Planetary #8: The Day the Earth Turned Slower
Created by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday
Writer: Warren Ellis
Art: John Cassaday
Colours: Laura Depuy with thanks to Wendy Fouts
Letters: Ryan Cline
Editor: John Layman

What Happened:
Planetary meet with strange woman named Allison at an abandoned secret American government science base. The woman shares her story with them. Of how her and other vagabonds were brought there and experimented on. She herself was killed and brought back to life, thru these strange experiments...

Comments:
I really don't know how they do it, but this is another great issue.

Good points: The storyline itself, i.e. aboned science facility etc, isn't really that interesting, but Ellis and Cassaday take this simple idea and make it interesting and intriguing. This is mainly done by following the character Allison and her story, her narration of what happened at the facility send shivers down the spine and connect the reader with what's happening. In the end making the story quite haunting.

Besides this there is heaps of other cool character stuff going on, over the last couple of issues Ellis has been developing the main Planetary characters and giving the readers a look into there heads, especially Elijah and Jakita. It's great to see Jakita in this issue kicking giant insect butt. It really reveals why she's part of Planetary. In the same the end seen with Elijah looking to the night sky reveals alot about him in a few short panels. These are the kind of scenes that I love to see!

Of course the art is great, what's best though is that Cassaday just keeps on improving, issue after issue. When you go back and look at previous issues, you can see just how much he has improved.

A final good point. Anna Hark is mentioned in this story as being somehow affiliated with the science city, especially the project involving bringing Allison back to life. Anna has been mentioned in previous issues and is the daughter of one of Axel Brass' group of adventurers. What could this mean? I'm not quite sure, but it looks like Ellis is building something in the background, which is great. I like continuing stories and the way that Ellis is subtely building this up is excellent, I want to find out more.

Bad Points: The only bad point is that while there was good development of Jakita and Elijah, so far in the series there hasn't been much exploration of the Drummer and I find him the most uninteresting of the group. Even a bit boring, he almost might as well not be there. If he is going to be around I want Ellis to do something with him.