Introduction
Hopefully writer Warren Ellis needs no introduction, his body of work and his relentless internet presence should make him known to just about anyone with a remote interest in comics or internet culture. He has an impressive body of comics work, perhaps most notably Transmetropolitan and the initial work on The Authority. Planetary takes place within the context of the Wildstorm universe, but is very much its own ‘creature’.

For me this is Ellis’ magnum opus, delayed, beset by problems and an irregular schedule of releases Planetary is a triumph over adversity. Essentially the books are a product of the millenium, ten years in completion but while those themes have somewhat passed by, the books have remained fresh in part due to Ellis’ constant forward thinking and in part due to the recent success of semi-rebooted comic book films and other re-examinations of the genre.

It’s a comic about comics, about the past, a wry, cynical and yet loving examination of comics and their history through an archaeological metaphor, investigating the world of comics within a comic, updating and examining the strange ideas of the past with the eye of today, albeit a sometimes harsh eye.

Review
Planetary is the story of Elijah Snow, one of the Century Babies, unnatural individuals who share the birthdate of January 1st 1900. Elijah is tough, seemingly immortal, unnaturally strong, unnaturally tough and has the ability to control temperature, freezing things solid in an instant. Snow is also an historian, an archaeologist of the impossible, driven to uncover secrets and to document them, he is the author of the Planetary Guides, a series of books published across the 20th century detailing its hidden and secret history.

As the story begins we know nothing of this, Elijah is a washed up unknown, living in the desert, eating at a shack diner, drinking awful coffee when he is the one approached by the Planetary group, having no memory of his former existence as a part of it, as the driving force behind it. Jakita Wagner, another superhuman and Drums, a living information hub form the other two members of Planetary’s ‘field team’, actively heading up their investigations into the unnatural.

As the investigations continue, Elijah gradually comes to fall back into his old ways, his memories slowly reappearing as he is re-exposed to old cases and the string of discoveries that lead him to his original downfall at the hands of The Four, this world’s equivalent of The Fantastic Four, an evil, selfish grouping, jealous of superheroes who collect secret history themselves, specifically to add to their own power, hoarding it from the rest of humanity.

Planetary’s investigations take us through the fate of this world’s Hulk, Thor, Superman, they touch on the age of the pulp and the weird and mystery fiction of the Victorian age. We mix with ‘Tarzan’ and the secret cities of Africa, we cross ‘the bleed’ to parallel Earths on a macro scale and uncover something just as strange at the micro scale. Planetary romps across comics, science fiction and fantastical ideas that are part of all our popular culture. This is as literate as Moore but more accessible, as good as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but broader in scope and delighting in the popular rather than the obscure.

While Ellis often ends his material on a down note (The failure’s of The Authority or Jenny’s death, the racism in Ministry of Space) Planetary ends on an up note. The vanquishing of The Four is almost a side note to the true story which I won’t spoil, but which is far more human, far more compassionate and ultimately far more satisfying than any whiz-bang, widescreen superhero punch-up could ever have been.

The door is left open for future adventures with the Planetary team, but I almost hope that doesn’t happen as, in the hands of others, Planetary can’t live up to what it has accomplished.

Conclusion
This is an unmissable comic series and the artwork by John Cassaday deserves to be seen in the best format possible. With the release of the second volume as an Absolute Edition, hopefully the first Absolute Edition will get a reprint and you can get both in this format. It’s a shame this series had to be interrupted and delayed so much but the juxtaposition of speculative science and pop-culture nostalgia does make this series essentially timeless and a classic that, to me, deserves to be as widely recognised as Watchmen or The Invisibles.

Score
Style: 5
Substance: 5
Overall: 5

Introduction
China Mieville is one of my favourite authors and has energised the alternative/urban fantasy or the ‘New Weird’ for me as much as Peter F Hamiltion re-energised British science fiction for me. I wasn’t so keen on The City & The City but his Bas Lag novels and his somewhat similarly themed children’s book Un-Lun-Dun are acts of pre-meditated brilliance. Kraken lacks the pure and unadulterated awesomeness of Perdidot Street Station but is much better and more engaging than The City & The City and closer in theme to King Rat, somewhere between that and the Bas-Lag novels in terms of wierdness. Comparisons with the last book I reviewed, Into the Nightside, are likely to be inevitable in the course of this review.

Review
Kraken follows the story of Billy Harrow, a curator at The Natural History Museum in London who begins to get caught up in strange events when one particular specimen, that of a Giant Squid, mysteriously and impossibly vanishes from the museum with no evidence at all of how it came to disappear. Billy is a bit of a cloistered academic, living in a rarefied world of specimen cataloguing and preservation with a special talent for cephlapod preservation – so no wonder that he ends up both suspected and examined by those who take an interest, criminal and mystical in the events.

Initially Billy is a passive victim of events, though he can’t help sticking his nose into them and poking around, wanting to know what happened to his prime specimen. In so doing he gets the attention of a special – if unconventional – police unit who seem to hold onto some very secret and very special information and appear to be a powerful occult organisation. In a flipside to conventional conspiracy lore however, while the government and police do have a handle on the occult, they’re considered a bit of a joke, a relatively ineffectual player in London’s secret, occult underground.

Billy get’s dragged further and further into the strange world of rituals, magick and cults as the story progresses, eventually finding the balls and knowledge to make his own way, even while surrounded by squid-cult berserkers, activist golems and deadly origami experts. Eventually Billy emerges as a hero, embracing the occult and the strange and emerging as a power within that world as the plot surrounding the squid unfolds and the secret war over its pickled corpse bleeds over into the real world.

Parallelling and trailing after Billy’s descent into the weird, like a literature version of a musical round is the story of Marge, partner of one of Billy’s friends – Leon – who ends up killed because of his peripheral involvement. Unwilling to let Leon and Billy’s disappearance go she trails after them and gets sucked into the underworld in a similar manner to the descent of Billy. For me this felt like China playing with our expectations of narrative and bringing an ice-cold shock of the ‘real’ into the fantasy world. Why would a modern woman sit helplessly by like some medieval damsel and wait for the police to solve such a problem? Why couldn’t she get off her arse and do something herself – which she does. While this could have been an afterthough or an overly PC attachment, unnecessary to the novel, for me the ‘echo’ of Billy’s descent reinforces the theme and adds greatly to the overall arc of the story.

There are many great characters scattered throughout the book. Billy is initially a somewhat annoying wishy-washy type but grows and develops over the course of the story in a noticable way that makes you appreciate him. Marge’s doggedness and determination make her an admirable character while WPC Collingswood – a foul mouthed, chain-smoking police witch – is a strong female character that brings some much needed humour and spite into the book, without being a politically correct cipher. Goss and Subby, two of the primary villains, are a little disappointing by comparison to the others, a combination of mute and verbose that’s been done better elsewhere and while both sinister and blackly humorous they never seem to quite gel.

Conclusion
This is a great book and a return to the full-on strangeness that makes China so engaging as a writer, bubbling over with ideas that seem to indicate a return to the energy and inspiration that seemed to be lacking from Iron Council (the last of the three Bas-Lag novels). Comparisons with other urban-fantasy/new weird titles are unavoidable seeing as it has all but become its own genre and, to refer to my last review (The Nightside) this one, while containing over the top action and weirdness, manages to contain it by introducing it bit by bit, rather than cramming your face into it right from the get go. It’s also consistently and constantly obvious that these places, these people, these things are secret – at least normally – and so the strangeness exists within an established context that allows you to maintain your suspension of disbelief much better.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4

Introduction
Simon R Green (Whose name, for some reason always makes me think of I.R. Baboon) is the writer of the Deathstalker and Shaman Bond book series which are notable for their over-the-top action and rat-tat-tat pacing. Into the Nightside follows pretty much the same model as these other books although it is, ostensibly, set in a mirror of our own London, the eponymous ‘Nightside’ of the title. This book collects the first two stories of The Nightside ‘Something From the Nightside’ and ‘Agents of Light’.

Review
The hero of the Nightside books is ‘John Taylor’, a mysterious private eye who normally works in The Nightside. At the opening of the story he has left The Nightside for the real world, where he’s impoverished and not too great at his job – or at least making money from it. Eventually he gets dragged back into his former life in The Nightside by a case that he simply can’t dismiss, one that’s almost designed to appeal to his instincts, a damsel (a rich damsel at that) in distress and an innocent in need of rescuing from The Nightside that he’ secretly missing.

It’s only in the Nightside that his special gift, the ability to see and trace things, any kind of things, is at its power and he can use his unique talents to serve the peculiar clientèle of The Nightside.

The Nightside itself is a dark mirror of London where it’s always 3am, existing alongside the ‘real’ London though The Moon is larger in the sky and the people that hang out there are somewhat… different. The Nightside is inhabited by demons, werewolves, vampires, ghosts and even stranger things that are all looking for a good time, though their idea of a good time may be very different to that of even the most perverted inhabitant of the normal world. This gives the author all the license he needs to throw anything and everything into play in The Nightside and to have all the crazy and unnatural ideas he wants all clashing together in the same place.

Because The Nightside is a separate and divided world from the ‘real’ one this works a lot better than in the Shaman Bond series where we’re expected to believe that all this over-the-top magic, explosions and so on is taking place – relatively uncommented on – in the real and everyday world. However, since it’s established in the Shaman Bond series that The Nightside exists in the same universe as Shaman Bond the point of The Nightside when all that over-the-top nonsense IS taking place in the ‘real world’ becomes rather diluted. When you have UFOs engaged in a long road battle on a motorway, the idea of dark things actually HIDING from society becomes a little ridiculous.

In the second story Taylor is tasked with finding The Unholy Grail, the cup that Judas drank from at the last supper. The problem is that nobody knows where it is and Taylor’s gift, which can usually find anything, can’t trace it, forcing him to rely on more ordinary legwork, friends, contacts and his detective skills in order to track it down before the legions of angels from both heaven and hell, utterly destroy The Nightside. This ramps up the power level of the book all over again which makes me wonder where there is to go!

Conclusion
Simon R Green’s books are enjoyable romps but, unlike with his Deathstalker books, I can’t suspend my disbelief as I can with a whole, new Science Fiction world. The Nightside series occupies a space between the real world of Shaman Bond and the out-there SF goodness of Deathstalker. For me it’s all a little OTT, though more forgivable than Shaman Bond since it’s all contained in its own fantasy world. This whole alternative world or underbelly of occult strangeness seems to be a recurrent theme in a lot of books I’m reading lately and The Nightside series certainly occupies a position on that spectrum, much more to the extreme/Gonzo than, for comparison, Neverwhere.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 2
Overall: 3