Entrega y disponibilidad
Cód.: 501580
Planetary. All Over the World and Other Stories
por: $ 63.000
Cantidad
Writing this in the last guttering stub of the Twentieth Century, aware of you reading it in the fresh-lit flame of the Twenty-First, it's difficult not to be struck by the Janus-like view that we have of the landscape from here, stretching a long way behind us and further in front. Not only the much broader landscape of human and global affairs, but also the landscape of that smaller world that we know as the comic book field.
While the boom-and-bust sweep of the last decade will almost certainly not prove the end for the comic strip medium, it nevertheless remains difficult not to emerge with a sense that while comics may not have collapsed into rubble forever, still something has changed. Something's gone. Not a market, a format, a style or a thing of the hard and material world of brute commerce, but something more abstract and rarefied, some phantom essence.
The thing that has changed may not be in the comics themselves, but instead in their audience. Could it be rather that people have changed in the accelerated and furious rush of these last hundred years while the comics that they read have changed more slowly or, in many cases, not at all? One of the field's defining axioms in this century has been that people want not change, but the illusion of the same. This is a fallacy based on a purely short-term observation. While it may be true that people don't want change, it's also true that what we want and what we get are very different things. The Twentieth Century gave us nothing else but constant and tumultuous change and did not think to ask us if we wanted it or not. We both knew change, and were ourselves changed in the torrent of events. The underlying human tastes and audience demands on which we built the comic field have altered in the flux of things, within the readership if not within the books themselves. The way that people think and see things has moved on. The massive scaffolding of values where the comic field was raised seems now deserted, seems redundant.
Comic book creators moving through this wasteland between centuries are, it would seem, subject to twin, conflicting impulses. On one hand is the reckless New-Year's-resolution urge to plunge headlong into the future, as of course we must, while on the other hand we have the weighty knowledge of the glittering rubble that we leave behind us, at our backs. With so much of great worth there in the long back yard of comic history, we are obliged to ask ourselves if there might not yet be buried treasures, items fit for salvage. Many of us seem to have the feeling, only mistily defined, that it is some element in comics past that will provide the key with which we can unlock the medium's future. As if in order to move forward, we must also somehow simultaneously move back, however paradoxical that may appear. Which brings us, by a somewhat drawn-out route, to Planetary.
Warren Ellis and John Cassaday have manufactured an ingenious device by means of which they can exploit the possibilities of our contemporary situation, as described above. The heroes of their tale are neither crime-fighters nor global guardians, but, by some perfect stroke of inspiration, archaeologists. People digging down beneath the surface of the world to learn its past, its secrets and its marvels. In this instance, though, the world that's under excavation is not our immediate sphere, despite the fact that it is almost as familiar. Instead, we dig into a planet that is nothing less than the accumulated landscape of almost a hundred years of fantasy, of comic books.
While the boom-and-bust sweep of the last decade will almost certainly not prove the end for the comic strip medium, it nevertheless remains difficult not to emerge with a sense that while comics may not have collapsed into rubble forever, still something has changed. Something's gone. Not a market, a format, a style or a thing of the hard and material world of brute commerce, but something more abstract and rarefied, some phantom essence.
The thing that has changed may not be in the comics themselves, but instead in their audience. Could it be rather that people have changed in the accelerated and furious rush of these last hundred years while the comics that they read have changed more slowly or, in many cases, not at all? One of the field's defining axioms in this century has been that people want not change, but the illusion of the same. This is a fallacy based on a purely short-term observation. While it may be true that people don't want change, it's also true that what we want and what we get are very different things. The Twentieth Century gave us nothing else but constant and tumultuous change and did not think to ask us if we wanted it or not. We both knew change, and were ourselves changed in the torrent of events. The underlying human tastes and audience demands on which we built the comic field have altered in the flux of things, within the readership if not within the books themselves. The way that people think and see things has moved on. The massive scaffolding of values where the comic field was raised seems now deserted, seems redundant.
Comic book creators moving through this wasteland between centuries are, it would seem, subject to twin, conflicting impulses. On one hand is the reckless New-Year's-resolution urge to plunge headlong into the future, as of course we must, while on the other hand we have the weighty knowledge of the glittering rubble that we leave behind us, at our backs. With so much of great worth there in the long back yard of comic history, we are obliged to ask ourselves if there might not yet be buried treasures, items fit for salvage. Many of us seem to have the feeling, only mistily defined, that it is some element in comics past that will provide the key with which we can unlock the medium's future. As if in order to move forward, we must also somehow simultaneously move back, however paradoxical that may appear. Which brings us, by a somewhat drawn-out route, to Planetary.
Warren Ellis and John Cassaday have manufactured an ingenious device by means of which they can exploit the possibilities of our contemporary situation, as described above. The heroes of their tale are neither crime-fighters nor global guardians, but, by some perfect stroke of inspiration, archaeologists. People digging down beneath the surface of the world to learn its past, its secrets and its marvels. In this instance, though, the world that's under excavation is not our immediate sphere, despite the fact that it is almost as familiar. Instead, we dig into a planet that is nothing less than the accumulated landscape of almost a hundred years of fantasy, of comic books.
