Retrospective: Transmetropolitan
Good. Your earned it. With your silence.
Spider Jerusalem is a journalist. He's also a very angry person who indulges heavily in recreational drugs, habitually assaults people who annoy him and generally makes it his mission to tell people things they really don't want to hear. A die-hard cynic with no respect for authority or social niceties, he tears through anything and anyone in his way to get a story.
He has plenty to vent about. His dystopian city is a hotbed of corruption, neglect, exploitation and poverty with rotten politicians, soulless transhumanist cults and a populace pacified by apathy and sociopathic perversity (Anyone for a tasty cloned human flesh burger?)... It's Western decadence to the nth degree.
We join Spider as he is forced to come out of his drug-soaked hiatus out in the bondooks in order to fulfil a book deal (the advance for which he has long since burnt through). He can only write in the city he despises, so he gets a job as a columnist for The Word newspaper. They give him an assistant, he adopts a feral mutant cat with three eyes and two mouths, and gets to work.
The city has many bizarre dispossessed - not just the poor with no access to healthcare who have been moved into out-of-the-spotlight housing projects (with exotic diseases), but also those who have chosen to splice themselves with alien DNA (Transients), those who have chosen to download themselves into clouds of nanobots (Foglets), those resurrected from cryogenic suspension (Revivals), etc. - all of whom are treated with disdain.
A presidential election campaign throws all of these injustices into stark relief. Voters have a choice of the far-right incumbent ("the Beast") and a vapid contender ("the Smiler") who offers empty blandishments. Is there any hope for democracy? Does the majority even care?
Transmetropolitan by writer Warren Ellis and artist Darick Robertson is a rare combination of political commentary and entertaining cyberpunk narrative, kind of like Joe Sacco creating a tale set in Judge Dredd's Mega City One... but even darker. Advances in technology are no guarantee of an improved quality of life, at least not for the common herd. With violent cartoons on 'the feed' and supermarket shelves full of packaged dolphin meat, our anti-hero seems to be living in a nightmare... the scariest part being that nobody around him seems to want to wake up from it.
Spider's column (I Hate It Here) is a non-stop exposé of the city's shortcomings and shows that he is motivated by a raging thirst for justice... but how much can one man do? Is the pen really mightier than the sword?
Robertson portrays the cast of increasingly weird characters with humour and humanity, and his cityscapes are mesmerising, making much use of dizzying perspectives and contrasting hi-tech angular architecture with the mundane and the squalid and with brief glimpses of beauty.
Transmetropolitan was originally published as 60 issues from 1997 to 2002 but its social and political messages are still relevant today. It will be interesting to see how far into the future this remains a reflection of the timeless imperfections of human society...
Zak Webber
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