Line #5 Headscratchers/Planetary


1	* How can ''Planetary'' be part of the same universe as ''ComicBook/TheAuthority''? If the Four are supposed to be hiding and/or destroying all the fantastic things that could stand a chance against their evil [[{{Expy}} expies]] of everything ever drawn by Creator/JackKirby, then shouldn't they do something about those totalitarian superheroes who overthrew the US government and killed God?
2	** The Authority are either too powerful to take down or are allowed to exist because they do wonderful, helpful things like turn the US into a police state (give the conspiracy theorists a bigger target) and kill God (definitely a superhuman force that the Four couldn't control or conquer, so had to be eliminated). Imagine this - you're a group of four posthumans who are very, very good at getting rid of other superhumans. And you want to take over the US. But the US is run by a lot of bureaucrats and elected officials and such, and killing them all would draw a lot of attention. So you let a group of less than ten people take over the whole place. Toppling or subverting this regime is a ''lot'' easier. Or, as we learned in the same issue of Planetary that introduced the Four, the real rulers of America are thirty-three levels above the president, so the Four don't really give a shit because they're still the ManBehindTheMan (repeated 32 times). Or they could have been dead by then. I'm not quite sure how Planetary's timeline syncs up with the post-Jenny Sparks Authority's timeframe.
3	*** The Planetary/Authority crossover has Jenny still alive, and Snow is still not at full mental function (ie the blocks Dowling put on him are still present), so that's before issue #11 of Planetary and issue #8 (IIRC) of Authority.
4	*** It's repeatedly implied that the Four are just that damned arrogant. They probably consider themselves above all that superhero crap.
5	** Jenny Sparks spends roughly the same amount of time that Snow spent in the desert in a drunken stupor. It's not too great a leap to assume that Randall Dowling got to her as well, thus neutralizing the last two Century babies and was bankrolling the post-"screw you America" Jacob Kreigskind in case either Snow or Sparks got back into the game to keep them busy
6	** I always took it to be a simple matter of timing. Yeah, ''Planetary'' took 10 years to make, but the events of the book from start to finish may only take a few months. The Authority doesn't really get going until after Planetary has rescued Axel Brass and Elijah has his memories back, so I saw it as The Four wanting to get rid of Planetary before worrying about anyone else. And besides, there's no indication that Jenny/The Authority knew anything about The Four.
7	** The official take on the pre-DC-merger "Wildstorm Universe" is similar to that of the Image superhero universe, in that all titles are assumed to be in their own universes until such a time as it's indicated otherwise. Thus, while ''Planetary'' fits rather neatly into the quiet Cold War environment of late ''Stormwatch'', it doesn't play ball very well at all with post-Ellis ''Authority'' even before the world got blown up.
8	*** ''Planetary'' is explicitly in the same continuity as ''The Authority'', though. These two series had a crossover one-shot, and Jenny Sparks in mentioned several times in the main series.
9	*** One gets the impression Warren Ellis [[CanonDiscontinuity didn't care about anything he didn't write himself]], particularly since quite a lot had happened to the Authority (in real-world terms, via multiple writers) by the time he got around to wrapping up Planetary. It's hard to blame him for disregarding all that to finish his own story the way he wanted. Much like the earlier Image writers, Ellis really only takes what he wrote himself as canon. So ''Stormwatch'' and ''The Authority'' as far as his finale, are the only things that ''really'' count.
10	*** Planetary's last few issues, even though they came out much, much later, are very clearly set in the Wildstorm universe before it was rebooted.
11	** Aside from one issue featuring the Authority and a handful of mentions of Jenny Sparks / shared concepts such as Century Babies etc., there's really not a lot that actually directly links the two (particularly in later issues), and IIRC ''Planetary'' was never really mentioned that much in ''The Authority'' or any of the other Wildstorm titles. It's not to hard to look at it as its own standalone thing; the crossover / shared concepts can just be handwaved as the book taking place in an "Earth 2" kind of thing for the Wildstorm universe (hey, if the DC universe gets one, why not Wildstorm?), or as just being quietly retconned away later in the series.
12	** It's possible that the Authority simply didn't know the Four existed. The Four are incredibly secretive, with issue 6 pointing out that their past history was classified prior to the Artemis launch, and afterwards they completely ceased to exist on ANY file or document. Unlike their inspiration, the Fantastic Four, they don't live in a building with their logo on the front, they live in a totally anonymous skyscraper that simply happens to have 'Four' in it's name. They work in the shadows at all times, operating in secret, existing solely to bury the unusual and the incredible in their laboratories. Meanwhile Elijah Snow's entire thing is finding secrets, he himself says he could never resist it. Maybe Elijah just kept picking at a scab and eventually uncovered the Four, while the Authority figured 'nothing unusual here' and moved on to something bigger and more obvious
13	* Jakita expressing surprise that aliens have visited Earth, when at least some of those visits are public knowledge in the Wildstorm verse. Creator/WarrenEllis doesn't even have the excuse of ignorance, since he's written rather extensively in that universe.
14	** My personal WMG for this and the above is simply that ''ComicBook/{{Planetary}}'' in fact takes place in a universe which is very similar to-in-many-ways-but-not-quite the actual Wildstorm universe. It's just easier that way.
15	** She also seemed more surprised at the ''amount'' of aliens who've visited Earth than at their existence.
16	* Radioactive Half-life Doesn't Work That Way: Why would a radioactive woman "with a half-life of 50 years" stay fully functional for exactly fifty years and then instantly blink out of existence?
17	** She says "I could've done this a while ago" before she goes. She's holding on just long enough to tell Jakita and Snow about City Zero, and then she lets herself die.
18	** RuleOfDrama.
19	** She didn't blink out existence, you just could no longer perceive her as a whole woman, the same way that radioactive decay results in elements becoming entirely different elements over time.
20	** More specifically, ''Planetary'' takes place in a universe that is pretty much made of various tropes of real world fiction, progressing historically along ''with'' our fiction. In the 1920s and 30s, Snow lived pulp adventures just like were written in the 1920s and 30s. The woman was a 1950s Cold War mad science story, so she would by necessity obey the presentation you'd get out of schlocky, scientifically-illiterate period SF written by a hack. Her "story" literally obeys different rules than the turn-of-the-millennium main storyline.
21	** I seem to recall [[WordOfGod Warren Ellis openly admitted]] that he knew half-life didn't mean that, but the metaphor of a 'half-life' given from the science was too good not to use.
22	* In issue 17 "The Lost City of Opak-Re", Elijah is attacked by the nominative city's guard- a cyborg-sea-monster-dinosaur-thing. He opens fire on it with his revolver and does some damage. The monster then knocks Elijah off his feet. Elijah loses his gun in the fall, and then acts as if he is completely defenceless. He is only saved by the sudden appearance of a Tarzan-CaptainErsatz. Did Elijah just forget that he can freeze things solid by thinking at them? Even if he did have a gun, wouldn't it make more sense to start the fight using the superpowers that had previously let him CurbStomp Dracula rather than rely on a mere handgun?
23	** He's visibly exhausted from his jungle trek at the start of that scene, and given that he's already lost the rest of his expedition and bearers he might also have been out of food. So he might not have had the strength to use his powers at full blast, and just giving the giant snake an ice cream headache wouldn't have had any point.
24	** Dracula was also not a massive cyborg-sea-monster-dinosaur-thing. It would be easier to quickly flash-freeze something which is more-or-less human in size, build and make-up than to flash-freeze a massive prehistoric creature.

Context Headscratchers / Planetary