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from the Right Brane
What the Next Live Action Comic Should Be…July 30, 2026
There’s a lot of talk about “superhero movie fatigue,” the public getting increasingly tired of movies about the same comic book characters in garish costumes slugging it out with each other over and over, ad nauseam. And obviously, I get it. After all, there’s not much going on in there beyond the slugfests and explosions, and characters don’t change much.
And television isn’t doing much better: Its attempts to create shows from successful comic or animation franchises keep falling short (looking at you, Cowboy Bebop). And sci-fi franchises have become pretty predictable and dry (looking at you, Star Trek: Everything).
But if anyone is looking for inspiration from a comic series that would actually make for interesting movies or TV, I know of one that should be great for development. It’s a series that has an inventive and unique premise, amazing characters, a deep backstory, intrigue, adventure, humor, and a dynamite series conclusion. And best of all, it doesn’t look like anything else on TV or in movies, but at the same time has elements we are all familiar with. It’s a series about the Archeologists of the Impossible.
That series, if you haven’t already guessed it, is… Planetary.
Cover of the opening issue of Planetary, showing the featured characters and a surprise cameo suggested by the brand logo.
Planetary, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by John Cassiday and colored by Laura DePuy, was an incredible series produced by Wildstorm Publishing beginning in 1999. The date was important; because the series was centered around the myths and legends of the 20th century. And the myths and legends it investigated were mostly ideas suggested by popular media—literature, radio, television, cinema and other comic books—making the media fiction of the 1900s their playground. And although Planetary was essentially a comic book, it was definitely not emulating the colorful action and mayhem of most popular adventure and superhero comics.
Ellis’ main trio of characters were original, but not ordinary. Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and The Drummer (yes, his name was The Drummer) had incredible powers not unlike superheroes. Very much unlike comics superheroes, the stories weren’t all about their jumping around using those abilities to beat up villains and stomp monsters (although they did, when the need arose). Mostly, they were investigators, searching for information about the hidden history of the world… the strange creatures, impossible beings, secret places and buried technologies that made the world… interesting.
The supporting characters were also original, but at the same time very familiar to readers. For example, the very first issue had the trio meet up with Axel Brass, a close analogue of the fictional hero Doc Savage… the lone survivor of a team with analogues of Tarzan, The Shadow, The Spider and Flash Gordon, which had fought a deadly battle against a close analogue of DC Comics’ Justice League of America.
If that sounds like the series is set in some kind of parallel universe where fictional characters are real… that, too, is intentional. In fact, the series features the intentional discovery of the “multiverse,” through which characters from one such universe were able to bleed through to the other, allowing any combination of characters from fiction to exist alongside the others. Episodes in the series regularly had the characters interacting with their versions of comics superheroes, magicians and fairies, Japanese monsters, Universal Studios monsters, atomic mutant monsters, Sherlock Holmes, Zorro, James Bond, Fu Manchu… a little bit of everything.
Elijah Snow finds a trove of exotic weapons on a dead world in another dimension, in Planetary.
On top of all this are even deeper mysteries: The central character, Elijah Snow, a 100-year-old man himself, seems to have forgotten his own past; he does not know who runs the Planetary organization in the first place; some people he meets speak like old friends that he doesn’t recall ever meeting; and Planetary has a “fourth man,” but his identity or whereabouts are unknown. Who and what is being kept from Elijah, and why?
The ongoing adventures to uncover the hidden truths about the world—as well as the hidden truths about Elijah Snow himself and the Planetary organization—make for a wonderfully rich background and stories. Best of all, the series does provide answers to all these mysteries, as well as a satisfying conclusion to them all. And even at the conclusion, the audience can easily tell the Planetary organization would go on to experience many more adventures.
This would be an ideal vehicle either for a series of movies or a television series. It could be done as high-quality animation, I suppose… but live action would better preserve the impact of the premise. And because of the nature of the premise, there’s room to add new and original stories to the series. I, myself, once penned a story in the Planetary vein wherein the trio investigated a secret organization based in Britain which, in the 1980s, was busy fighting the invasion of Earth by UFOs.
(Sound familiar? Somehow, none of the incredible material by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson ever made it into a Planetary story, though they really should have. In fact, one interesting genre that Planetary all but missed out on was televised fiction. Other than a mention of a few early heroes that made it to television, such as Zorro, the Lone Ranger and Batman, the Planetary universe does not seem to include characters from television shows; and if you think about it, there are so many characters that would have been ripe for borrowing, from the early Japanese cartoons like Astro Boy and Gigantor, the characters by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the heroes created by Hanna Barbera, the world- and time-travelling adventurers of Sid and Marty Kroft, the Avengers, Search, the Man from Uncle… but maybe that would have been too much for even Planetary to hold within its pages.)
Now, I’d be the first to admit that any attempt to recreate this incredible saga in live-action would be expensive; some of the stories and elements would require exotic locations and cinematic-scale special effects (though very little of it would amount to anything you haven’t seen before). And as this is essentially a big mystery series with deep plots and drama, you’d need top-notch actors to play their characters as straight as possible, to get the full impact of the series. Fortunately, Ellis’ characters and dialogue are well-developed, and Cassiday and DePuy’s art has an atmospheric and cinematic style that would translate well to the big screen; their layouts could be used as a direct storyboard for film content.
The art of Planetary is atmospheric and almost cinematic in style. A series could use the original stories as storyboards for live-action material.
Most importantly, for all the familiar elements involved in the series, the entirety of Planetary has a unique and tantalizing flavor. The entire audience—not just jaded comic book fans—would get great enjoyment out of the combination of familiar characters, clever dialogue and inventive plot twists that make for exciting and satisfying storytelling.
So, that’s my pitch: Planetary for the live-action win. Thank you for attending my TED talk.
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