The First Few Issues: Early Writings of the Giant Box of Comics

(This is the last of my old writings that I've found so far, so probably the last of the First Few Issues until I find something I wrote in crayon about my old Doctor Who Weekly magazines.)

Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson
Overview and review of issues #28 - 30, by Tom Miller
Rating: 5/5 

The first thing you ought to know is that I'm not going to give anything away here. Not a thing. I hate reading reviews that tell you the entire plot of the (insert medium here ) that you're interested in, thus negating any reason to bother with it. That's what I'm going to try to do: give you a reason to bother with Transmetropolitan.

What you should know: Transmet has been going for 30 issues, 12 under the Helix imprint, and the rest in Vertigo. At the outset we meet Spider Jerusalem, a journalist of the near future and apparently some great fame. He is called back from a self-imposed exile on a mountain under threat of contractual breach, just the first thing to piss him off. And therein lies the key to Transmet. Things piss Spider off. Lots of things. However, unlike the majority of human beings, he does not let them slide off his back like water on a duck.
He says all the things you ever wished you could say, or thought of an hour after the fact, or were just too damned polite to utter aloud. And he says them better than you or I ever could. And he says them to all the people who've ever deserved it. The police, the government, the fanatically religious and just plain idiots. Along the way he manages to step on toes he perhaps shouldn't have, the ramifications of which are just now being felt. The early issues are collected in trade format. Back on the Street (issues #1 - 3) chronicles
a race riot in the city. Lust for Life (issues #4 - 12) is a series of stand-alones and one short multi-parter and includes my personal favourite issue, in which Spider spends the whole day watching television. Year of the Bastard (issues #13 - 18, Winter's Edge 2 story) is the beginning of a particularly ugly presidential campaign, and contains some truly chilling sequences. These books are followed by the six-part "The New Scum," the
ending(?) to the presidential arc, and a series of stand-alones that lead to .....

Lonely City: This story arc stands out for me as the best of 1999. I kid you not. I read a lot of comics, too many perhaps. When I finished issue #30, the last part of the story, I had chills. The same goes for the previous two issues. #28 makes a perfect jumping-on point for a new reader as we are given brief introductions of the main players in the series. It shifts into high gear with the most savage beating this side of Preacher that explodes into another race-related story. Determined to find out why the police insist on covering up this crime, Spider and his assistants harass officers of the law and attend volatile demonstrations. Anyone familiar with Ellis' writing will understand what kind of witty banter this involves. And it's always a treat to see Spider pull out the old Bowel Disrupter. The arc in general is perhaps not quite as verbose as the majority of Transmet, and has plenty of action and intrigue, another reason it makes such a good place for a new reader to start. "Lonely City" is an overview itself, a taste of things that have been and things to come, a brief glimpse into the world of Spider Jerusalem and the madness that surrounds him.

A quick word on the art. In Vertigo books you can generally count on some weird, pseudo-surreal art in a story that sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense. And that's what we like about Vertigo, but it's not so in Transmet. Darrick Robertson's art is deceptively simple. The characters look like comic-book characters, in a style that could easily fit into The Flash or JLA. My opinion is that Robertson's true genius lies in his backgrounds. I spend hours (seriously) pouring over his city shots,just to see what he's crammed onto the
billboards and ads. Amazing.

So now you're thinking "Damn, if I'd wanted to read an essay, I'd have stayed in school," but fear not, I'm done. If you're a fan of Warren Ellis and you're not reading this book, you should be, if only so you can gain a little more insight into the cool character that Jack Carter transformed into in Planetary #7. If you're not a fan, read the book anyway. It ranks as one of the most thought-provoking, touching and hilarious comics this addict has ever read.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 173: X-Calibre #1, March 1995

It is interesting to watch this series unfold from the vantage point of Magneto's master plan. I have to applaud the characterization of the X-Men's leader by all of the writers and artists involved. They really have captured something fundamental about this character, something that is present in all of his incarnations. Arrogance, perhaps? But in service of the greater good. When suggesting epic Magneto stories, there are certain ones that are always brought up, the trial in Uncanny X-Men #200, or his tenure in the Xavier School as Xorn during Grant Morrison's New X-Men, but I think the Age of Apocalypse crossover is really a story about Magneto and the kinds of decisions that someone of his caliber (see what I did there?) is expected to make.

Today's comic represents an interesting moment for this crossover, because it is scripted by one of the second (or is it third) wave of British writers to have made a huge impact on North American comics. Warren Ellis is definitely amongst my favourite writers, though his propensity for falling back on a particular kind of characterization and dialogue more and more puts him, at least to my mind, in the same kind of place as Jack Kirby's archaic cleaving to outdated slang in order to characterize the youth. I stopped reading Ellis for a long while because it seemed to me that, after Transmetropolitan, every character he wrote was some derivative of Spider Jerusalem. That's probably an unfair thing to say (mostly), but that's how it seemed. It could very well be that after Transmet, I just needed a break from Ellis, as that series was very purely him.

Of course, X-Calibre comes before Transmet, and still there's shades of Spider. Nightcrawler is not a nice guy in this comic. There's a text piece at the end of each of the first issues of the mini-series that asks how each hero or villain might turn out in this world without Xavier, whether or not they would retain their roles from the prime timeline. Nightcrawler certainly has not, and his transformation is deftly handled by Ellis and Lashley. The same goes for the monk Cain, this world's take on Juggernaut. While many of the changes are, as with the whole crossover, due to the absence of Charles Xavier, these interesting reinterpretations beg us to consider what happened in each of these characters' lives to engender such a switch in personality. Actually, I can see Nightcrawler being far more angry and violent if he was not rescued by Professor X, but what made Juggernaut into a monk? I don't know if I'll get the answers I seek, but I can imagine.

My last thought for today is a comparative one. There's a reason Ellis is known as one of the better comics writers of the last couple of decades. His writing smacks of a certain attention to craft and detail, of the importance given to words as language itself, rather than simply as a vehicle for conveying narrative. It's interesting to be able to make this kind of comparison in such a tightly-knit crossover. One can absolutely see what it is that defines a good writer and what defines a great one. I think that I'll try paying attention to the artists in the same way. Generation Next's Chris Bachalo is definitely a great artist. What is it that separates him from someone like Lashley, on X-Calibre, whose art is good, but somehow lacking? I'll think more on this. See you tomorrow.