June 15, 2004
TRANSMETROPOLITAN
Written by Warren Ellis and Drawn by Darick Robertson
Published by DC Comics/Vertigo
OBJECTIVITY
Certain types of journalism require a necessary objectivity. A beat or assignment reporter brings his perspective to a story, of course, but he should never let that perspective become the story. Only two types of journalists have that luxury: columnists and reviewers. Their perspective is the story.
I landed my first real journalism gig when I was fifteen years old. It was co-writing a column for a weekly local sports tabloid in Indiana. After that, I moved on to the sports desk of the largest paper in the county, writing features as well as doing live coverage and write ups of local sporting events. I even contributed to the regular news section as well, dipping my toe into the world of the above-the-fold byline. Moving on, I would eventually wind up an entertainment reporter for a while in Arizona, again doing features, and also doing reviews. And tiring of it, I got away from any type of journalism at all for a long time, until five years ago I began pounding a beat on the internet with my own websites. My love of comics and sequential art drew me into this milieu, and I began writing on comics, pop culture, and what have you, back in late 2000. And now… now I wield my mighty opinion here, on one of the great pop culture websites running today.
I am a columnist and a reviewer, and my perspective is your fucking story. Objectivity means dick. I will beat to death with my keyboard anyone who says differently, and I will sexually satisfy whatever creatures they keep living in an aquarium. Are we clear on this?
TRANSMETROPOLITAN is, quite simply, my favorite graphic novel series of all-time.
I turned 34 this past week, and that means I have been reading comics for the better part of twenty-nine years. I am sure there have been greater works of art that have transcended the medium, and I certainly am not insane enough to sit here and tell you that TRANSMET is a more important work than MAUS or SAFE AREA GORAZDE, but it is my favorite, and it is fucking great. If I were to be shipwrecked tomorrow on a deserted island, and Salma Hayek were not shipwrecked with me (disproving the existence of a noble and caring God), then I would want all ten volumes of TRANSMET along with me, alongside Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel ALL THE KING’S MEN. Otherwise, barring Salma leading my rescue party, there would be no reason to attempt to survive, and I would look for local animals and berries to eat that would hopefully help me shit myself to death.
”TRUST THE FUCKHEAD.”
The fuckhead in question is Spider Jerusalem, TRANSMET’S lead character. While in many ways a tribute to Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, part of Spider’s basic character foundation is slyly given away when we first meet him in book one. Living alone, as a hermit, outside of traditional civilization on a mountaintop, Spider bears a ringing resemblance to the great Alan Moore. It isn’t until he is forced to return to the City and become a journalist again, that he is shorn of his frightening hair and beard and begins to look like the good Doctor.
Spider, too, is an attack journalist, his soul tied to being a voice of the people and to revealing the truths that the establishment would deny to the common man. His first cause is the Transient Movement, a new religion that has sprung up around a conclave of body modifiers who are having their DNA mixed with the genes of aliens. Indeed, the Transients’ attempt at seceding from the City is what ultimately restores Spider to the top of the journalist strata and into the hearts of the people; his live remote column describing rampant police brutality during a riot in the Transient zone eventually gets the public to swamp City Hall with complaints and forces a withdrawal.
This becomes the running theme of the book: the power of the word to effect change in the world.
Spider gets his first assistant after the riot, a young journalism student named Channon Yarrow. Channon had been putting herself through school as stripper and a bodyguard, but little does she quite realize what she’s in for as Spider’s right hand. After all, he is a chain smoking, substance abusing lunatic.
Channon begins the process of humanizing the character for the reader after she arrives. We begin to see that there is an actual thought process behind Spider’s madness, as he begins to quietly teach her about how to be a good journalist, and she forces him to actually wear pants. It’s a pretty good trade. She also serves as an excellent entry in an exploration of some of the more sci-fi aspects of the series, which I will discuss later.
A short time later in the series, Channon would resign (to return later as a bodyguard) and Spider would get a new assistant, Yelena Rossini. And that was when the series got interesting.
Ellis is not a writer who is interested in standard storytelling devices or tropes. So Spider Jerusalem is not a hero in any traditional sense. He is, in fact, quite an asshole. In the run of the series, he really doesn’t take the traditional “journey” either. He starts out as an asshole truth seeker, and he ends up as an asshole truth seeker. But perhaps merely to tweak his critics, Ellis allows the true hero of the series to show up after it has been running for over a year. It is Yelena who subtly takes on the traditional route of the hero. She begin as a novice, cowed by a harsh master, and gradually, she grows and she adjusts, and she begins to develop her talent, and she becomes essentially, a feminine and more personally rounded version of Spider. It is Yelena who begins to see what needs to be done in light of Spider’s eventual travel towards the end of his faculties and career. It is Yelena who becomes a master by the end of the series.
It just isn’t the brain dead reader who realizes it.
”MESSIANIC FUCKHEADS ARE A SUPERSTITIOUS AND COWARDLY LOT, AND I MUST STRIKE FEAR INTO THEIR HEARTS.”
TRANSMET is a series based heavily on near-future science fiction. Ellis, more than any other graphic novel writer working today, is a man fascinated with the future and with the coming technology. His defunct Delphi forum was, for some time, a decent storehouse for finding articles dealing with the coming technology and its ramifications for our society. But it wasn’t until he would later start his “news research” Web site Die Puny Humans that Ellis would finally have the perfect pulpit to explore his sci-fi jones. However, in both cases, much of the material that Ellis would find or be exposed to would make it into the pages of TRANSMET. Or, even more amazingly, things that Ellis extrapolated on his own in doing his research would actually come to fruition during the run of the series.
For instance: Spider’s eyeglasses functioned as a camera. That technology has started to break in the real world within the last year. Ellis’ characters worked with “smart phones” before they began to be available to the public. Jerusalem’s work would eventually find itself on a “feedsite” called The Hole. The “feedsite” is easily comparable to blogging technology, and The Hole’s distribution system strongly resembles what we now think of as an RSS feed. One of the striking things about this series is just how prescient it seems on a number of occasions.
However, some of the sci-fi aspects aren’t quite here yet, but that doesn’t make them any less fascinating. The Transient movement is an obvious extrapolation on the current body modification movement (not to mention the penchant for sexual experimentation in the teens and twenties), and the “Foglet” community, a sentient people who have had their consciousness downloaded into molecular-sized machines that allow them to function forever takes it a step further.
Like many science fiction writers, Ellis uses the milieu to explore modern day issues. Issue eight (to my mind, the series’ best) follows the plight of a woman retrieved from cryogenic storage and set foot in the TRANSMET future. It functions as a scathing indictment of the way our society treats the elderly and those others perceived to have no value anymore. One issue takes a look at the proliferation of religions that have cropped up, and the phony way that each approaches trying to offer a fundamental truth to the weak and confused. If it weren’t for some of the deep oddities in Ellis and Robertson’s vision, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them and the tables you see sitting on the mall at a large university today. (It offers no small amount of delight to watch Jerusalem go berserk in the “temple” if you will and destroy the offenders.)
Issue nine explored the preservation of culture, extending that preservation far past the museum stage. It’s an intriguingly optimistic take from Ellis, although it is tempered by an incident that, unknown to the reader, will dramatically affect the final two years of the book, as Ellis quietly introduces the concept of “I-Pollen,” a substance that actually attaches itself to the brain’s synapses and downloads mass amounts of information.
Other interesting moments would be found as Ellis explored topics such as child prostitution, mental health care treatment for the poor, or when technologies such a “Air Jesus” shoes (which allow the wearer to walk on water…or the ceiling) or Spider’s weapon of choice, the bowel disruptor, were brought into play. (The bowel disruptor has many settings. My favorites: “prolapse” and “rectal volcano.”) But no matter how much the book delved into science fiction or the human condition, it was mainly founded on one basic tenet: politics.
”HE LOVES YOU AND HE WANTS YOU TO VOTE. HE’S NEVER HAD A BLOWJOB, AND HE DOESN’T OWN A TAPE RECORDER.”
I know what you’re thinking: That’s from Bush’s 2000 campaign against Gore, right?
Wrong. That’s the campaign slogan of the man who would be the ultimate villain of the series, Senator, and later President, Gary Callahan.
Callahan, known immediately as “The Smiler,” is a vile and wretched combination of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. From the timing of his first appearance, he was obviously a Blair homage (if you can call it that) but as the series wore on, it was clear that Ellis was filling him in with Bush’s traits fairly quickly.
We meet Callahan as a candidate running for the Oval Office, and in the beginning, there is almost the smallest of hopes that he could be the right person to remove the sitting President, a man Spider refers to only as ‘The Beast.” But it soon becomes clear that Callahan is a vicious and terrible man who only wants to become the President because he feels he is entitled to fuck with the lives of the little man. Faced with this evil, a gauntlet is thrown, and the last half of the series details Spider, Yelena, and Channon’s desperate attempts to bring down the Presidency of a loathsome, loathsome man.
A series is only as good as its villain in many cases, and Callahan is a great one. In one scene, he sits with his top advisors with a copy of the Constitution and asks where they can start cutting. He imposes draconian sanctions on the free speech of the media. He sends assassins after Spider, and any other person who can bear witness to his crimes, and conspires in other ways to destroy evidence that he might have done something wrong.
Does this sound even remotely familiar to anyone paying attention to our current national situation right now? Patriot Act and “Free Speech Zones” anyone? High level leaks about the identities of CIA agents? Anyone? Bueller? Frye?
Do you think that maybe, just maybe, a guy in Britain is paying closer attention to the news than we are?
”IT MAKES ME WANT TO SHIT ON GEORGE WASHINGTON’S DEAD CHEST.”
The back breaker in the series is that Spider’s race to take down The Smiler acquires a deadline, because I-Pollen causes brain damage that mimics Alzheimer’s Disease. That leaves him in a vulnerable position, and it also (as I mentioned above) sets Yelena on the path to being his true protégé in the struggle to get the truth told. Ellis has written no more heartbreaking, yet wonderful, line than Spider’s simple reaction to his diagnosis: “So we’ve got a deadline. We can do deadlines.” It not only defines and solidifies Spider as someone who can aspire to be a better man, it also turns away the possibility that he will live out his days in self-involvement and let Callahan run rampant on the backs of those who have trusted his quest for truth. The work, as always, will still come first.
Ellis was a writer primarily known for writing superhero comics for Marvel at the point when TRANSMETROPOLITAN first hit the stands. His co-creator, genius artist Darick Robertson had worked his way up the talent charts, starting with APACHE DICK, moving on to his creator-owned SPACE BEAVER, and finally settling into superhero work at marvel as well. Ellis had done some earlier creator owned work like LAZARUS CHURCHYARD, but it wasn’t readily available in print at the point TRANSMET was ready to debut.
And what a debut it was. DC had started a science fiction line that they called “Helix,” and the line as a whole was an absolute and utter flop. Only TRANSMET was showing signs of life, and so it was spared, moving over to the Vertigo line and allowing Ellis and Robertson to make a little bit of history.
At the beginning of this review, I told you a little bit about who I am, mimicking Spider’s style of writing more than just a tad. There was a reason for that.
I believe that right now, the world needs a Spider Jerusalem. I think we are a critical point, as mass media continues to conglomerate itself beyond recognition, for the erosion of truth. Read the papers. Watch the news. Explore. CBS sat on the Iraqi prison torture story for months. The New York Times spent months allowing itself to be spoon-fed wrong information by informants and never bothered to check it in depth. Clear Channel is deciding what you can hear on the majority of the airwaves in this country, and they’re owned by a fellow who just happens to be one of the best friends of our sitting President. The truth is slipping farther and farther away from us.
I think that’s why the presence of bloggers and other unaffiliated journalists continues to be so incredibly important. Someone has to be speaking who isn’t buried deep in Money’s pocket. I’m not saying that someone like Michael Moore is going to save us all (though I’d be interested to know if he’s ever read TRANSMET) but we need people with that kind of tenacity out there on our side.
So I told you who I was because this is my favorite series of graphic novels. Because Spider Jerusalem came alive for me as few other fictional characters ever have, drawn, prose, or otherwise. Because Spider Jerusalem was who I always wanted to be, and I never got there. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t aspire. Whether I am reviewing graphic novels here, or working on columns for my personal (non-comics) web page, or looking for freelance assignments from papers and magazines, I aspire. That’s the realest truth we can have.
Warren Ellis’ wonderful script and characters. Darick Robertson’s incredible, mind-blowing art and design. There is no objectivity when it comes to this one: Grade: A+
Should It Be A Movie?
I do not believe even remotely that a feature film of TRANSMETROPOLITAN could be made that would do justice to its setting, its complex characters, or its wide-ranging vision. Trying to encapsulate the entirety of 10 volumes of work into a two hour running time would be a disaster.
That said, I believe TRANSMET is ripe for adaptation. Ellis and Robertson created the book essentially in “seasons” with each twelve issues sort of rounding one out. So to my mind, a cable television adaptation would work splendidly, following the BBC/HBO model for going about it. Produce a cohesive set of episodes of maximum quality and take your time in getting back to it, again assuring the quality. But the key ideal must be for the production to capture the flavor of the book and its characters.
From the moment I first opened the book those many years ago, only one man has been the right guy to step into the role of Spider Jerusalem for me: Gary Oldman. Oldman possess not only the acting chops to pull off Spider’s lunatic ravings, penchant for violence, and general distaste for the world, but he also possess the appropriate sense of when to hold back and not go over the top. Oldman is also an excellent chameleon, able to wear a variety of accents and looks, which would allow him to play the American Jerusalem with effectiveness. Shave him bald, paint him with tattoos; trust me: Oldman is the man born for the role.
Supporting him, I’d like to see the amazing Maggie Gyllenhall as Yelena and Kathleen Robertson as Channon.
I suppose in a certain way, the idea of someone adapting TRANSMET seems sort of scary to a diehard fan like myself. You don’t want to see it get screwed up and ruin the opportunity to introduce others to it. It all comes down to seeing who options the property and if they’re trustable. The quality of the WB’s adaptation of Ellis' GLOBAL FREQUENCY will likely be the deciding factor.
I’ll be watching the trades.
Review materials may be sent to: Marc Mason, P.O. Box 26732, Tempe, AZ 85285. E-mail me from the links provided. You can also find me at The Comics Waiting Room. See you in seven.
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