Sorry! Sorry about that. Crap, how long ago did that issue come out? It’s been years… Anyway, they weren’t really “nails,” as such… Look, it’s been like TWO YEARS, how is it that this issue hasn’t been trade-paperbacked yet? I take no responsibility for this. Did I mention that I’m sorry?
Sigh… I bailed on the Authority for the same reason. I enjoy seeing people play around with the classic superhero archetypes, so I tend to be fooled by these series that claim “We’re going to shine an exciting new light on superheroes!” But “everyone’s a dick” isn’t an exciting new light. It wasn’t even an exciting new light in the 1980s. It may have been an exciting new light back in 1964 when they introduced Earth-3 and the Crime Syndicate. I remember being distinctly impressed by that one Superfriends episode with the evil Superfriends, where evil Batman had a mustache, and the space monkey was also evil. That was a pretty good episode. Not as good as the one with the zombie plant monsters that sounded like Ookla the Mok, but good.
This is getting a bit off-track, I guess. It’s okay if I hijack my own thread, isn’t it?
Once again, sorry.
Anyway–
That is a weird coincidence! I had no memory of the Extremists, or of the Champions of Angor for that matter. Should be interesting to see how DC updates those characters. I guess they’re from a parallel Earth now, rather than from another planet? Or possibly from another planet in the same universe as Earth-8? Because I thought Earth-8 was supposed to be the home of characters like Breach and Damage.
I stopped reading Planetary around that point myself, though in my case it was because I got tired of the protagonists acting as righteous hypocrites. It’s the world’s greatest evil when the Four keep dangerous alien technology out of public hands and they must be murdered for it as opposed to digging this stuff up and only making knowledge of it available to a select group of millionaires.
It looks like they’re from a parallel Earth now, yeah. Not sure where that places the planet Angor in continuity. Blue Jay (the male Wasp equivalent) is still alive and on Earth in current continuity (he appeared One Year Later in one of the Superman books, I forget which one), so I’m not sure how he ties into this.
Earth-8 would have been the home to heroes like Breech, Damage, and Kyle Raynor if the original multiverse had survived Crisis on Infinite Earths. At least, according to Alexander Luthor in Infinite Crisis. But that multiverse is gone, and the new one isn’t the same. Some Earths kinda line up, like old Earth-3 and new Earth-3, but even there the old version had the Crime Syndicate, while the new version has the Crime Society. In the case of new Earth-8, apparently there’s no connection to the Earth-8 of the old multiverse.
Action, during Busiek’s run while Johns, Donner and Kubert were still getting their run organized.
And Blue Jay is no doubt like Power Girl, or Duella Dent - his origin’s simply been shifted to the new Multiverse’s Earth-8.
To expand upon the ‘not the same multiverse’ part - The only Earths we know have the same numbering as the equivalent (which isn’t to say, identical) pre-Crisis Earths are 2, 3, and 4, although the new Earths 5 and 10 are obviously designated as such as a reference to their pre-Crisis equivalents, Earths S and X. Earths 5, 8, and 17 were named in both multiverses, but refer to completely different worlds in each. (Although the two pre-Crisis Earth-17s (Grant Morrison mistakenly re-used the designation in his Second Crisis Animal Man story) were the only ones named prior to 2006.)