(WARNING: This post contains SPOILERS dealing with Planetary #27, the series finale released last week.)

The perennially late but highly-anticipated finale to Warren Ellis’ and John Cassaday’s Planetary series has finally been released. Issue #27 was a very long time in the making…and boy, was it a colossal disappointment.

Almost all of the characters on this cover have nothing to do with the story inside.

Planetary started way back in 1999, and writer Warren Ellis promised to explore the “secret history” of the WildStorm comics universe. The team of Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner, and the Drummer did undeed unearth all sorts of cool shit, connected to not only popular WildStorm stories like WildC.A.T.S., Gen13, and The Authority, but also to classic literature, pulp novels, and science fiction tropes.

Planetary was always meant to be a bimonthly book that would run twenty-four issues. Which means the series should’ve been completed in around five years, but it’s taken more than twice that much time. This is laziness run rampant, people. Granted, Ellis dealt with some illness at one point, but there’s still no excuse for the series to have taken so long to finish. John Cassaday had other artistic commitments..which would be fine, except that he accepted these offers before he finished his work on Planetary. It seems to me that Planetary was just at the bottom of his list of priorities, and that’s unacceptable.

But I digress. Let’s focus on the final issue.

Instead of a story that wrapped up all of the remaining plot threads that ran throughout the entire series…we got a retcon, and a extremely clichéd one at that. The end of Planetary can be summed up in one sentence: “Oh, Ambrose isn’t really dead.” You read that right: the finale is devoted to bringing Ambrose Chase back to life, who up until this point was shown to have been dead for years. Yeah, we’ve never seen that before in comics! The issue was filled with fantastic art and Ellis’ requisite technobabble, sure, but the fact remains: it was just another bring-back-a-dead-guy issue, and didn’t serve to truly wrap up the series at all.

Furthermore…whereabouts in WildStorm continuity does this final issue take place? The current WildStorm universe is still reeling from the World’s End event. I don’t want to hear any nonsense like “Planetary is creator-owned, so it’s in its own continuity!” Well, no, it’s not. Let me reiterate: Planetary explores the secret history of the WildStorm universe, not the “Ellis universe.” It takes place in standard WildStorm continuity, like it or not.

It’s possible that #27 takes place just prior to World’s End; I suppose you could shoehorn it in there somehow. But without at least a mention thereof, it seems a bit sloppy. (Note: The real-world explanation is that Ellis purportedly wrote the script for issue #27 years ago, before World’s End and its predecessors were implemented, and just didn’t change anything to reflect this.)

Planetary #27 has been getting boilerplate rave reviews from many in the comic press, but that’s just the status quo. Too many comic book fans are wrapped up in the “if it’s Warren Ellis, it must be gold” mode of thought. Ellis is often dubbed immune to criticism, constructive or otherwise, because of this. In some cases, I also think that people are afraid to criticize Ellis, due to his rather…outspoken personality.

Ellis has written a large amount of fantastic work, but even he stumbles from time to time, and Planetary #27 is a perfect example of this. As a random one-shot issue? It’s fine. As a finale to one of the best stories in modern comics? It’s terrible.