- This is a reprint of a story I wrote for 411mania over a decade ago that isn’t on the site anymore.
Transmetropolitan.
Wow.
Yeah, this has been out for a while, but I finally got around to starting it last month. I tried to start it a few years ago, but for some reason, I couldn’t really get into the first trade. I don’t know why, because this time around, I just kind of flew through it. It took me about three weeks to read the first five trades in the series. Then I grabbed the last five, and I read them in just under three days.
Damn, this was an amazing story.
Basically, the hero of Transmetropolitan is Spider Jerusalem, a journalist patterned slightly after Hunter S. Thompson, the famous gonzo journalist. If you don’t know who Thompson is, he’s the guy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was based on. If you have never heard of Thompson or seen Fear and Loathing, I can’t help you.
Anyway, I say Spider is based on Hunter, but this is the most original story I’ve read in a long time. We start off after a lot has already happened. Spider is the most (in)famous journalist in The City because he attacked the President of the United States (The Beast) while the Beast was running for office, and people loved him for it. He gets so famous that he picks up a book deal, writes the first book, gets even more famous, and hates it.
Spider can’t write unless he’s hated, so he leaves The City for The Mountain, where he basically kills anyone who tries to bother him. Sadly, he gets a phone call from his book publishers, who remind him he still owes them two more books, and he realizes he has to return to The City. It’s the only place he can write, because that’s where his inspiration lies.
With that setup, we get the start of the final giant adventure of Spider Jerusalem’s life. Spider is the most interesting person in the book, but we see the whole world through his eyes. The things we see include foglets (people who download their minds into a swarm of nanobots to avoid ever dying), new surgical enhancements that let you become an animal or an alien, injections that cure any cancer, and more.
The first year of the series focuses on introducing us to the world. It’s also where we meet his Filthy Assistants, who work with him throughout. The first is Channon, a former stripper who starts out as his first assistant, quits, then comes back as a bodyguard. The second is Yelena, the daughter of a rich philanthropist, who later becomes an ally. It’s through the Filthy Assistants that we really see Spider himself. We also meet Royce, the editor of The Word, the newspaper that happily hires Spider to write for them again.
The first story Spider writes covers a rebellion, when the police charge into a district of Transients (people who splice their genes with aliens to become half-breeds and get shoved into the worst neighborhood in The City). When the police start murdering the Transients, Spider sits on a nearby rooftop and writes the story of what’s happening. He’s the only journalist in the area, and his story goes out live, which forces the police to stop and pull out. It gets him a brutal beating from the police and sets up their rough relationship from here on out.
Things really pick up in the second year, when the story takes shape, and a plot develops that carries us to the end (60 issues, 10 trades). It centers on a new presidential candidate called The Smiler. Spider supports him over The Beast until he learns the truth: The Beast is an evil man, but at least he has morals, while The Smiler hates everyone and only wants the presidency so he can hurt the whole country. Spider warns everyone about him, but it doesn’t matter. After The Smiler has his top assistant Vita Severn (someone Spider likes a lot) murdered, the people vote for The Smiler by a wide margin because they feel bad about Vita’s death.
This is when The Smiler promises to ruin Spider’s life, and that promise runs all the way to the end of the series. It includes “D-Notices,” which censor the media so any news that makes the government look bad gets buried. The D-Notices are meant to shut Spider up, but he finds a new outlet called The Hole, a pirate newspaper that goes out over the feeds. Along the way, the government starts slaughtering innocent people for the crime of being poor and runs roughshod over anyone in its way. When the President orders the murder of everyone Spider has interviewed to crack the story open, Spider realizes he has one last mission: bring The Smiler down.
The ending is perfect and bittersweet. This is a comic book series made for adults, and it’s just as great as any novel you could read. People have tried to turn it into a movie, and Patrick Stewart actually wanted to play Spider a couple of decades ago, but things dragged on, and he got too old. Honestly, the best way to make this would be a TV show on HBO or a cable network, but the production cost would be way too high for a story this niche.
I would kill to see it as a TV show, but it won’t ever get made. Luckily, we have the comics, one of the best series of all time. If you haven’t read Transmetropolitan, you need to read it. Now.