Thursday, November 19, 2020

Run the Reviews: Transmetropolitan

I'm still not sure if this is a good call, honestly, as my second foray into this kind of piece writing. There's two things to address off the bat when it comes to this book. One, I've loved this book for a long, long time. It and I are old enough that I can bestow upon it a share in the "comics that got me back into the medium back in college" award, alongside classics I was introduced to at the time like WATCHMEN, THE SANDMAN, PREACHER, etc. And my fandom for this book has run so long that I already co-wrote something similar to this with a former Ain't It Cool News cohort, Vroom Socko, over a (motherfucking) decade ago, so feel free to check that out while at it. As for the second thing, unfortunately, my "election year bastardry preparation" reread that I usually do of this book came a couple months ago, right in the middle of a comics-wide "speaking out" movement where a lot of mostly female creators were calling out creators for sexual harassment, grooming, just all manner of actions ranging from "disgusting" to "fucking abhorrent." For those who happen to not know about this and what I means here, TRANSMETROPOLITAN scribe Warren Ellis was arguably most prominent name in the slew of those called out during that dark time for the comic book industry. And, well, fuck him. We don't seem to know how deep the actions actually go so I'm not really going to call for jail time or anything like that because I don't think we officially know if what happened with him and the women he manipulated crossed legal lines, but it's more than apparent he manipulated women in MULTITUDES and that's scummy enough in its own right even if a law wasn't broken. I'll let the community at large and the companies that do the hiring decide how deep into a hole the man's career should be tossed and buried, but I do openly admit that his body of work was truthfully one of my favorite in any medium between books like this, PLANETARY, NEXTWAVE, etc and I'm here to say "fuck that guy." 

So, yeah, I'm not sure if writing a piece about a seminal work of calling out people for the bastards they are by a man who spent years being his own level of bastard behind the scenes is a "good look" or not. I legitimately don't and if it's a bad place to be I'll just delete everything and move onto the next piece, or I'll edit this to leave behind a public "fuck that guy" declaration in place for Ellis. But, given the new light shone on this book reading it with all that in the air and also reading it in a world where America is getting its first giant heaping helping of authoritarianism as we're wrestling with a narcissist President whose desire to be considered "strong" is only exceeded by his greed, well, I decided to give this a go. Again, I don't mean any disrespect to those affected by his actions, but as a commentary on just exactly the current status of America as we hit the final lap on this Presidential Election and, quite frankly, possibly American democracy in general, this book does mean a lot as a commentary piece to a large amount of people, myself included. Also, co-creator Darick Robertson by all accounts seems to be a stand up guy and it would be a shame if he and his contribution to this seminal piece of fiction were also buried in the ramifications of a former coworker considering how immeasurable his efforts was to making this Cyberpunk story of both the underbelly of society and politics come to life. So, without any more tentativeness and further ado...

                             Gonzo journalist 'Transmetropolitan' a hero - nj.com

The sole survivor of the ill-fated "Helix" imprint at DC Comics, TRANSMETROPOLITAN was a fire in the belly of a comic book industry that grew fat off a steady diet of crossovers, relaunches, and spinoffs in the 1990's. As I've noted before in these pieces, I was just coming back to the party at the turn of the century after all those factors I mentioned last sentence drove me away screaming for a few years and into the welcoming arms of Magic: the Gathering. TRANSMETROPOLITAN, though, was a kick in the teeth to an industry dominated by "Clone Sagas" and "Heroes Reborn" and whatever stupid half-hearted crossover DC was pulling out of their butts year to compete (Genesis, apparently, a quick search found out for me). Even with DC's Vertigo imprint still carrying the banner for comics that were harder edged and didn't get bogged down in such wallet drowning affairs, comic books were on the back end of a bubble that had just gone "kapop!" from these indulgences and was finding itself in a wild new frontier where all of a sudden books were selling literal fractions of what they were a few years earlier. Not only did this create a climate where a book like TRANSMET - which was selling numbers that were sketchy even with lowered expectations - could survive because of lowered expectations, but the landscape was getting a little more daring in general. Vertigo was starting to broaden its horizons with books like 100 BULLETS and adopting TRANMET, Jim Lee's Wildstorm line from Image was starting to reinvent itself at DC as an imprint with books like THE AUTHORITY and WILDCATS 3.0, and Image was starting to lay the groundwork to getting back to its being a place to launch creators and their books, like it did with Brian Michael Bendis and POWERS at this time. Comic books in general needed to do a little soul-searching after spending most of the decade of the 90's cranking out anything they thought could make a buck in the speculation era, and now that everything had crashed and burned, a comic book featuring a foul-mouthed ex-journalist with more drugs in him than every 80's hair metal band combined was as good a mouthpiece as any. 

                                TRANSMETROPOLITAN BOOK ONE | DC

Spider Jerusalem is what you get if you made a bullet sentient and it talked with a constant snarl. After alienating himself from society up a goddamn mountain because political journalism made him too popular - so you can tell this is a work of high fiction with that alone - and too overwhelmed by the attention to do his job anymore, Jerusalem is brought back to the harsh reality that is life in "The City" when a former publisher lets him know he owes them more books or his life basically. Spider returns to find The City even more bugfuck insane than when he left it and hooks up with his former editor, Mitchell Royce, and immediately winds up in the middle of what would be called the "Transient Succession Movement," where a group of humans slowly exchanging their DNA with that of aliens are vying to claim their own section of The City to live within. This movement is led by a lowly pusher named Fred Christ that Spider knew from his previous life in The City and politics and therefore knows how doomed is is to end in misery and pain because of how much a conniving scumbag Fred exists to be. There is also a Presidential election primary afoot, to add to the chaos.

Right off the bat TRANSMETROPOLITAN grabs you by the balls and doesn't let its grip loose. Look at what I briefly discussed up there and I'll expand upon some of it. The very first story arc of this series involves a very violent and always heavily armed journalist who came back to his old stomping grounds and immediately gets involved in an inter-species war, gets beat down by the cops for his efforts, and finds himself living in a megacity where more than ever the haves are living in posh towers with the best views in the heart of the city, and everyone else is left to scavenge in the gutters for leftover tech, supplies, anything they can scrabble up to survive. Substitute "inter-species war" for any of the ones plaguing current-day America - the culture war of science belief, immigration stances, etc - and how do you not just think, "oh yeah, that seems familiar." Yes, that's the sign of any good piece of dystopian cyberpunk, that no matter how deep into the far, weird future it occurs the material is easily transposable over what current society looks like and, uh, yup. That's the point. TRANSMETROPOLITAN may be brutal, it may be vulgar and overly sexualized and, uh, sometimes cannibalistic but even with all that craziness going on you can overlay it on the current day United States, especially motherfucking 2020 US of A, and easily go "oh, man, this material is twenty years old? How did they get it so right?!?"

Quite frankly they - they being Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson and inker Rodney Ramos - were ahead of the curve because they were about as cynical about society as they could be; and twenty years on it looks like they didn't go far enough. I'm going to be blunt for the rest of this paragraph. I'm working on this piece right now as this current Presidential election has entered another nailbiter because... reasons. As I type this a quarter million of my fellow Americans are dead due to a virus that ravaged the world but decimated the "strongest nation" on it comparatively. The past week I've been inundated with images of people with guns strong-arming polling places and chasing down campaign buses. There's been reports of African refugees being tortured in ICE centers to renounce their claims of asylum. A "militia" plotted to kidnap the Governor of their state because they didn't like the protocols she put in place to stop the spread of the virus I mentioned a couple sentences back. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Getting back to TRANSMET, I'll go to the next laundry list that the "work of fiction" took on. Not only does Spider get instantly involved in a major species rights "war" out the gate, he's constantly barraged by daily human rights violations that are as embarrassing considering the overall wealth of The City and they are fatal to those living in the disenfranchised areas. Viruses that humanity had eliminated generations ago are ravaging the slums. History is being preserved in "reservations" where time periods are recreated for people to be physiologically dialed back to live in in order to preserve them because otherwise no one would bother to remember them. Basically, history can only be saved by people volunteering to relive it because no one can be fucked to remember it in any other circumstance. There's living breathing examples of history sitting there for people to learn from and they're all but abandoned but for the people that run them because "they're important." Back in 1997, cell phones were basically things the size of a canteen that Zack Morris cartoonishly played with on Saturday morning programming, not the computer in a pocket they are today, and yet Ellis and Robertson slammed home not just how these devices would be so ubiquitous, but also how they would wind up as instruments used basically for ads, cultish celebrity worship, misinformation, and more ads. When Spider finally does start covering the election, he goes to see a rally for the incumbent President that is essentially a bunch of jacked up white males hooting and hollering at "their guy," who was nicknamed "the Beast" by Spider and is escorted out to stage by pinup models and mainly talks about stamping out "the weak." Seeing as I still every fucking week have to deal with the memory of the news showing frothing at the mouth white men with torches shouting "the Jews will not replace us!" just a year into the current, real life Presidential administration, re-experiencing "The Beast" in all his glory in the pages of this work has never hit harder. I mean, come on, just look at this frame that's now twenty-two years old and look at literally any footage from Charlottesville just three ago...

                                   Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard by Warren Ellis

TRANSMETROPOLITAN succeeds because not a single punch is pulled in its tone and as it does something American politics has been sorely lacking for decades until our backs were absolutely against the wall in the face of institutional collapse; it works its way from the streets up. Spider Jerusalem is a bastard. He is just as likely to punch you as he is to glance at you twice, but if he thinks you're a scammer he will destroy you and if he thinks you're the scammed he will both berate you for your indifference or complacency and then roll up his sleeves to verbally and physically rip your oppressor's throat out. He's a being of pure anger whose bile spatters on everyone in some way, but he knows that at the end of the day it needs to be directed at those with the power. It makes him a character with a weird charisma you can't deny the power of; he can be tiring in just how much energy he expels in railing against everyone in some manner, but he punches up significantly more than he does down. 

And what really helps the overall tone of this book are the cast around Spider; mainly his two "filthy assistants" in the form of Channon Yarrow, a stripper at the club the "Transient Riots" started at who was inspired somewhat by what Spider did there, Yelena Rossini, the "niece" of Spider's editor, Mitch, who turns out to just be a trust fund kid with a real knack for politics, and then Mitch himself, who quietly aids Spider throughout the book and behind his hardened veneer of "I just want my columns." One, let me point out right now, we PROBABLY should have known something was up with Warren Ellis personally when his biggest work featured a man who pals around with two significantly younger women, one of which was a stripper, the other of which he ends up sleeping with first by drunken accident, then regularly by the end of the series. Y'know, chances are we missed something about what was driving his scripting there. But! But, those characters are fundamental as to why this book works because they take the snarl out of Spider at the perfect times. They always know how to take the piss out of him whenever he's on his high horse, they're always (mostly) there when his inhuman rage eventually overcomes him and makes him "mortal" and wears him down. What Spider's biggest secret is is that down at his core he's a sad, lonely, disenfranchised human who grew up with a hard on to spit on the establishment, but that empty core has never went away. 

Beyond that, to actually break down the events of the book and not just the tone of it, it's an overall engaging storyline that is really just a build up of a "titanic" showdown between the highest power in the land, the President of the United States of America, and Spider himself. Our villain is Gary Callahan, nicknamed "The Smiler," who ends up being the out of nowhere upstart who takes down The Beast by being an even dirtier political operator than him. Now, over the years it always seemed to me like everyone wanted to likened The Beast to Richard Nixon because he was just every corrupt indulgence of politics that dumped on poor people every chance he could personified. Which, okay, that's fair. But the Beast was also a walking pile of toxic masculinity. He was a pile of arrogant and always cocksure and brusque about everything. Nixon was a sweaty piece of public anxiety that was a non-factor on the big stage in 1964 and didn't hit it big until he worked behind the curtain and then cozied up to Barry Goldwater's brand of politics which was, essentially, "hey, are we sure we want black people to vote?" Nixon was way too much of a mechanisms animal to be a good comparison for the Beast for me, who brute-forced and "common-manned" his way to victories fueled by angry people who didn't know anything about politics except who they hated. It's fair to say, presently, that I think our true comp for The Beast came significantly after Nixon and rode in on a gold toilet and a pile of his racist father's money while convincing right-leaning America he was "just like them."

                                Comics Presidents Worth Watching Out For | Magnett Academy

Callahan always felt way more Nixonish to me because how much he was more well, smiley and smarmy in the public eye and then always toiling away in the Oval Office, designing ways to use and bend the system to destroy people. Callahan starts off as quiet and reserved in his first encounter with Spider when Spider really starts hitting the election trail for his column, but then quickly lets the veneer slip a bit to one of disdain for people in general. Callahan makes it pretty clear that, unlike the Beast who enjoys being president for the power and the crowds, he wants to be president because he gets to fuck with people. And once he makes it to that high office, despite Spider's efforts, he uses every bit of prestige the position presents him with to make life hell for the "rabble" on the streets that champion Spider. He has always felt those disenfranchised masses were just fodder to be churned through to get to power he always assumed he rightfully deserved and makes that abundantly clear once he is their President.

Again, the main story that is the conflict between Spider and the Smiler is a good back and forth between a stalwart of truth and justice - just, y'know, with an obscene drug problem and hatred of everyone - and a power hungry despot with the power of the pen. But what really makes this comic book sing and read as such an amazing romp through a future that looks like the most psychedelic anime you've ever watched but with triple the LSD dosage is the adventures of Spider and his filthy assistants. In between fits of dodging whatever physical deterrents Callahan throws at them and grinding the pavement for proof of his power abuses, it's those harrowing or just plain surreal encounters on the streets of The City that are the heart of this book. Tales like the one where Spider takes Channon to a ceremony where she watches her ex-boyfriend convert himself to a "foglet," which is basically a cloud of floating nannites with his consciousness uploaded into them. There's the "Reservations" I mentioned earlier. There's a particularly devastating one-shot issue called "Business" where Spider finds himself watching a bunch of orphanage kids prostitute themselves out because that's simply how they survive. And then in another he's going "monstering" with his Filthy Assistants and essentially spending a week terrorizing a local politician who Spider knew was as a big a hypocritical scumbag as the job could make and he felt like destroying him because he could. There's even an issue where all Spider does is watch television all day and it's one of the most surreal things I've witnessed between the covers of a comic book. 

Between all the side stories and the main event game of cat-and-mouse that Spider plays with the Smiler, TRANSMETROPOLITAN is many things, from absurd, to laugh out loud hilarious, to absolutely heart wrenching and it is always, ALWAYS cranked to eleven on rage. And it's never dull, though it could be oft times exhausting and/or over-indulgent; but that was always the point and I feel why Ellis and Robertson made the book so relentless. Politics and life are relentless but they're important and cannot be ignored, otherwise the true bastards will triumph. Ellis would always take that energy and then ramp up the drama at just the right times in places so that the book was a work of perpetual motion of emotion and plot.  Like, for example, when at the midway point of the run Callahan creates the idea of the "D-notice," which is essentially a censorship order that makes journalistic pieces like Spider's have to run through government approval first for content. It's the equivalent of Bond villain cartoonishness given the arena the story plays in, but it works because it gives a weird bit of respite from all the raw emotion most of the street-level material exudes. And, of course, the highest drama comes when we find in the final stretch of the book that incidents of being exposed to banned and experimental tech has mucked with Spider's neural pathways enough that he most likely will find himself with a case of cognitive degeneration so extreme he may as well expect to become a vegetable. Again, it's a little on the nose as an ironic turn of events to happen to our dauntless lead whose biggest weapon is his cunning and wit, but in how it shifts the focus of the book when it needs to, it works admirably for added tension. 

And now, to start bringing this thing to a close, let's talk about one thing that goes beyond "admirable" to a point I would say it's one of the greatest exhibitions of its type in all of comic book history; let's talk about Darick Robertson's artwork on this series.

              Darick Robertson

Darick Robertson, like any top tier artist in the medium (and that all images used here in this piece are credited to, natch), was the lifeblood of this series. I simply don't think TRANSMETROPOLITAN exists as the classic it is without his pencil work gracing its pages. Now, I'm not saying this to underpin Warren Ellis' scripting because he's the (deserved) whipping boy of an ugly time in the comic book industry. His acerbic wit and mad energy that he channeled through his career and especially this work within it literally changed the business in the late 90's/early 2000's and inspired many a career. The revelation of his transgressions hurt because he was just that beloved for his body of work. But Robertson's pencils here are literally the distillation of everything that makes this book memorable. How he channeled all that raw emotion into in the somewhat "cartoonish" figures and rendition of future society he did is just an astounding. The pure imagination behind every detail and how he rendered this just batshit insane world is beyond me. 

Straight up, every page in this series is a visual feast. Any time Spider Jerusalem sets foot onto the street we really are just taking a trip inside Robertson's head. Every panel has its own story he wants to tell on top of the main plot point. There's always something going on behind the action revolving around Spider. In any given panel someone is falling into love or lust, or enacting some fit of rage, or there's just a weird bit of drug-addled depravity occurring amongst the populace of The City. Whether Spider is directly influencing these events or grumbling past it on his way to the next story doesn't matter; they're there and are the lifeblood of this book and The City. Robertson's attention to detail is staggering. His channeling of Ellis' raw energy into the script and then the pure emotion he packed into every line on top of it makes this one of the best art jobs ever to exist in comic books, full stop. This world that he and Ellis created together is really just the world Ellis gestated through cigarettes and rage and that Robertson carried to term, birthed, and then raised on even more nicotine and whiskey. Oh, and Rodney Ramos on inking and Nathan Eyring on colors were there to slap this bastard kid on the ass and start it up a college fund. Like I said, I know the world of comic book artists is a talented one, but I don't think there's very many that do the work that Roberson did here to make this insane cyberpunk future come together. 

Right now I'm wrapping this thing up two weeks plus after the election. I am just now starting to get a sleep schedule back in order because I lost an entire week of it staying up near twenty-four hours at a time watching coverage of that pivotal event in American politics. For the past four years I've watched police willy-nilly decide protestors were target practice for tear gas canisters, I've read stories like how not only have we been detaining asylum seekers at our borders indefinitely, we've separated children from their parents, doctors have performed hysterectomies without permission on some of the women being detailed. White supremacy has been on a dramatic rise for the past few years because they've been enabled to and encouraged to by those in political power. The virus I mentioned earlier in this has been so politicized that half the country laughs and/or screams at the idea of its mere existence and denies the reality of it to the point where it is now daily claiming the lives of over a thousand Americans and infecting 100,000-plus.  A FUCKING 100,000 PEOPLE ARE BEING INFECTED BY A HIGHLY INFECTIOUS DISEASE A DAY AND IT'S A MOTHERFUCKING POLITICAL ISSUE SOMEHOW!! This is the state of politics when bastards are allowed to thrive unabated in that ecosystem and they rally and raise a mob to enable them. TRANSMETROPOLITAN made this lesson abundantly clear over two decades ago and yet even the most cynical of us still weren't as ready for it as we should have been when this mob rule of ignorance and hate finally came to power and held on to it for way too long. And that was still just the tip of the iceberg.

Shrewd, "the glass is not only half empty but I'm pretty sure that's laced with cyanide" political followers like myself know this is just a brief respite from true fascism. Like, yeah, for the next four years we get to (most likely) breathe easily in knowing our government won't be treating refugees like fucking science experiments and unwanted dogs, but those of use raised completely on a steady diet of Neoliberalism don't expect the ills that led the mob to turn as hate-filled as they did to see any real treatment to the system to stop the bleeding. There's no reason to hope that our healthcare system that is exorbitantly the most expensive in the world and provides a mediocre at best level of access to care will improve. There's no reason to believe we won't continue to be the most indebted nation in the world between that healthcare system and our educational one. There's no reason to believe that the moral rot at the core of our society will go away because our society has very much done nothing but pit us against each other for wages that have stagnated for near a half century and jobs that provide no security in-and-of themselves and for retirement. Yes, we're not going to watch our President bumble over himself to slyly pat White Supremacist groups on the back for their support, but the crumbling structure of society that made the world of TRANSMETROPOLITAN and the "New Scum" within The City's limits the focal point of the work is more apparent than ever as a reflection of real world politics. I've breathed a little easier through the lack of sleep for two weeks now but I know the nightmare is far from over because the worst instincts of humans and worse yet, AMERICANS, have been activated and allowed to take root in the heart of the most powerful nation on Earth.

Again, works of dystopian cyberpunk realities to come are often hailed as successes as the years move on and they become more and more relevant as a mirror being held up to society. TRANSMETROPOLITAN is pretty much the best example of this to ever exist in the world of comic books and, while other real world events within the comic book have marred its reputation a little, its relevance has only strengthened as the worlds of global politics and technology have advanced around it. The narrative may not have always been perfect (there's a little bit of an oopsie about the timing of a major plot point late in the story) and yeah, there were some tropes in here like a cartoonishly vile main villain, the hero is some how the most curmudgeonly person to exist and yet he still commands ungodly amounts of loyalty from those around him, and some male wish fulfillment, but the book does genuinely have the heart, energy, reverence, irreverence, and mad fits of creativity that make any work of fiction a classic. It's one of the best comic books ever written. It just is and nothing is going to change that and nothing has changed that even if we are soured on the circumstances around the work after this hell year known as 2020. The creativity and originality that went into crafting this comic book was off the charts and with each full cycle of the Earth around the Sun it just means that much more and more from the biting social commentary it unleashed. From now on this comic will always hurt to read a bit from the standpoint of both Ellis' antics and just how painfully true to life the material within came to life, but it still should be both read and hail for the cornerstone work of comic book and cyberpunk fiction that it is in spite of all that. There's probably nothing more 2020 than one of the most pivotal parallels to the year in the comic book medium also wrestling with being problematic in its own way but, yeah, there it is and I don't know what to say about it anymore so I'm going to shut up now several thousand words into this piece. Form and stand by your own opinions about for sure and don't let me change your mind on how to perceive the work from the outside, but inside those pages it deserves all the credit in the world, even if the "Fuckhead" inside its pages is way more trustworthy than his creator outside of them.