sawyl | Back on the Street

In honour of the US elections, I've decided to re-read Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis and Darick Robinson's masterpiece of politics, journalism, futurology, filth and fury, starting with Back on the Street.

Threatened with a lawsuit by his publishers, Spider Jerusalem reluctantly decides to come down from the Mountain and return to the City, the only place where he can write. In order to cover himself while he works on the two books his contract demands — one on politics, one on a subject of his choice — he finesses a job as a columnist out of his old friend Royce, who just happens to have risen to the dizzying heights of city editor for The Word.

While casting around for a subject for his first column, Spider learns of a plan by the human-alien hybrid Transient community to declare independence for the Angels 8 district. Trading on an old relationship with Transient leader Fred Christ — a former band manager turned alien love messiah — Spider pokes around and asks questions, concluding that the Transients aren't serious about their demands and will back down when the City authorities gets fed up and threaten violence.

When the City launches a crackdown on Angels 8, Spider smells a rat and rushes down to the district to document the police brutality. As the only journalist able to make it into the district, he takes up residence on the roof of a strip club and beams his text back to Royce at the The Word ready for the next edition. Never one to miss a trick, Royce arranges for Spider's word to be distributed out live throughout the City, triggering enough outrage to force Civic Centre to recall the police and returns Spider Jerusalem to peak of his journalistic fame.

Even if it isn't the best book in the sequence — I prefer the stories that concentrate on spat with the Smiler — Back on the Street launches the series rather well and gives a good feel for the weird future world of the City. A place where you can decide to hybridise your DNA with an alien. Where your semi-intelligent household appliances can be supplied by the mafia. And on drugs. And where two headed gecko eating cats are a possibility. Where you can buy Ebola Cola, the soft drink that eats you, and where monkey burgers and caribou eyes are the take out food of choice. And where the written word has power and a journalist can be worshiped as a God.

Like I said: weird.

And all of which weirdness Robertson manages to capture almost perfectly. From the squalor of Spider's mountain home — is it just me or does the exiled Jerusalem look like an untidy version of Alan Moore? — to the chaos of the streets, the art really goes the extra mile to pull in the strange details of life in crazed future where vast gaps exist between the rich and poor, and where almost anything is possible.

The book also does a decent job of setting up Spider as a character. We learn that for all his cynicism and casual violence, he really does care about people and particularly what happens to those who've been excluded and marginalised; his people, the New Scum, as the Smiler latter calls them. And while he's better with his filthy assistants to act as Watsonian foils to his crazed and rambling Holmes, he still pretty good fun on his own, baying out his fury like some sort of albino shouting gorilla. Except with less hair. And more tattoos.