The Planetary Omnibus

Comics have been a big part of my early childhood. This is mostly thanks to my larger  family. Back then there was more unity between us all. My cousins lived in Florida and thanks to them I had my first contact with Comics. And the first comic I ever read was a big hardcover of the first stories of the X-Men, the one with Mimic in it. And it was MAGICAL! 

Shortly after they got into DC comics, and so did I. I loved the old Superman movies so I felt more attracted to his Universe or Universes to be precise. Crisis on Infinite Earths is where I started. It was bigger than anything I ever read on Marvel! More characters, bigger scope and so much emotion! The lost of Kara for example.... 

For the reason I ended up an oddity among my friends. They were all about the X-Men, the Avengers, Spider-Man (which is my ultimate favorite character from the Marvel Universe), The New Mutants and so on. I read those a lot because we only got Marvel books at the local store, for some obscure reason. But DC had some zanny stories that Marvel only got close to equal at the time with the X-Men Phoenix/Goblin Queen storyline. At least in my eyes. I liked their take on their shared universe, where one book line in Marvel could he read without even needing to read another, DC stories were connected. Lately Marvel has done amazing strides to connect their books and I commend them on that. 

Which leads me to this Omnibus. It seems like these types of books have become the rage. Marvel putting out Omnibuses also. I thinks it's a great way to engage customers who do not want the hassle of tracking down every single individual issue of a story arc. 

I had maybe tasted one issue of Planetary at some point, I found it strange, I had no context for the part I read. Now that they are all collected in one place I jumped on the occasion. And I have decided to take my damn sweet time. I've read the excellent foreword by Alan Moore and the first chapter of the story. Both were amazing. 

Alan Moore is one if my favorite writers of the medium, right up there with Neil Gaiman. I hadn't known in advance that he wrote the foreword, hence I did not expect the quality with which he handled it. As for the book itself, the fact that it is such a big hardcover worries. The binding will most certainly not hold up to overt handling. I was more than tempted to leave it in its plastic wrap. The only thing that stopped me was curiosity about the story. The first chapter was slower paced than I expected and at the same time it was not. I felt I did not get enough exposition and context when it came to the main protagonists. On the other hand, as a newly reformed team they sure went quite straight to mission. It's a story that hints to great things to come, I mean, those of you who have read it can look back and realize how far they went with some ideas right off the bat. It left me wondering, "this was big, CAN they take it any further while keeping us interested?". I loved the reference towards Crisis on Infinite Earths, and also the obvious nod to JLA. This is a DC fan book, there are subtle parallels with the rest of the Multiverse right off the bat and not all so terribly obvious for the non connoisseur. Will keep update later as I slowly make my way to the last page :)