History ComicBook / Planetary

* NoOneGetsLeftBehind: Lampshaded.
-->'''Elijah:''' He's getting away!\\
'''The Drummer:''' Leave me behind! I'll only slow you down!\\
'''Elijah:''' Okay.\\
'''The Drummer:''' I didn't ''mean'' it, you evil old geezer.

* TheCanKickedHim: A guard suffers this fate thanks to Elijah and his freezing powers. Specifically, he's pissing into a urinal when Elijah ''freezes the urine stream from the basin right up his dick and into his bladder.''

** Ambrose Chase Vs. Kim Suskind. Poor lady never had a chance.

* ExplainExplainOhCrap: In the penultimate issue, before departing from a parlay he invited them to in the desert, Snow claims that he's about to kill Dowling and Suskind. The two villains note that for all of his bravado, Snow has only ever known one thing that they didn't know themselves. Then they remember what that one thing ''is'', namely [[spoiler: the location of an alien spaceship hidden beneath Earth's surface. Snow has just tricked them into standing on top of that ship and has it blast off, killing them.]]

* HellBentForLeather: Jakita Wagner.

* InvisibilityWithDrawbacks: Suskind can turn invisible, but in that state she's blind. (Unless she wears a special pair of goggles designed by Dowling to mitigate the problem. It's not explained how the goggles help when they're invisible too.)

** Subverted by Dowling and Suskind, their radically altered genomes means they can't breed with each other. One of Dowling's labs contains [[PeopleJars tanks]] with hideous stillborn mutants in them, apparently his attempts to create children from their DNA.

* UnholyMatrimony: Randall Dowling and Kim Suskind. When they're bickering near the end, Dowling says something that suggests he only hooked up with Suskind because she was useful to him, but then again when he recognises their imminent doom a few moments later he seems to be genuinely trying to get her clear.

* OneToMillionToOne: In the flashback to Bret Leather's career as a sinister masked vigilante in the 1930s, a group of mooks open fire on him and he appears to disperse into a mass of small black dots -- spiders, which swarm past the feet of the gunmen, and then Leater appears again behind the men.

* SomebodySetUpUsTheBomb: In issue #18, William Leather busts into the Planetary helicopter, intending to kill all capture all aboard, only to find that it's being flown remotely and all that's aboard is a lot of boxes filled with explosives. The resulting detonation doesn't kill him because he has SuperToughness, but stuns him long enough for the Planetary team to capture him.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: In issue #4, Jim Wilder intervenes in a mugging and chases after the mugger because he's taken the victim's heart medication and the victim is having an attack brought on by the stress. During the chase, Jim gets sideswiped by the larger plot of the issue, and the story never gets around to going back and finding out if the mugging victim was okay. [[spoiler:However, a later issue reveals that the mugging was set up to lure Jim to the spot where the plot got him, which would suggest that the victim's heart condition was an invention to encourage him to chase the mugger.]]

* ExplosiveLeash: In one issue, the Planetary field team raid one of the Four's facilities, where a group of child prodigies in explosive collars are being forced to subvert the internet.

* EyeScream: The way they torture [[spoiler:William Leather]] in the final volume.

* GroundShatteringLanding: Jakita's SuperToughness is first demonstrated in a scene where she jumps out of an aircraft without a parachute, landing unharmed and leaving two sets of radiating cracks in the rock where her feet made contact.

* InvisibilityWithDrawbacks: Suskind can turn invisible, but in that state she's blind. (Unless she wears a special pair of goggles designed by one of the Four to mitigate the problem. It's not explained how the goggles help when they're invisible too.)

* NonhumansLackAttributes: Averted. The ComicBook/GreenLantern {{Expy}} who falls on Earth naked has vagina-like genitalia.

* NoPoverty: The home of Jakita's mother.

* OffscreenMomentOfAwesome: In issue #8, the Planetary team are attacked by a swarm of giant ants which carry off their helicopter with the pilot still inside. Jakita tells the rest of the team to take cover in a nearby building while she deals with the ants. The audience sees her take down one ant, then turns as more ants surround her -- then the story cuts away to the rest of the team, discussing the situation that brought them there, and after a while Jakita comes in covered with ant body fluids and announces that she's dealt with the entire swarm and rescued the pilot.

* SecretTestOfCharacter: In issue #4, after Elijah's first few missions on the field team have involved nothing but making records of events that have already happened, the team encounters a man who's in the middle of a difficult situation involving a stranded alien intelligence. Elijah drops several hints to Jakita that he thinks the Planetary organization should use some of its vast resources to help the guy, and when they fall on deaf ears he volunteers Planetary's help unilaterally, silently daring Jakita to contradict him. At the end of the scene, he goes off by himself, fuming about Jakita's attitude and then chuckling over the look on her face -- unaware that behind him she's dropped the offended expression and is looking pleased that he's emerged from his cynical detachment and started caring about the people Planetary deals with.

* SlowElectricity: In the issue "Percussion", the Planetary field team raid a facility where a group of child prodigies are being held captive. A guard triggers a fail-safe that sets off the {{Explosive Leash}}es the children have been fitted with. Jakita runs across the room, first at the same speed as, ''then faster than the radio signal'', kids' heads popping like zits just as her hands touch their leashes, with her beating the signal only to the last one.

* TimeCrash: Worst case scenario of using the Four's time machine. It can only travel back up to the moment of its activation, meaning if you want to check out history, that's pretty much the only meaningful place to go. If any point of the future can only travel to one spit in the past, then not only does the normally variable future collapse into predestined events, but those events are paradoxically erased before they can happen. They use the time machine anyway and only nearly collapse spacetime.

* TranslationConvention: Dialogue in a foreign language is rendered in a different font; Japanese speech in "Island" is in italics, and Chinese speech in "Dead Gunfighters" is in that Chinese ForeignLookingFont where all the letters are made out of triangles.

** The Gun Club from Creator/JulesVerne's ''Literature/FromTheEarthToTheMoon'' also make an (obviously posthumous) appearance in one strip, when their primitive spacecraft crases to Earth, containing the skeletons of three members. It's revealed that their bullet-ship fell into a stable orbit around the Earth and the moon for over a century before finally falling out of the sky.

* RequiredSecondaryPowers: Averted.
** The inhabitants of Science City Zero typically (and horribly) avert this, usually dying of it.
** Suskind herself has this problem, too, as turning invisible also blinds her.

* LiterallyShatteredLives: In the flashback to the first time Elijah worked with superspy John Stone, Elijah freezes the evil mastermind solid and then shatters her with a kick.

* ChainsawGood: Fully-automatic ''chainsaw bullets.''

* EmpathyDollShot: In the "Planet Fiction" issue.

* AnIcePerson: It's right there in his name! It's a more low-key variant than most examples, though, described as "heat subtraction": he can't shoot ice at people in a fight or generate dramatic-looking "ice beams", but he can freeze anyone/anything solid in just a few seconds.

* [[SpyFiction Martini-flavored Spy Fiction]]: John Stone's entire existence.

* NonhumansLackAttributes: Averted. The ComicBook/GreenLantern {{Expy}} who falls on Earth naked has vagina-like genitalia.

* SlowElectricity: In the issue "Percussion", the Planetary field team raid a facility where a group of child prodigies are being held captive. A guard triggers a fail-safe that sets off the {{Explosive Leash}}es the children have been fitted with. Jakita runs across the room, first at the same speed as, ''then faster than the radio signal'', kids' heads popping like zits just as her hands touch their leashes, with her beating the signal only to the last one.

* ExposedToTheElements: On multiple occasions, Elijah and Jakita go into cold environments without changing their outfits; Elijah doesn't feel the cold because he's AnIcePerson, and Jakita doesn't feel the cold because she has SuperToughness. Showcased in the opening scene of issue #8, where Elijah, Jakita, and their contact (who also doesn't feel the cold for her own reasons) are standing around in street clothes while Drummer is bundled up in a padded coat and hat with earflaps.

* DaddysLittleVillain: Anna Hark is the daughter of a Franchise/FuManchu-esque mastermind from the 1930s who decided to use his power for the good of humanity and then died saving the world. She inherited his globe-spanning secret empire, and it's quite a way into the series before we learn for sure whether she's also using it for good or following the example of her father's earlier career.

* AttackOfThe50FootWhatever: The 50s-B-movie homage issue includes accounts of two attempts to grow a human to giant size, one a homage to ''Film/TheAmazingColossalMan'' and the other to ''Film/AttackOfThe50FootWoman''.

* {{Guns Akimbo}}: Both the ghost cop and Ambrose are fond of this.

* AdaptationalWimp: Sort of - Superman in an Elseworlds story where Planetary is the quartet of evil overlords [[spoiler:[[UncertanDoom seems to be killed]] by being BlownOutTheAirlock on the dark side of the Moon. He's based on Post-Crisis Superman, and ''can't'' [[BatmanCanBreatheInSpace breathe in space]]]].

* TimeForPlanB: In the issue "Percussion", the high-rise building the Planetary field team are in starts blowing up around them, forcing them to resort to "Exit Plan B" -- [[spoiler:jumping out of the nearest window and being caught by a net trailed by a passing aiplane]].

** In a flashback in the first issue, a quantum computer creates an imaginary Earth with a set of Franchise/{{Justice League|of America}} analogues. Ellis even asked Cassaday to draw them as such. Other instances are The Four (of [[Creator/MarvelComics Marvel's]] ComicBook/FantasticFour) and a technological take on [[ComicBook/{{Shazam}} Captain Marvel]] (Creator/DCComics).

** The Planetary field team are like a photo-negative twist of the original Fantastic Four. Specifically:
*** The Thing, a slow and hideous mutated strongman who desperately [[IJustWantToBeNormal wants to be normal]] again, becomes Jakita Wagner, a sexy woman in a sleek jumpsuit, and is superhumanly fast and strong at the same time, and revels in her superhuman status and constantly seeking new strange thrills.
*** The Invisible Woman, the team mom who could make herself and other things invisible, becomes The Drummer, a boy sidekick who perceives things all around him that most people cannot -- namely, information. For an added bonus, the Invisible Woman has often been written has having some strong emotions simmering under a calm surface. The Drummer, on the other hand, is a CloudCuckooLander with a calmly idealistic center.
*** Mr. Fantastic is a white man, who creates strange gadgets and distorts his own body via stretching. His counterpart is Ambrose Chase, a black man (who falls victim to a weaponized ''Black Dude Dies First'' trope, see above) who uses normal semi-auto guns, and distorts physics and reality around ''himself'' rather than distorting his own body.
*** The Human Torch is the youngest member, impulsive and brash, who throws around fire, and usually functions as the fire support for his family, strategy-wise. Elijah Snow is the oldest member of his team, is a thoughtful detective, ''subtracts'' heat from his environment to freeze things, and finds himself a natural leader with Jakita and Drums when he joins them.
*** The Fourth Man is also an inversion of Comicbook/DoctorDoom. The source of his problems really is his Reed Richards nemesis, but the Fourth Man isn't really obsessed with his foe -- Dowling is an obstacle to be overcome, and once removed from the picture, the Fourth Man barely acknowledges his victory before returning to his real agenda. The Fourth Man is also a ThirdPersonPerson; much as Doom refers to himself, the Fourth Man usually discusses himself as "the Fourth Man" rather than in the first person. [[spoiler: Because Elijah spends most of this time unaware that it's him!]]

* GettingCrapPastTheRadar: The Tarzan {{Expy}}, Lord Blackstock, mentions he's never slept with a black person his whole life so far - "Why bother, when there are English girls?" Elijah questions it, since Blackstock was raised in Africa and went through puberty there. Blackstock is just barely hinting that his first sexual experience was [[BestialityIsDepraved probably not human]] when circumstances cut him off and save him a lot of embarrassment.

** The Gun Club from Creato/JulesVerne's ''Literature/FromEarthToTheMoon'' also make an (obviouslu posthumous) appearance in one strip, when their primitive spacecraft crases to Earth, containing the skeletons of three members. It's revealed that their bullet-ship fell into a stable orbit around the Earth and the moon for over a century before finally falling out of the sky.

* AdaptationalWimp: Sort of - Superman in an Elseworlds story where Planetary is the quartet of evil overlords [[spoiler:is killed by being BlownOutTheAirlock on the dark side of the Moon. He's based on Post-Crisis Superman, and ''can't'' [[BatmanCanBreatheInSpace breathe in space]]]].

* PassFail: [[spoiler:Jakita]] is black[=/=]white biracial yet looks sufficiently white to pass in 1930's Germany. It's explained that most of their black mother's people’s racial traits were caused by recessive traits, which is why they opposed any mixing. That, combined with their white father's superpowered [[spoiler:Century Baby]] genes resulted in a child that looked like a slightly tanned white person.

[[caption-width-right:350:Jatika Wagner, Elijah Snow and The Drummer]]

* PassFail: [[spoiler:Jakita]] is black[=/=]white biracial yet looks sufficiently white to pass in 1930's Germany. It's explained that most of their black mother's people racial traits were caused by recessive traits, which is why they opposed any mixing. That, combined with their white father's superpowered [[spoiler:Century Baby]] genes resulted in a child that looked like a slightly tanned white person.

* PassFail: [[soiler:Jakita]] is black[=/=]white biracial yet looks sufficiently white to pass in 1930's Germany. It's explained that most of their black mother's people racial traits were caused by recessive traits, which is why they opposed any mixing. That, combined with their white father's superpowered [[spoiler:Century Baby]] genes resulted in a child that looked like a slightly tanned white person.