Transmetropolitan Review

**Resposting this here for portfolio reasons.

Transmetropolitan a comic by Warren Ellis

Once in awhile we read things or hear things, watch for a split second something complex and obnoxious. It takes us by force, sits up down for a chat and then goes into a rant that you expect from a cultist leader who will then hand you kool aid.

Transmetropolitan is in the kool aid and the heavy William Gibson influence that is definitely dreaming of electric sheep is the cult leader.

That also makes New York City into Waco Texas if I were to continue down this line of thought, but I’m not. Instead I’m tying us all down with some alien hybridized sub standard contraption and taking us on what is a trippy ride of futuristic anarchy, free form journalism, neurotransmitters and what is most likely going to stroke every aspect that’s been asleep in my brain since I last played Mechwarrior.

And no, there’s no direct correlation between Transmetropolitan and Mechwarrior.

With mismatched sunglasses that could possibly reflect two sides of a quirky, driven personality we meet Spider Jerusalem. Technically we meet him in a Grizzly Adams stage that is entirely unbecoming of a man such as himself. Intelligence. An anti-hero. And he’s tracking down a story.

In the introductory issues of Transmetropolitan we are introduced to transients. They’re sort of homeless. More to the point of the topic, they are a transient species more than the state in which they live. This counter-culture of people chooses to live between bodies; they are half alien, half human. And they’re pretty sure they sent out a memo, but just to remind you they want to secede. And have sex with your wife.

This story is to be the first we see of Spider Jerusalem, the first he tackles to refamiliarize himself with the city. How life has changed in the five years since he exiled himself to the mountains?

It never can be what you expect.

Instead, we face an assault on the senses! Really… okay, so not really. But it’s a pretty assault of color and lines as brutal as Brock Lesner winning a UFC match and as tweakish as a cokehead trying to explain the intricacies of a free market Friedenist economy to a pothead. This is not what you’d expect anything to look like except maybe a leets hallucination when it comes to the panels. Then again it’s a leet and if you never played Anarchy Online I just lost the joke.

But for those of you who have played, you get it.

I want to make a pie from this story, really, I do!

Take the artwork, the inking, the words, the story and place it onto of building in the body of wiry journalist with an attitude problem not only has my mind become giddy excited but my libido has kicked into overdrive. This is hot.

Bring on the godless anarchy of a civilization in a technocratic decline.

And bring me the power of the written word unabashed by laws to tie it down.

Welcome to Transmetropolitan.

In a city as depraved as this one, it is oddly fitting that our journalistic revolutionary is one of the crankiest, obnoxious, intelligently stimulated, tattooed, vulgar and raw individuals to be thought up. I think his creation really came forward after an acid induced trip through flying monkeys at a strip clubs happy hour. Spider Jerusalem is both the hero and the anti-hero, he is his own antagonist and needs little help from his personal assistant, a former stripper, who at best calms the fits before the storm.

Why am I so reminded of Hunter S. Thompson?

I highly doubt that it has anything to do with Mr. Jerusalem’s obsession with a bowel disrupter.

I think it has more to do with the fact his wife won’t come out of cryonic freeze until he is dead.

Through the eyes of the future planned out for us in this cyberpunk apocalyptica we find that life in this version of New York, is just as convienient with push button ordering. And really, it is push button. In issue five we find Spider trying to learn and understand the culture that surrounds him by spending the day watching television. Which is in itself a modern constant. Whatever you wish to learn about a people you can find out about them by just watching television.

And find a commercial you like? Press a button on your remote and a customer service associate will be right with you to take that order and make sure a courier is dispatched to your position.

Large pie extra cheese. Please.

Shall we even touch on the mayhem of a call in television show?

Or shall we travel to the New Religious Movement Convention?

If you have any sense of morality that is not tempered by a sense of humor, this comic is neither for you nor for the weak of stomach. It is a drug in of itself. An addictive form of reading and watching as it the pages were moving themselves into a movie of proportions to which there is not a rating system.

And this fact may be why we’ve been given the character of Channon, a former stripper and the assistant to Spider Jerusalem. She acts as both the balance to his over the top nature and an instigator. Not as if Spider needs anything extra to instigate him, but training Channon as a journalist is definitely an excuse to further his shenanigans.

Unfortunately she can’t seem to keep him from making enemies. Then again with columns such as his own, how is he not making enemies?

We bounce between socio-political issues of a time yet to come and as with other comics they directly mirror those we see today in our society. From cultist leaders, to medical experiment, to the use of drugs or lack of and to the campaigns or corrupt politicians.

Questions of how to vote when you really are backing up the lesser of two evils rings too true in the minds eye of this American. Or even when do you start backing them up and begin to question?

Through the visionary eyes that Transmetropolitan tends to cater to we see the iconic idolization of those who have inspired us before falling and how in their deaths they become gods. Which is a very cynical way of looking at things but there is so much evidence to hold it up to the light. For instance, the rise of celebrity worship and the deification of political figures are something that we not only find in these pages but in the world around us today with things such as Obama Nation and Brad Pitt.

Trough a gamut of human emotion and tenacity to surreal mindsets brought on by states of mind foreign to those of us who have not delved into the depths of drug induced clairvoyance we see this story told of a modern day. Of Hunter S. Thompson living in the world of William Gibson.

Armed with a personal assistant and a former personal assistant turned bodyguard, there isn’t much that can stop Spider Jerusalem on his crusade for a brutal array of truth and justice in cyberpunk apocalyptical journalism.

In Transmetropolitan we see a plethora of social commentary that is on par with that written in “The Wire.” The series takes us beyond the normal moral questions of right and wrong and into vast grey areas that are often left untouched except in other great comics such as “The Watchmen” and the “Sin City” series. Transmetropolitan cannot be touched. It is an incredible epitaph to the world that we live in and the future we face. I owe Warren Ellis, Derek Robertson and Rodney Ramos my ovaries. This is amazing work.

I am in love with Spider Jerusalem.

~ by nunabutt on May 27, 2009.