Planetary #1

[skemono]

As requested, some scans from Planetary #1, where a Justice League analogue invades "our" Earth.


Elijah Snow & Jakita Wagner go into a secret hideout and find Axel Brass, a pulp hero from the '40s, guarding something.



He explains what he and his friends got up to during WWII.











Around 8 pages of 24.

Comments

[sadoeuphemist]

Was the Green Lantern-analogue seriously just making a brick when he got shot. What an imagination on that guy.

[q99]

Maybe it was the start of a hammer? But yea, not the A-list of GL analogs!

[jlbarnett]

anyone else tired of the explanations for the multiverse?

[obsidianwolf]

I always kind of liked the one the Time Broker gave when Exiles started since it didn't explain anything by comparing it to a living being and basically amounted to things are screwed up, fix it or your screwed.

Of course then every writer who got on the title had to come up with a new secret revelation for what was going on.

[matrix_dragon]

What's wrong with 'A hell of a lot of alternate universes'?

[wizardru]

Well, at least this one is both not recent (1998) and based on an actual mathematical theory called the "Monster Group". of which the snowflake is the common visual reference used for it.

[arbre_rieur]

I never really got this. By creating this snowflake, aren't these guys committing some sort of genocide on a cosmic scale by generating all the alternate Earths doomed to decohere?

[michaelhealy]

I always thought their snowflake wasn't the multiverse but a representation of it and all of the various universes existed out there on their own this was just a way for humans to gaze into them, and occasionally for them to gaze back.

[sadoeuphemist]

That's like saying, 'Isn't it murder to give birth to a human being that's doomed to eventually die?'

[silicondream]

Basically, yes. But I don't think they realized that all those alternate Earths were, well, "real" in some sense. They just thought of them as models or simulations, with inhabitants that weren't real people, any more than the characters in a book or video game.

(And maybe they were correct; maybe the JLAnalogues only gained independent minds/souls/whatever when they stepped out of the snowflake into the "real" world.)

It's a little less clear to me why they couldn't just leave the machine on for a few seconds more, and have all those alternate universes fast-forward to their "natural" end. Presumably no one inside would notice their world decohering in that case--although God knows how it's possible to detect the decoherence of your own world in the first place.

[sadoeuphemist]

I understood decoherence to be the natural end of the universes. That's how the machine processes information, the alternate possibilities die out until only a single answer remains.

[silicondream]

Right, but maybe you could tweak the program so the universes don't decohere until all the life in them has gone extinct and all the stars have gone out? Maybe?

One wonders if the "corrected version of the planet Earth" was the League's world, which is why it was one of the last to disappear? Kinda tragic.

[freezer]

The lingering stench of The Illuminati taints this, retroactively.

The "I have no way to call for help and/or warn the world in case things go pear shaped, so I must stay forever on guard" factor doesn't help. Says less "noble sacrifice" and more "Really should've put more thought into this."

[katefan]

Well to be fair would the Justice League have made such provisions? Or would they have assumed they have all the power and expertise to handle whatever might come along? Remember, these guys are that analogs of the likes of Doc Savage and The Shadow; nothing ever beats them!

Until one day they pay a terrible price for their hubris...

[freezer]

I figure, at a minimum, Batman would leave some sort of "If I'm not back by X, something went wrong at Y" message for Dick or Alfred.

You're right, of course. But it doesn't make them look less short-sighted.

[silicondream]

Yeah, but at least these guys are pulp heroes--they don't normally operate at the "we can save or destroy planets" level, and they're not used to having a lot of competition. It's pretty reasonable that they wouldn't expect a team of otherdimensional superheroes to leap out of their computer and try to kill them. (And presumably it never happened before, while they were building and testing the thing.)

Whereas the Illuminati are supposed to be smart and powerful and ethical enough to save universes, and include at least two characters who can normally pull this off on their own, but somehow when they all come together in a group they become howlingly incompetent.

[icon_uk]

I find it a little more unreasonable that a bunch of 1940's pulp heroes would be able to kill the JLA in the first place (A few might get hit with their science tech, but how would Doc Savage kill Superman, when he's never met anyone like Superman before.

[silicondream]

Yeah, this JLA must have been weaker than the standard model. Even Golden Age Superman was out of Savage's, er, league. And god knows how Edison could even target the Flash.

That said, I think Hark (the Chinese guy) wins the Extreme Bad Luck award for going hand-to-hand against any version of the Martian Manhunter. IIRC, Hark's a Fu Manchu analogue and basically has no superpowers whatever except for being kinda smart.

[icon_uk]

Actually, the Lord of Strange Deaths would be someone I might expect to be able to take down anyone who isn't actuall invulnerable trying to fight him; those nails are probably more durable than they should be and coated with more exotic toxins than we can dream of (He's attending a meeting of people who would want to stop him in most circumstances, and he doesn't have his bodyguards, so some safeguards are a sensible approach)

[drtechnobabel]

See this right here shows why Hickman is nothing like Ellis. If Hickman wrote this, this entire sequence would have been at least six issues long and the first two would solely consist of the characters constantly talking about the morality of turning on the computer and then doing it anyway.