It is a given that in every story, there will be a protagonist and an antagonist. The antagonist may be a force of nature, a feature of the protagonist's society, or even an element of the protagonist's own character with which he or she struggles. More often than not, however, the antagonist is another character who has plans which cannot succeed if the protagonist achieves his or her own goal. The protagonist/antagonist relationship is sometimes simplified even further into that of the hero/villain. In such stories, the antagonist is shown to be morally or ethically opposed to those of the presumed audience, so that the reader identifies completely with the protagonist.
This is particularly true in graphic literature (or comic books). On the surface, it would seem that "the Four", a group of astronauts-turned- masterminds in the serialized graphic novel _Planetary_ (published by Wildstorm, an imprint of D.C. Comics) are the villains of that story. They are certainly the antagonists of the story, as they have served as opposition to the story's titular organization since their first appearance. And we have certainly been shown sufficiently terrible deeds to make audience identification with the Four difficult, to say the least Yet I suspect that this is an over-simplification of a very complex topic, for reasons which I will discuss in this essay.
Our first glimpse of the Four's handiwork comes in the second chapter of _Planetary_, entitled "Island". At the climax of the story, a group of uniformed guards arrested a group of Japanese extremists who had discovered the secret of Island Zero. When Ryu, the leader of these extremists, stated that they intended to make camp on the island, the spokesman of the guards replied, "We can't allow you to do that, sir. In fact, we can't allow you to leave, either." (2:18) Ryu concluded that the guards intended to kill him and his followers, and shot the canister of nerve gas he had carried with him, killing himself, his followers, and the guards as well.
The audience will not be told that these guards are agents of the Four until the sixth chapter of _Planetary_, but for the moment let us examine their actions. They do not act in opposition to the protagonists of the story. They do not even interact with the members of Planetary who appear in this chapter. And it is difficult to claim that they were engaging in villainous activity. While the guards initially appeared (apparently, they teleported to the scene) with their weapons out and pointed at the extremists, this was completely understandable under the circumstances. Ryu was also armed and had already demonstrated that he was willing to kill, as he had shot one of his followers. And while the spokesman stated that they would not permit the extremists to leave the island, as we shall soon see, this does not necessarily indicate that the guards were going to execute their prisoners.
The next chapter of _Planetary_ which deals with the Four, the sixth ("4") does so directly. It recounts the origins of the group and also features a face-to-face confrontation between Elijah Snow, the focal character of _Planetary_, and William Leather, one of the Four.
In 1945, according to the account given, a group of brilliant German rocket scientists ("the engineers and analysts Hitler secretly kept close to him in Berlin", 6:1) were smuggled out of Germany to work on a secret space project for the United States government. Working behind the scenes, these experts produced a booster design comparable to the Saturn V in 1959, and launched a mission to the moon in 1961. The crew of the mission encountered a mysterious anomaly (one clearly related to several other anomalies encountered in the pages of _Planetary_) and returned to Earth changed. They took over the project and used its resources to pursue their own goals. According to the Drummer, a member of Planetary's field team, those goals make the Four "the dark side of everything we do." (6:15)
When Elijah Snow reads Planetary's files on the Four, he is outraged. "Even if a tenth of this thing is true ... The things these scum have cost us since 1961 ... I don't enjoy killing people. I want to kill these people." (6:16) However, we are not made privy to what, exactly, the Four have done which so angers Snow. Nor are we told a great deal about the Four in general. The two most relevant statements are that "they might've let [Randall] Dowling [the project leader of the moon mission] be the American Einstein if not for his background" and that "[Kim] Suskind [a physicist on the mission] was the daughter of one of the Nazi brain trust". (6:8) There is no supporting information on what aspect of Dowling's "background" was problematic.
My own first question concerning the information presented in the file would not be, "how much of it is true", but rather, "from whose perspective is this being presented". What we have already been given is sufficient to make us somewhat distrustful of the Four. Yet a more rational examination of the facts calls such an evaluation into question. The fact that Kim Suskind's father was a Nazi rocket scientist tells her nothing of her character, nor even of her father's character. It is a simple truth that during the Nazi regime in Germany, it was difficult to get anything -- from scientific research to grocery shopping -- done if one was not a member of the Nazi party. We do not know if the "brain trust" engaged in acts which could be considered "crimes against humanity". The story presents no particular evidence to suggest that they did any such things. Yet the presentation of the facts about the Four seems to be slanted in such a way that we are ready to believe the worst about them, and it is possible that the information in the files, which we do not see, is equally slanted, if not moreso.
When Elijah Snow confronts William Leather, Snow states that "the things here [in the Four's New York lab]: if I understand them right, then they alone could save millions of lives a year." He wants to know why the Four don't use them in such a manner. Leather replies that the Four are "adventurers ... on the human adventure. And you can't all come along." (6:19) He later states that they are "optimal humans ... explorers, scientist gods, the secret heroes of a world that doesn't deserve [them]." (6:21)
These are arrogant statements, and they might lead the reader to conclude that the Four are elitists who do not care if millions die as a result of their actions or inaction. However, such a conclusion ignores certain facts. It is true that Leather's statements are arrogant. However, arrogance is not a crime. The various members of Planetary all make comments of equal arrogance and braggadocio. While it is certainly possible that the technologies and secrets contained in the Four's lab could save millions of lives every year, it is also likely that they could lead to the destruction of as many if not more.
Furthermore, while Planetary has investigated many things which "could be salvaged or retrieved" (6:20) there has been no particular evidence that they then bring them to public attention. In fact, while investigating an exploded building in the fourth chapter of the story, "Strange Harbours", Planetary kept their excavations literally under wraps. Is it possible that when Leather says, "You've changed, Mr. Snow." (op cit.) he is referring to more than just an increased tendency to engage in physical violence, but also to a difference in attitude towards "mystery archaeology"? As Leather knows, Snow is not exactly himself. But of that, more later.
The next reference to activities by the Four actually refers to events predating the Four's transformation. In the eighth chapter of _Planetary_, "The Day the Earth Turned Slower", Planetary interviewed a woman calling herself Allison. She claimed to have been imprisoned in City Zero, "an experimental concentration camp for American dissidents". (8:13) There, she was shot and then brought back to life by Dr. Randall Dowling, who stated that she had been given a "radioactive half-life of fifty years." (8:17) After describing other atomic horrors perpetrated on the prisoners of City Zero, Allison appeared to disintegrate -- her half-life expired.
However, a radioactive substance does not disintegrate when its half-life elapses; it simply emits one-half as much radiation as it did at the start of the interval. While it is possible that the remaining radiation in her body was no longer sufficient to support her life-processes, it is rather convenient that she had just enough time to tell her story and say farewell before she expired. Two possibilities suggest themselves -- that her disintegration was not actually the cessation of her life, or that she did not tell the complete story of what occurred in City Zero. Either possibility casts doubt on all aspects of her story. The existence of City Zero is not in doubt; it is confirmed to have existed in another chapter of _Planetary_, but Randall Dowling's presence there need not be taken as a given.
The machinations of the Four are only briefly touched upon in the next chapter of _Planetary_, entitled "Planet Fiction". The anonymous director of the "fictionaut" program described in that chapter states that the events which took place will upset Dr. Dowling. We can deduce almost nothing from this statement. The Four might have been only tangentially involved in the program, or they may have been a substantial backer for it. Even so, the only thing we can say for certain about the Four from this incident is that they have poor taste in employees.
But the fact that the director of the program was a thoroughly unpleasant person does not mitigate against the fact that his shooting of Ambrose Chase was a clear-cut case of self-defense. He had watched as Chase shot dozens of the guards for the facility, and could certainly have been said to have been in fear of his life. Under those circumstances, I suspect that any reasonable person would have done the same thing. In contrast, Jakita Wagner's response to this act was a clear-cut case of deliberate murder.
The tenth chapter of _Planetary_, "Magic and Loss", is certainly the grimmest indictment against the Four thus far. It puports to relate how the Four dealt with three potential alien influences through very brutal means, taking trophies from each of them. But there is a problem with this chapter. Snow, observing the devices which Planetary's "grunts" found in the Four's New York lab, could not have known what transpired on two different alien worlds and in a parallel reality. Neither could he have been privy to communications between members of the Four. While some of it he could have deduced from the files, or perhaps learned from memories he only half-recalled, we don't know that he did ... and so we must regard the bulk of this chapter as taking place entirely in the imagination of Elijah Snow.
Not until the fourteenth chapter of _Planetary_ does the chronicle return to the conflict between Planetary and the Four. In the interim, we learn that Snow is himself the Fourth Man of Planetary, and that his memories of this were blocked out by the Four. This is the chapter which explains how this came to pass. While examining a stick found in a vessel captured from the Four, Snow and a nameless Professor discovered that the stick is linked to a hammer by a quantum thread which leads to a world filled with such weapons ... and covered in bones.
Snow said, "They killed an entire world ... so that they had somewhere to store their weapons." This is an absurd allegation. Let us accept, for the moment, that Snow has seen evidence that the Four are sufficiently ruthless to do something of this nature. This still does not prove that they are responsible for this specific incident. And even so, we have seen no such evidence.
Subsequent to this incident, Snow lured Suskind into an ambush in Planetary's remote, secret Antarctic base, and directed Chase to keep his reality distortion field focused on her, as he had "seen her explode people who lost their concentration for a second". (14:16) Concentration in doing what -- attempting to inflict mortal or fatal injury? Self-defense, again. Ultimately, however, Snow was captured by the Four and forced to choose between accepting blocks in his memory or seeing Dowling kill his team. He accepted the blocks.
But while capturing Snow, the Four also captured Chase and Wagner. As John Stone pointed out in the eleventh chapter of _Planetary_, "They're the Four. They could just kill you. They could just kill Planetary. Hell, they could kill half America before lunch if they felt like it. And get away with it. It's not just `why would they run a game on you?' It's also `why would they not just kill you?'" (11:16) We can accept the reasons that Dowling gives: that they find Planetary amusing but are concerned that it is growing dangerous, and so are handicapping the situation in their own favor. It is simple, sadistic, and feeds into our perception that the Four are terrible and evil and nasty.
Except that as we've seen, that doesn't make them all that much different from Snow. When asked in "Century", the thirteenth chapter of _Planetary_, whether he managed to defeat John Griffin, he casually responds, "More like tortured him for a while." (13:15) And we have already seen signs of hypocrisy in his attitude towards the Four -- that they are contemptible for discovering things and then not using them for the public weal, while it is perfectly acceptable for him to do so.
To summarize. It is my position that based on the evidence already presented, the Four are certainly not good people, but they are not necessarily the malevolent force we have been led to believe. And while Planetary, and Elijah Snow in particular, are the protagonists of the story _Planetary_ ... they certainly aren't heroes. Moreover, there have also been a pair of subtle hints that the conflict between Planetary and the Four is not a struggle between very different forces. When Allison muses about the reasons that City Zero was built, she comments "There was no real "red threat". They [meaning the Soviets] were just as afraid of us as we were of them." (8:20) And John Stone claims that "Heaven and Hell are nothing but siege engines set a constant tug-of-war against each other, and souls provide the coal." (11:12) In both cases, it is implied that enemies may have more in common than they are able to admit ... and I suspect that both examples also describe the conflict between Planetary and the Four.