100 COMICS TO READ BEFORE YOU DIE (or grow out of them)
#96 TRANSMETROPOLITAN - Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson
(Vertigo)
"You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism."
Transmetropolitan is set in the future, but like a lot of the best science fiction it’s really talking about the present. Darick Robertson draws its futuristic, bustling American city made out of bright plastic and filthy metal, full of weird-looking people and advertising everywhere you look, just like the real ones of today. The people include a subculture who genetically alter themselves to look like aliens and the advertising comes in bombs that invade your dreams, but it’s still recognisably our world that’s being exaggerated in Transmetropolitan’s fairground mirror.
Part of this backdrop is a political race that slowly becomes the foreground of the story as Spider Jerusalem, a journalistic cross between Hunter S. Thompson and a William Gibson protagonist who is our tattooed and drug-fuelled guide, becomes caught up in it against his better judgement. Spider is a bitter cynic, but like most cynics he’s an optimist who’s been let down by the world too often. The battle between his disdain and hate on one side and his compassion and idealistic belief in truth on the other is as fascinating as the war of words, media skulduggery and bowel disruption between him and his opponent. That opponent is a politician so vile he manages to combine Nixon’s arrogance, Blair’s vapidity, Clinton’s rampant horniness and even quotes Bush with the slogan: “Because there ought to be limits to freedom.”
Several of Transmet’s everybastard characters are loosely analogous to real people, but fictionalised and sanded down to timeless archetypes. Using Spider as his megaphone, Warren Ellis harangues them and most of the rest of the world for their failings. If the world has ever disappointed you enough to want to piss on it from the rooftops like Spider does - or you’re considering a career in combat journalism yourself - this is your handbook.