financial backer behind the scenes?
Warren Ellis's writing remains spare and echoey and witty throughout, leaving the reader space to imagine all the permutations of the jam-packed pop-cultural landscape across which Planetary stalks the Four without moving into the pompous or purple. It's meta, but not in the way that Alan Moore's similar-but-quite-different League of Extraordinary Gentleman is meta: the characters of Planetary aren't fictional characters in a mutating world of overlapping fictions. They're real people in a multiverse whose fundamental laws suggest that everything real resembles fiction, stories, myths, legends, all of it explained by mad science and madder cosmology.
John Cassaday's art justifiably won a number of awards. It echoes the styles of others when it needs to echo, but throughout maintains a marvelous vastness and spaciousness, an epic look nonetheless capable of evoking the familiar and the normative.
There are lovely character moments, moments of profound sorrow and loss, and wide as the widest widescreen moments of revelation and epiphany and wonder. Recurring throughout is Elijah Snow's catchphrase -- "It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way." In these four volumes or in the larger Absolute Planetary volumes, this remains one of the four or five truly essential superhero comic books of the last 20 years. Highest recommendation.
Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth: the Deluxe Edition, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by John Cassaday and Laura Martin (2003; this edition 2011): OK, so it's a shameless money-grab in many ways, reprinting a 48-page story in an oversized 96-page hardcover. On the other hand, the art by Planetary co-creator John Cassaday pretty much warrants the package. He's one of a handful of contemporary comic-book artists whose art looks better the larger it gets.
Taking place some time during the first 12 to 15 issues of the main Planetary comic book, Night on Earth brings a Batman-less Gotham City into the Planetary universe. Strange murders involving what appears to be multiversal shifting have been taking place, so Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and The Drummer meet up with Gotham City Planetary office workers Dick Grayson and Jasper (who looks a lot like the Joker) to find out what's going on.
And then their prey, John Black, starts shifting portions of Gotham again -- bringing the Batmen of different worlds (or, from out POV, different comic books and TV shows) into conflict with the Planetary team.
It's all great, meta-fun as Batman and Gotham jump among several major versions from comics and television due to John Black's multiversally shifting brainstorms. Cassaday renders each iteration in marvelous, telling detail, while Ellis gives us both the usual Planetary bickering (100-year-old Elijah Snow is especially grumpy throughout because of his previous experiences with Gotham, which even in the Planetary universe is a really screwed-up place) and some relevant character moments for Batman.
I hope that after the way-too-oversized Absolute Planetary editions are done we'll get something more like this size for future reprints. Cassaday's art really does look great. Warren Ellis's proposal and script for the comic round out the package. Both are pretty interesting, though we're told they were edited for mature language. I want the swears! Highly recommended.
Planetary: Lost Worlds, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Jerry Ordway and Phil Jiminez (Collected 2011): This inexpensive, 100-page comic-book style reprint collection replaces (along with the expensive, over-sized hardcover Planetary: Batman reprint) an older reprint volume of Planetary's non-arc one-offs, Crossing Worlds. I don't know how successful these inexpensive DC reprints are, but this one is just about right for the money and the material.
The first story teams super-archaeologists Planetary and super-problem-solvers Authority in a story that mainly seems to exist to show Planetary's worries about the Authority's gradual assumption of more and more political power, to tie up some loose ends from the first issue of Planetary, and to give Warren Ellis a chance to write the most unpleasant (and, historically speaking, inaccurate) version of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft ever. Phil Jiminez does solid pencilling work, but the story seems padded with fight sequences and awfully thin on all other types of sequences.
The second story, drawn by long-time Superman penciller Jerry Ordway, takes place on a parallel Earth on which Planetary runs everything (malevolently) from behind the scenes just as Planetary's enemy The Four do in the regular Planetary comic. Alternate versions of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman take on Planetary, all the other heroes of Earth having been killed off in secret by Planetary and their powers used in new, money-making technologies. It's one of those depressing 'What-if?' tales that again seems padded with fight sequences in lieu of adequate development of the characters and dystopian elements.
Both stories are interesting, and it's hard to argue with the price ($7.99, about half what you'd have paid for the standalone issues back when they came out in the early oughts), but they're pretty light stuff compared to the heavy-hitting regular Planetary material. Lightly recommended.
Planetary Volume 1: All Over the World, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by John Cassaday and Laura Martin (1998-2000; collected 2001): 27 issues spread over 12 years... that's how long the truly epic story of Planetary took to play out due to a combination of health issues and other artistic and writerly committments.
Elijah Snow, The Drummer and Jakita Wagner -- the three super-powered members of Planetary -- would investigate a wide variety of superheroic and science-fictional events over that time, all tied into the overarching plot that involved the efforts of the super-powered, Nazi-derived Four to do something terrible to all of humanity, something terrible they'd been building towards for decades.
The Four -- a nightmarish version of Marvel's Fantastic Four -- had been systematically holding back humanity for those decades, destroying or suppressing various wonders, technologies and strange visitors from another planet. Against them stands Planetary, "archaeologists of the impossible", funded by a mysterious Fourth Man as the world's last hope for a future. As Planetary seeks out the roots and the aims of the Four's plan, Snow also seeks out the mystery of the identity of the Fourth Man.
Early on, though, the master-narrative was still being alluded to, discovered by the characters as they went along. Snow, capable of generating vast amounts of cold (which of course means that he's really capable of extracting kinetic energy from his environment), begins the book somewhat amnesiac and terminally bored. Recruited by super-strong Wagner and information guru The Drummer, he then takes part in a series of pulp- and comic- and movie-allusive adventures that begin to reveal the secret world under the skin.
Giant atomic monsters on Japan's Island Zero! The secret fate of pulp superman Doc Brass! The Hong Kong ghost-cop and his mission of vengeance! And the origins of The Four, America's first astronauts transformed into something greater and something worse than human. With John Cassaday's often stunningly beautiful art, Planetary quickly became one of the best, and the most interesting, superhero comics ever created. Highly recommended.
