YMMV / Planetary

• Complete Monster: Randall Dowling is the leader of The Four, an evil analogue of The Fantastic Four. Having made contact with another world, Dowling plans to assist it in conquering Earth in exchange for power. For decades, he has kept Earth's technology at its current level by withholding or suppressing discoveries that could eradicate disease—including the cure for cancer—and save countless lives. in addition, Dowling locates children with budding technological skill able to advance humanity. He has their families killed in "accidents", before tormenting and brainwashing the kids into using their talents to stifle humanity's growth, with bombs planted in them in case anyone tries to rescue them. Using the Red Scare as a threat, Dowling also creates "City Zero", where suspected "spies" are rounded up and subjected to inhuman experiments, kept alive in horrible agony for Dowling's purposes. To store his experiments and weapons, Dowling also wiped out all life on a planet, just to ensure it was freed for storage. Treating his fellow members of the Four as disposable as well, Dowling's only care is for his own ego, advancement and power, no matter how many worlds he sacrifices.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Zig-zags with Harsher in Hindsight, depending on the time period one focuses on. Issue 2 (released in May 1999) is a meta-commentary on the rise and perceived fall of Kaiju movies within pop culture over the decades. While most giant monsters on the island are long since dead and decaying, the very end shows they are not all gone. At the time, the face of the subgenre, the big G himself, had not had a Japanese movie since 1995, and a then-recent Hollywood reboot in 1998 had made a profit but underperformed to expectations, and divided longtime fans, so calling the series more or less dead was not unreasonable, though of course the longtime fans would argue the point.^note There were still other kaiju movies made around that time, like a Mothra trilogy. But in the same year as the comic (December 1999), he returned to Japanese cinemas, starting a run of new movies... that lasted until 2004, and then another lull movie-wise lasted for ten years. But in turn, this was broken by the success of a second, better-received Hollywood reboot in 2014 which has spawned its own sequels and a spinoff, with more planned. Japan followed up with their own very well-received film in 2016, and the following years have produced anime series and movies, with more stuff to come. Plus there's other unrelated movies that kept the flame burning in their own way, like Cloverfield and Pacific Rim.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The whole message of Issue 7 (released in January 2000) is that Vertigo comics are a relic of The '80s and the industry needs to move on, complete with a paper-thin Expy of John Constantine essentially saying “this has really run its course” and giving himself a full makeover into Spider Jerusalem. Skip forward twenty years and, with many Vertigo fanboys now writers and editors at DC, not only are Vertigo characters and concepts now firmly integrated into the DCU, but John Constantine himself (trenchcoat and all) is now one of their most prominent magic-based characters and was even a member of the Justice League.
• Inferred Holocaust: If one considers the series to be in continuity with the post-Ellis Authority. It also goes against the surprisingly definite Happy Ending in Planetary, so it's safe to say nobody really worries about it.
• Nightmare Fuel: City Zero, a secret American concentration camp that did human experimentation on select political dissidents. To make things truly nightmarish, it’s also a Genre Deconstruction of So Bad, It's Good sci-fi B Movies from The '50s. It’s amazing how unfunny it is from the inside.
• One-Scene Wonder: Brass's teammates (including expies of Tom Swift, Tarzan, and the Lone Ranger) are only in the first issue and a flashback or two, but they provide some great fight scenes and world-building. 
• Spiritual Adaptation: Many consider the Planetary/Batman crossover to be the unofficial, much better version of All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder, due to perfectly summing up the character in a similar, reconstructive way as All-Star Superman.
• Spiritual Successor: The new Outsiders (2023) comic appears to be this. Luke Fox's Outsiders team is very similar to Planetary in both aims and methods, and introduces a new version of The Drummer. It also has ties to Wildstorm by having the team discover The Authority's Cool Starship The Carrier in the first issue. The last panel of the first issue suggests it may be a full-blown sequel.
• Third Act Stupidity: While the series had several examples of an Aborted Arc, fans (and the main page) often point to Randall Dowling’s failure to use his mind-stretching powers in the final showdown with Snow. Word of God says the creators were very done with the series by that point, which may have encouraged a few shortcuts in the writing.

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