The Covers Of Planetary

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m a little busy over here, so I’m gong back into the filing cabinet this week.

ORBITAL

The Covers Of PLANETARY

So, I’ve mentioned before the plan I wrote for the PLANETARY covers. Each cover and its design would be different from the last, and my intention was that you’d find it on the shelves by dint of the fact that it wouldn’t look like anything else out that month. Utter hubris, I know, but I was like thirty years old when I came up with that scheme.

The first cover, I wanted to be just John doing John, and the cover was perfectly lovely. I wanted to get involved from issue 2

Thing is, I don’t recall much about this one. I don’t know if the dialogue was me or editor John Layman. It’s still quite a “traditional” cover, a Japanese monster movie poster vibe. The next one is when I started to get odd.

This was a compromise cover. Because Scott Dunbier, bless him, had to make one of his many interventions with me because I’d gone off the reservation. My plan was for this to look like a still from a Hong Kong action movie. And that the title and credits would appear as English-language subtitles superimposed across the bottom of the frame. I am, to this day, still sad that didn’t happen. But they told me I was insane and eventually I caved and we agreed on this compromise.

CUT TO: me in my office afterwards:

Full early pulp magazine:

The lettering here was either Ali Fuchs or Richard Starkings, I think. The additional text elements like “250 cents” was probably Layman. We had fun at Wildstorm.

If writers get a lot of help from the best people in the business - who also want to have fun - then writers can write comics covers too. Sometimes it’s a prompt, sometimes a few paragraphs, sometimes just a bunch of ideas you need help to stick together. Sometimes it’s just a very specific reference.

This one probably got us into trouble. The owners of DOC SAVAGE were not pleased about my knock-off Axel Brass, and I probably shouldn’t have conned John into aping a James Bama DOC SAVAGE paperback cover for this one. Or my production co-conspirators into doing the logo. But isn’t it gorgeous?

We did a lot of pastiche stuff, yes. But it was a book about the history of weird pulp fiction and the roots of the modern commercial comic. Every now and then, though, I wanted to go somewhere else.

This one, I wrote. The graveyard rows, the colours, and a specific tonal thing. “Joy Division album cover.” John fucking nailed it. I don’t recall for sure, but I suspect either Laura or David were involved with the colours. I almost emailed John to ask him…

I know why this one is here, though. John really wanted me to do a Western episode for him, so I had nothing to do with this cover. This was all for him to play with. I'd already done one of my bucket list things, after all:

British science fiction paperback cover! That still thrills me. And, let me note again, when you can talk to all your co-creators, you can pull stuff like this off.

I include this one partly because it says on the cover that John won an Eisner Award, and never was one more richly deserved. This was my “Doctor Strange” issue. Doctor Strange was, of course, a slightly pre-psychedelic (1963) and a New York thing. But, equally obviously, it had a huge impact on what came later. This cover is a West Coast psychedelia thing, Fillmore poster style, green and pink being a classic psychedelia colour combination.

The acid Sixties are intimately connected with comics, so, again, it’s pastiche - seemingly outside of comics, but in fact tangled around the modern form’s roots.

What was, however, the best cover we ever did? For issue 12, I just told John to do whatever he wanted, because, shit, we’d made it to twelve issues and he should have some fun. When we started to reach the end of the series, I did the same thing. Said that John should do whatever he liked.

And he did the best cover the book had ever had. The iconic PLANETARY cover.

Hubris, see? I thought I could do all the work, make everything far too difficult, and cause every issue to do something new and stand out on the racks every time just by main imaginative force. And then John, without me underfoot all the fucking time, takes a breath and does the cover that defines the series to this day.

One measure of John Cassaday’s kindness is that, even though I put him through all this, he still talked about doing covers for me right up until the end. I miss him.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition

This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

it am notebook on the webbies

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And that’s me done. Take care of yourself. I’m rooting for you.

W