Planetary / Batman: Night On Earth – Flash Back Review

By: Warren Ellis (writer), John Cassaday (art), David Baron (colors) & Wes Abbott (letters)

The Story: An investigation takes the Planetary gang into Gotham City.  Guess who they’ll run into?

What’s Good: This one-shot from August 2003 is a mixture of two things that I really like: Planetary and Batman.  But, as we all know, many team-up or cross-over comic titles don’t really work out.  Sometimes the writer clearly understands one of the characters, but completely misses the boat with the other side or there is an editorial failing that allows the writer to trample on an important item of continuity for one of the universes.  Even when those things don’t happen, you usually put the book down with the feeling that the cross-over was fun, but it is hard to take seriously because it was SO obviously an elseworlds-type tale that it clearly doesn’t “matter”.

What makes Planetary/Batman soooooo good is that this cross-over really could happen in either of the two universes.  Part of the entire fun of Planetary was that it explored recognizable alternate versions of super/pulp-heroes that we all know: Fantastic Four, Lone Ranger, Doc Savage, Green Lantern, etc.  In the comics review world, we like to talk about things that “pull us out of the story” like bad art or implausible concepts that make it impossible for us to enjoy an otherwise pretty good story.  You really could see that it made sense that the Planetary gang would run into a masked vigilante dressed as a Bat.