The year in books #7: Transmetropolitan

The most concise way I can think of to say how much I love Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan is this: I read the entire series for the fourth time just so that I could review it here and share my love of the series with you. And I already can't wait until the experience has faded from my mind enough that I can read it again. The series was a conversion experience for me that opened my eyes to the incredible potential that the comics have as an artistic and expressive medium.

The comic tells the tale of Spider Jerusalem, a drug-fueled, violently misanthropic newspaper columnist in the image of Hunter S. Thompson, who is forced to leave his idyllic life in exile and return to The City and employment. His rediscovery of City life is our introduction to the world of the story: a brilliantly conceived future America in which technology and progress have brought American culture's every shining facet and every festering zit into near caricature proportions. Tens of thousands of television channels broadcast, all competing to show the most pornographic and violent content; the ubiquitous Internet puts every conceivable piece of information within reach of investigative journalism, as news broadcasters do little more than relay press releases; racial discrimination has seemingly been overcome, replaced by hatred of those who have chosen to change their species, or even abandon their physical bodies altogether.

Transmetropolitan is classic science fiction in the sense that it uses the device of following trends to their most extreme logical conclusion as a tool for examining the world of today, and it does so in a way that is riveting, hilariously funny and often deeply moving. Spider Jerusalem is an incredible character who Ellis succeeds in giving great depth with very lean dialog; like a cartoonist who can imply a complex image with a few deft strokes, Warren Ellis has mastered the craft of making such powerful choices in his dialog that the lack of exposition in the medium serves more to highlight his strength as a writer than to detract in any way from the complexity of his stories and his characters' personalities.


My favorite image in Transmetropolitan, the one that I remember convinced me that there were things that could be said better in comics than in any other form, shows Spider Jerusalem in a pool of fire, having commanded his computer to project holographic flames around him and to cover every wall of his apartment with news broadcasts. He leans back in his chair amidst this chaos and gives words to the urge that fills each of us denizens of the Internet as we click from page to page in search of fascination and knowledge: "Give me information."