Back to The City: Rereading Transmetropolitan by Ellis and Robertson

I’m a huge Warren Ellis fan. He’s one of my favorite writers working in any medium today, and lucky for us his medium of choice often happens to be comics.


Terrifyingly intelligent, insightful and scathingly hilarious, Ellis’ voice shines through whether he’s writing about technology, futurism or the craft of writing, or in genres such as hard sci-fi, horror, superheroes, political satire, black comedy, neo-noir, detective fiction or blockbuster action (often, as in the subject of this blog, he’s tackling all of the above). And although there might be better, more polished Ellis works out there, there’s no doubt in my mind that Transmetropolitan, his and artist Darick Robertson’s cyberpunk/gonzo-journalism mash-up, encompasses everything that’s great about the writer more so than any of his other projects. Transmet is quintessential Ellis, which is why it’s right up there with his and John Cassaday’s Planetary as one of my favorite comics of all time.

This being election season, when bullshit spews from both sides of the political spectrum with a nauseating intensity, I figured now was the perfect time for a Transmet reread, and another immersion into series hero Spider Jerusalem’s particular brand of Truth.

For those unfortunate few of you reading this who have never before read or – even worse – heard of Transmetropolitan, describing it is no easy feat. There never was anything quite like Transmet when it hit first hit the stands, and there really hasn’t been anything quite like it since. It’s a hybrid, mutant Frankenstein’s monster of nearly every topic and theme Ellis so often obsesses about, from post-humanism to hard science-fiction/futurism to politics, satire, comedy, action and everything in between. And writing. Even more so than it’s about the myriad subjects it so often tackles, Transmetropolitan is always first and foremost about writing and the inherent power of the written word.

For that matter it’s impossible to talk about the series in any depth without first tackling its hero, Spider Jerusalem, one of the most memorable and brilliantly realized protagonists ever to step onto the comics page. Equal parts Hunter S. Thompson homage and mouthpiece for Ellis’ own opinions, emotions and infamously cantankerous persona, gonzo-journalist Spider Jerusalem is present in nearly every panel of the sixty-issue series. He’s the source of nearly all of the story’s heart, uproariously funny black humor, political ideals and dramatic conflict. The fact that one character is able to so fully support such a great story is both the series’ most impressive accomplishment and a testament to how effectively Ellis uses him.

The series begins with Spider forced out of a self-imposed exile not unlike the seclusion/drug frenzy/writer’s block Hunter Thompson hid behind after the creative tour-de-force that produced such gonzo masterworks as Fear and Loathing in Last Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trial and The Great Shark Hunt in a relatively brief time. As was so often the case with Thompson, what brings Spider back into the game and down from his own figurative and literal mountain is a combination of deadlines and blown book advances. In short, he owes a publisher two books for cash he already spent, and the only solution is to get back into the very weekly political column game that burnt him out in the first place.

The series’ set-up is handled pretty briskly in the very first issue, and it isn’t long before Transmet’s main story vehicle kicks into its first gear, with Spider back in the cyberpunk City (a Manhattan on the worst sort of futuristic sci-fi steroids you can imagine, known only as The City with a capital ‘T’ and ‘C’) churning out columns for his hyper-stressed editor Royce on topics as politically satirical as they are a meditation on futurism. First up is a political movement turned race riot centered around Transients, a group of humans who willingly spliced their genes with the DNA of grey aliens just to stand out from the crowd and feel special.

The proceeding early chapters of the series then act as an introduction to this grotesque, absurd and often horrific future metropolitan culture, with Ellis using Spider as a lens through which to explore some of his crazier yet eerily prophetic sci-fi concepts. Religion, television, news media, counter culture, drug culture – everything gets Ellis and Spider’s razor-sharp style of satirical skewering, and one of the series’ biggest delights is seeing our own cultural and societal flaws in the fictional City’s. That siad, it isn’t until Spider dives back into the political game that the series really locks into form, with both Ellis and his protagonist rising to the height of their literary powers to cover an election between two terrifying presidential candidates.

If all this sounds pretty high-minded and intellectual to you, that’s because it is. Transmetropolitan is one of the smartest comics you’re likely to encounter, and it’s certainly not meant to be casually flipped through like an escapist superhero comic. But in addition to its intelligence, the series also happens to be fucking hilarious – one of the downright funniest stories you’ll read in any medium.

Between Ellis’ uncanny ability to channel Thompson’s voice (and really, if one didn’t know better it’d be easy to think Spider’s voice was all a creation of Ellis’ rather than the writer paying tribute to HST), Spider’s loving abuse of his two “filthy” female assistants and editor, willingness to shoot his trusty “Bowel Disruptor” gun on anyone who crosses him and propensity for colorful and inventive cursing, Spider’s dialogue will make you double over in laughter as much as it’ll make you think.

When it’s firing on all cylinders, Transmetropolitan is nothing short of a masterpiece. Once the book slips into its main story arc involving Spider and company’s quest to take down the cartoonishly evil President Callahan (known as “The Smiler” for his vacant political grin, and in hindsight eerily similar in appearance to John Edwards) using nothing but their gonzo journalistic powers, drugs and bowel disruptors, the book becomes every bit of a page-turner as it is a mediation on science fiction and political/culture satire. The book reads like some unholy conglomeration of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Bladerunner and All The President’s Men. And that’s about as high a compliment I can ever really think to pay any work of fiction.

Please, if you haven’t already, go read Transmetropolitan. I really can’t recommend reading it highly enough, especially during the sort of presidential campaign (i.e. all of them) that’ll make you slap your head in shame and disbelief over how far we’ve digressed as a culture.

As I noted earlier, there hadn’t been a comic quite like Transmet before it hit the stands and there hasn’t been one since. Come to think of it, the saddest commentary on the current comics industry might be that in today’s market a book like Transmet would never make it past the first couple issues, let alone to issue sixty. But that, alas, is a topic for another day.

That’s it for now. As always, please pass word of the blog along to friends and likeminded friends. Sorry for the lull in posting this past week. My schedule was a little crazy with work. Things have settled down just a bit, and I hope to get things rolling again with new content every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as originally planned.