“It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.”

This is the motto or mantra of Planetary, the story of three spacetime archaeologists in search of all things weird. It stars Elijah Snow, a man born in 1900, who, despite his years, still looks fabulous in all white; Jakita Wagner, the strong, silent supermodel who likes to punch things; and The Drummer, the cool nerd who can hear and interpret signals emitted from just about anything that emits signals. Deep secrets haunt the team–when the series begins, Elijah has gaping holes in his memories–and the Planetary organization is funded by a shadowy figure known only as The Fourth Man.

Together, the teammates initially chase bizarre mysteries and conspiracies in done-in-one chapters. It feels a little like a super-heroic X-Files, except Planetary has an overarching plot that eventually coalesces into a coherent and satisfying conclusion. As Elijah stares deeper into the undercurrents of his employer, villains grow sharper and pronounced, namely The Four–evil-doers who seek global control through the suppression of knowledge and human advancement. The Four rose to the heights of global villainy thanks to a mind-bending space mission that warped their physiology and sense of morality. If this sounds like the Bizarro version of The Fantastic Four, then it’s time to give Planetary a chance, as writer Warren Ellis makes a point of winking at familiar comic tropes and archetypes. Planetary is full of clever nods to Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Godzilla, and in one chapter, John Constantine and many of the characters who inhabit DC’s Vertigo imprint.

Ellis is firing on all of his best cylinders: characters who aren’t quite anti-heroes but wouldn’t be caught dead in capes; dialogue that jumps between banter and high concept Sci-Fi proclamations (“So we create a closed loop of light, make it incredibly powerful, and it’ll do the same thing, only locally–supermassive frame-dragging.”). But none of this would be anywhere near as successful without artist John Cassaday, whose details and care for expressions only become more refined as the series progresses. In later chapters, Jakita eventually relaxes her steely demeanor, and Cassaday is able to play more with her reactions, especially when she sarcastically digs at The Drummer (“Why do we keep you around, again?”). It looks and feels as if she's more comfortable in the book.

This month, the final half of Planetary arrives in the series’ second Absolute Edition, which includes introductions by Alan Moore and Joss Whedon. Colorist Laura Martin offers commentary on her interpretation of the famously complex snowflake image, and a few pages are devoted to toys and other Planetary esoterica. The first Absolute Edition, collecting the initial half of the series, went out of print several years ago. But in a show of good faith to longtime fans, DC’s Wildstorm imprint has reprinted the first Absolute Edition to give symmetry to collectors’ bookshelves everywhere.

Ellis and Cassaday’s Planetary ran for 27 issues, beginning in 1999 and ending in 2009. While that’s not a very expedient production schedule, it’s difficult to find fault elsewhere with the book, especially when read as a whole and on the Absolute scale. It’s that rare type of series: one that closes at the top of its creators’ abilities and narrative. Like Elijah Snow, it never grows old–no matter how many years pass in its storytelling. “Let’s keep it that way.”

–Alex

P.S.  Also recommended: Planetary: Crossing Worlds, a collection of somewhat outside-continuity Planetary tales. 

P.P.S. Graphic Novel Friday is on vacation next week, August 6th, as I brave the Canadian wilderness. 

There are two phases that most kids go through at some point in their young lives. The first phase begins when they decide reading is boring. The second begins when they decide that "bathroom humor" (as my mother always diplomatically called it) is an endless source of hilarity.

So what do you do when these two phases happen simultaneously? 

As we mentioned last week, The AP recently released an article discussing the relatively modern trend of bathroom humor in children's books, designed to get kids–boys in particular–reading more.  It's likely that some parents and teachers still find these books a little distasteful (Captain Underpants doesn't seem quite as pristine as Caddie Woodlawn, after all), but there's no denying that books filled with fart jokes and gross-out humor often have a better chance of grabbing the attention of reluctant readers.

The AP interviewed author and fourth grade teacher Ray Sabini (who writes under the pen name Raymond Bean) about his two books, Sweet Farts and the sequel, Sweet Farts: Rippin' It Old School, which are geared toward the most unwilling young readers:

"Reaching those reluctant boys, it's a challenge I take very, very seriously and this is what they think is funny," Sabini said. There's also history in there. There's science in there, the problem of bullying, but it's the humor that gets their attention." 

Ray talks about the issue a bit more in this video interview. What it boils down to, he says, is that convincing kids that reading can be fun will ultimately get them reading more and more. And he believes gross-out humor can act as a springboard for reluctant readers to discover more favorite books–one of his students fell in love with The Day My Butt Went Psycho, and was reading The Lightning Thief by the end of the year.

I'm sure gross-out humor books still have their opponents (my mom probably would have been appalled if I'd traded in Ramona Quimby for fart jokes), but if bathroom humor gets a hesitant young reader to pick up a book for the first time in years, I think most parents and teachers would consider it a win. Omni readers, what do you think?

With the paperback edition of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (one of our top 10 books of 2009) hitting shelves today, we checked in with author/inventor/dynamo William Kamkwamba to see where his inspiring journey has taken him over the last eight months.

Not surprisingly, he provided a staggering list of accomplishments.

Dear friends at Amazon,

So many great things have happened since the last time we spoke. Our book tour took us all across the United States, into so many wonderful places and back out again that I remember it almost like a dream. Along this great journey, I got to meet Jon Stewart, speak with Diane Sawyer, and tell my story at such great institutions as Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and the Seattle Public Library. But what stands out the most were the crowds of young people who came to each event saying how my book inspired them to learn science and encouraged them to think big. To me, that was as great an achievement as building my very first windmill.

Amidst all of this, another dream of mine was fulfilled: I finally graduated high school and was accepted into a university. After two fantastic years at African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, I’ll be studying engineering in the fall at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. While on our book tour, Bryan Mealer (my co-author) and I visited several colleges who were kind enough to invite me to see their engineering programs. I visited Harvey Mudd in California, Virginia Tech, and Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and was amazed at the beautiful campuses and equipment available to students. But after seeing Dartmouth and meeting its president Dr. Jim Kim – who I admired for his previous work treating people with AIDS and tuberculosis in Africa and Haiti – I knew it was the place for me. In addition to having a cool project-based curriculum (meaning I can get my hands dirty the first week there), the Thayer School of Engineering even has a lending library for power tools! Seeing this, I couldn’t stop smiling.

So if you’re ever in Hanover and see me walking around with my stack of books and looking stressed and sleepy, say hello. But I assure you, I won’t be there long. After I graduate college, I’ll be going back to Africa. As I’ve always said, my heart belongs to Malawi, and so does my work.

–William (and Bryan Mealer)

To keep up with the always-moving William, visit his blog at www.williamkamkwamba.com.

Oh lordy, is it award season yet? In other words, is summer over already? Here in Seattle the mercury just rose about 70 degrees last week, so you can understand if I'm a little grumbly, but I do like the prizes, and today's ceremonial first salvo got my blood going. It's the Man Booker longlist, a baker's dozen that will be narrowed down to the shortlist of six for the big UK/Commonwealth prize on September 7:

• Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
• Room by Emma Donoghue
• The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore (Amazon.co.uk only so far)
• In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (UK, or Kindle)
• The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (UK)
• The Long Song by Andrea Levy
• C by Tom McCarthy
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
• February by Lisa Moore
• Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
• Trespass by Rose Tremain
• The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
• The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner (UK)

Peter Carey is a two-time Booker winner, but the 800-pound gorilla is The Thousand Autumns, a big book by a big author who was a popular runner-up for Cloud Atlas and number9dream (and yes, it's one of my current Best of July picks). Room, C, Skippy Dies, and Trespass are all highly anticipated fall releases here in the US, while Dunmore, Galgut, Jacobson, and Warner are all still waiting for US editions to go on the schedule (I expect some will get them now). I was especially happy to see Lisa Moore on the list–I've been a fan ever since we picked her story collection, Open, as our Book of the Year on Amazon.ca way back when. She's the only Canadian on the list, and one of only a few from outside the UK (Galgut is South African and Carey and Tsiolkas Australian). [Update: Sorry, forgot: Donoghue is Irish and lives now in Canada too.]

Over at William Hill they've put The Long Song as the early favorite, at 4-1, with Mitchell close behind at 9-2 and Dunmore at 5-1 (the customer reviews in the UK for the latter, a story of the Soviet Union in the late Stalin era, are terrific, by the way).

Who didn't make this first cut? The big names Amis and McEwan are absent, which is not a complete surprise. Sarah Crown at the Guardian points out there are no debut novelists this time around, although there's a fair amount of fresh-ish blood nevertheless. What am I looking forward to checking out? I really liked Tom McCarthy's Remainder (saying I "loved" it seems wrong for such a chilly book), and I've just started C, which seems like a very different animal. But Skippy Dies looks like a tasty romp, and not just because of the adorable 3-book paperback set that Faber is offering alongside the standard hardcover. It's like a cute little sidekick to the more monumental 2666 set from a couple of years ago. –Tom

Another installment in one of my favorite literary pastimes: comparing US and UK covers of the same book. In this case, two views of perhaps the biggest novel of the fall, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, in US and UK versions:

What do you think? Could hardly be more different, except for the feather motif, which readers, particularly finishers, of the book, will understand (and which readers of his recent New Yorker piece on the mass slaughter of songbirds in Europe will not be surprised to see). The US cover has a stronger thematic tie to the story, but I find myself drawn to the bold blocks of the UK one.

And, for another view, my own vacation snap of some appropriate lakeside reading a couple of weeks ago:

–Tom

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that no one shall speak of Fight Club. Enjoy the latest mashup, which skips the book and goes straight to the trailer:

(Via BookNinja) –Tom

I always look forward to my daily dose of aesthetic inspiration from Design*Sponge, and I'm still ruminating on yesterday's typically gorgeous post on tables and cameras made of cool old hardcover books. Since the news that Amazon's digital sales now outpace hardcovers, I've been obsessing more than usual about the fate of physical books, wondering how long it'll be before my own dense shelves start to look like curio cabinets.

But like many who responded to the Design*Sponge post (Ashley Lorelle's "Beautiful and inspiring, but I’m not sure if I could actually destroy books to make them into furniture!" sums it up), I'm deeply ambivalent about using books as craft and building materials, despite the undeniable coolness of this pinhole camera:

This probably isn't a widespread enough trend to warrant serious angsting, but every time I imagine another way to make beautiful things from books, I run up against an internal argument.

The pro side goes something like this:

• I love salvaging and repurposing interesting old stuff in my home and garden, and objects made of books have a totally magical, storybook feeling.

• Those pinhole cameras are amazing objects in themselves, and the idea of taking such a low-tech photo with a book is really intriguing.

• Some older books have charming covers with deadly boring text, and just because they're old doesn't necessarily mean they're rare.

• Maybe all future generations need is the raw information, digitized, available to anyone, freed from the carbon consumption of production and shipping, and incorruptible.

But then another voice pipes up:

• As much as we try to ignore it, we live in an age of extinction (of species, ecosystems, indigenous cultures, many of the ways of living we've always taken for granted), so this may be the perfect time to think about preserving bibliological diversity in physical form. Books (some more than others) are links in the evolution of human knowledge. What looks dull but delightfully cut-upable to the modern craftista may be very valuable information down the line, or even a precious artifact of a lost civilization. Do we as creative individuals have a responsibility to consider a book's potential value before we destroy it?

• We've been very fortunate to live in an age of booky ubiquity, when cheap energy makes it cost-effective (if only in the short run) to print and ship mass quantities of hardcovers. Physical books are a marvelous part of the industrial age's legacy. And
  if the worst happens and oil dries up before we can come up with
  another large-scale, sustainable solution–a not-unlikely scenario–those used hardcovers (now so cheap at garage sales) might feel like precious relics.

• In all its clean, convenient, connected, ink-digitizing, font-expanding glory, an e-reader will never have the magic of paper and cloth and real ink.

What say you, fellow bibliophiles? Am I over-thinking this, or would it be worthwhile for someone to draw up some tenets for those of us who also like to use book guts in mixed-media images or turn them into building blocks for bookcases (or tables, or cameras, or picture frames/shadowboxes, or bedframes, or doors, or….)? What can we create with stacks of old mass-market paperbacks–or are they just as precious?

The answer must be "It depends," but I'd appreciate your thoughts about what it depends on. –Mari Malcolm