I Really Should Read This 9: Transmetropolitan Book Two, by Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson

Transmetropolitan Book Two, by Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson

1998, collected in 2001

Yesterday, I wrote about Abe Sapien, a book I was warned wasn't the best of the Mignola-verse, but I ended up enjoying. Today, I'm writing about Transmetropolitan, a book that seems to be pretty universally beloved, assuming 'universal' to be 40-something comic fans.

Pills!

Transmetropolitan is about the life of celebrity journalist Spider Jerusalem as he fights the City, achieving greater and greater success every time he takes society down a peg.

It was interesting, it was readable, but I wasn't blown away by it. I've been trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who mainly read mainstream superheroes, and Vertigo was their notion of "out there" comics, and yeah, this probably would have been mind-blowing. My small town comic shop flirted with indie books in the 80s after the TMNT boom, but by the 90s, it was mainly Marvel, DC, Image and Dark Horse. I don't even know they ventured much into Valiant territory. So Transmetropolitan was likely the most dangerous comic they carried the year it came out, followed by Preacher. It satirizes and attacks normalcy, so it probably read to 17-year-olds like Mad Magazine read to 9-year-olds.

Drugs and random references

I'm a 40-something art school graduate who's spent decades digging into the counter culture, and this thing read like the Cliff Notes of Hunter S Thompson, Philip K Dick, Dadaism, and a ton of other things Ellis was likely excited by at the time, rather than an incredible new and original vision of the world. When you read a book, you're not just reading a book, but it's competing with all that you've read before. Some work that wears influences on its sleeve breaks out into its own thing, but I didn't quite get there with this (I read book one a few months back, so I've read 24 issues total). Rather than see Spider as a character, he just read like a delivery method for Ellis' ideas.

On one page, Ellis spends the page setting up a dirty joke I've heard multiple times, but he changes the punchline from "goatfucker" to "chimpfucker". It's content for his comic he was churning out, and I doubt Ellis would hold it up as an example of writing he's proudest of, but it emphasizes the collage nature of the book. Transmetropolitan is not so much an idea as a bunch of ideas Ellis enjoyed and assembled. I recently read Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, and that also reads like a stew of things happening in the 90s, but with that series, I feel like it really coalesced into its own thing.

It wasn't worth it

Another thing that turned me off of the book is that Ellis is torn on what its viewpoint is, and what Spider's take on the world is. Lead character Spider is constantly hyped about getting drugged up, but society is also criticized for being drugged up and medicating their lives away. It's not so much that I want Ellis to take a position on it, but it's not consistent. Is being wasted a 'punk' action or a form of sheeple denial? In my most Dionysian points as a young man, I was similarly confused. I thought getting legally wasted (drunk) was for braindead losers, while getting illegally wasted was underground cool, even though they shared a lot of overlap. I don't really want Ellis to go into a treatise on the differences between stimulants, depressants, and hallucinogens, but compared to the use of drugs in Grant Morrison's Vertigo books, or Alan Moore's pre-Vertigo Swamp Thing, Transmetropolitan looks shabby in comparison. 

In the same vein, Spider is a self-proclaimed rotten bastard, but he spends his time sticking up the underclass, so is he? Is he about the destruction of society, or just the unfairness of the system? The character of Spider is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it too construction, switching modes as the story calls for it. Sometimes he's an evil, violent bastard, sometimes he's a sensitive hero. Maybe the notion is that he's a Robin Hood, attacking the rich to give to the poor, but he's not consistently that either. He's fluid.

What a self-proclaimed bastard! Using his influence to highlight the issues!

I get it, I really do. I have no idea how old Ellis was working on this, and honestly, I shared a lot of the same conflicting viewpoints as a young man, this frustrating rage against the world. As an adult reader though, trying to view Spider as a successful, influential writer is pretty hard, it's a bit too much to swallow.

That criticism out of the way, what can I say positive about the book? It's about stuff that a lot of other comics wouldn't be about. This is a twelve issue run about a presidential election. The main themes are that the candidates are self-serving and have no cares for what they say or their constituents beyond what gets them elected. That wasn't a new theme when it came out (this book came out a few years after "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."), and politics has only gotten more cynical in the decades since, but it's not an overdone theme in pop culture either. On a very basic level, Transmetropolitan is tackling topics which would be too polarizing for the mainstream in most cases. At the very least, it gives the reader something to think about.

Probably the thing I like most about the series is the concept of the City, which is only named as the City. Living in Toronto for a decade, I certainly had my own love-hate relationship with the place, and the strongest part of Spider Jerusalem's character is his own push-pull with the City, wanting to experience all of it and wanting to go hide in the mountains again. I've since moved to a smallish city and lost all those conflicting feelings, but yeah, living in a metropolis can make a person crazy.

It's not trying to be subtle

I've never been crazy about Darrick Robertson's penciling. He's a workman-like artist with Mark Bagley energy. He's made a solid living doing grotesque images with this and the Boys, so I'm glad he's found a niche. He draws everything, he gives people individual faces, and has fully rendered backgrounds, so he's doing really good work on the book, better than most could. He's a good artist. I'm just not a fan of his line work, which is a matter of personal tastes.

This really reminds me of someone, but who... what president could ever be so immoral as to think the job gives them blanket immunity?

Some of the original covers were done by Geoff Darrow, and those are gorgeous. It's absolutely unfair to compare a monthly artist to someone like Darrow, who is very slow and in the top percentile of the medium. But they are gorgeous, it has to be noted.

I'm not going to read more, unless book three gets sharply marked down. I enjoyed some of this, but it doesn't have the bite it should to get me excited. I suspect this is one of those books where you just had to be there at the exact right point in your life to get the thrill from it that people still carry with them today. For me, it didn't hit, it didn't meet the hype. 

(Books I read for the first time in 2020 that met the hype:

-Swamp Thing

-The Invisibles

-Akira

-Berserk

-Doom Patrol

I'm not just trolling by saying I wasn't crazy about the book.)

I do think if it were updated and adapted, it could make a very strong TV program though.