Broken Frontier

Writers Giffen and DeMatteis view superheroes as ironically situated clichés and they parody them to hysterical effect – but is their signature style still funny?

The first issue of Planetary Brigade introduces us to a hodgepodge of heroes (I’m using that term loosely). Crossing over from the earlier BOOM! series, Hero Squared, there is Captain Valor, the quintessential Superman/boy scout archetype. Then there is the group’s femme fatale, The Purring Pussycat, who carries the Giffen stigma of being the inevitable, narcissistic woman in a culture more glamour-driven than Hollywood. Following on her heels there is the Amazon warrior cliché, Earth Goddess, along with perhaps the one, truly unique creation of the series, Mauve Visitor, a…well…mauve visitor from another planet who’s short, squat, and likes to dress in the best of refineries and drink expensive liquor. Finally, the spotlight switches to Grim Knight – the team’s dark knight – and Third Eye, the mystic of the group. There is additionally one final member who appears on the cover, but not within the issue itself, so his identity will have to wait until issue #2. Or not; this is Giffen and DeMatteis after all.

There is a plot underneath all the introductions and witty, sarcastic banter, but not a solid one. It has something to do with a guy wandering around and this guy is some sort of unwilling portal and he keeps opening up gateways and letting weird monsters through to Earth so that the Planetary Brigade can fight them, but it’s all quite meaningless. This miniseries is supposed to run for two issues, so with the end of this chapter the story is halfway finished with nothing having progressed. I think it’s a fair thing to say that the plot is not the draw here, nor the point of the series’ concept. This is a story about so-called heroes and their personalities and how such beings could actually (answer: barely) co-exist within a single team – the threats they face don’t matter outside of the fact that they have a threat to face. Otherwise, how would the reader see them bickering in action, which is both the characters and the creators’ greatest strength?

In a weird symmetry to this, the issue is artistically as imbalanced as the characters themselves. There are a total of five artists for a twenty-two page comic, and for a debut issue I’m not sure of the reasoning for that. I suppose the editors didn’t want any one artist to be seen as the artist of the series, but nonetheless the choices given are so divergent that even this explanation doesn’t quite ring true. The opening presents the simple figures of Joe Abraham’s work followed by the action-oriented art of Cynthia Martin. She is then followed by an oddly anime-ish attempt by old-school favorite Eduardo Barretto, who in turn is followed by Mark Badger, an artist whose work is more cartoon-like and representational than even representational maestro Kyle Baker! To be honest, the constant change-over didn’t bother me as much as I expected, but it didn’t help to draw me in, either. It wasn’t necessarily detracting, but it didn’t seem to have any carefully planned structure that enhanced the progression of the plot (because there is none), and this only left me wondering why.

Giffen and DeMatteis have given us their version of the superhero team multiple times throughout the past two decades, and Planetary Brigade continues with this trend, though it offers little else besides. Fans of their past work will love PB, as it is, I think, some of their best and most inspired humor yet; but while the heroes are new and the plots thinner than ever before, there’s nothing original, nothing that hasn’t been read in the duo’s previous works. The tagline for the upcoming PB sister series Hero Squared is "We’re Not Through Beating a Dead Horse!", and this could indeed be used for PB itself. It’s the same-old, same-old, and much like a modern Mel Brooks film, fans will either be nostalgic and willing to fall in love all over again, or tired and flatly ambivalent. Either way, the series is what it is, which will be unsurprising to anyone familiar with either writer’s name.