There’s a whole lot of things in the world to be angry about. Legendary lateness is low on my list. Especially if that late book is about everything we SHOULD be angry about. One time Bendis said that Ellis really loves superheroes- that everything he says he hates he actually loves. Now I understand what that means: Warren Ellis is a writer fueled by hate and rage. His best work is bloody-knuckle rhetoric.

But this rage isn’t straight-up nihilism: Ellis isn’t angry because the world is shit and can only be shit- he’s angry because the world can be better. Finer. Superheroes’ control of comics is an awesome metaphor for systems of control in the real world. Fake-Planetary-Mr. Fantastic’s refusal to release his scientific breakthroughs to the public has a lot of resonance in a world where intellectual property rights prevent the development of cheap, generic AIDS drugs.

And Cassaday! The “What If?”-these-stories-were-real arguments in this book hold a whole lot more weight because Cassaday makes them feel real. A lot of people call his work realistic, but I don’t see that. Put a Cassaday face next to a photographed face and you won’t see much similarity. His work isn’t realistic, but it’s real. It carries a weight that few artists have matched. I can’t explain it, but I feel it.

My favorite books/movies/albums have been fully discovered on the re-reading/re-viewing/re-listening. Anything I forgot from the previous issues of Planetary won’t matter when I re-read the best Elseworlds story ever.