Transmetropolitan

Thanks to my student Kelly I’m four issues deep into Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s (very) graphic novel Transmetropolitan. For those not in the know, it’s a neo-neuromantic cyberpunk romp through a superdense urban core, with the Hunter Thomposoneqse journalist Spider Jerusalem at the center of it all, gonzoing his way through the muck and scum and the info-trash (female assistants and two-headed chain-smoking cat in tow). It’s also outrageous, dripping with too many lines too funny to pick one to quote here, and weaponry such as the ever popular bowel disruptor (three settings: loose, watery, and prolapse). Well, okay, having mentioned that, here’s one line; quoth Spider: “There was a time when I liked a good riot. Put on some heavy old street cloths that could stand a bit of sidewalk scraping, infect myself with something good and contagious, then go out and stamp on some cops. It was great, being nine years old.” But I digress. The series is an object lesson in the post-human, particularly apropos since we’re reading Kate Hayles and Haraway in my grad class tomorrow night. It’s also a glimpse of what cyberpunk looks like when the dominant strain is visual culture rather than information culture. Transmet’s a world of information bombs and nano-memes, to be sure, but it’s also, and more obviously, a world of screens and mirrors. Over and over images calcify into reality, as in the two issues that focus on Presidential politics—in this future a primordial struggle between rival candidates named the Beast and the Smiler. It’s the latter who wins out, his Bobby Kennedyesque choppers gleaming out at us from countless iterations of his image, the very vision of some whitelight Colgate™ hell. Transmet’s the society of the spectacle writ large, and Spider sees (and records) it all through the shades of his signature green and rose colored lenses—which I want.