Keeping The World Strange

A snowflake that describes the multiverse. A team of archaeologists with a mystery benefactor. A century of pulp heroes, atomic ants, kung-fu ghosts, and ships that sail between universes. Villains who hide these wonders from a world they have sold to an unfathomable alien intelligence. And the man, born with the 20th century, who alone can save the world… and his lost friend.

These are the elements of Planetary. In telling its story, creators Warren Ellis and John Cassaday uncovered the secret history of the super-hero genre and helped point towards its future, as well as — just perhaps — our own.

Keeping the World Strange: A Planetary Guide excavates all of this, as well as future studies, revisionism, decompression, whether the characters are proactive or reactive, and other topics. This book offers an archaeology of the archaeologists, and its essays allow us to see the snowflake-like structure of the series from new angles. Planetary lives and grows in these pages.