TRANSMETROPOLITAN is giving regular artist Darick Robertson a
chance to catch up, with a jam issue. The basic idea is that
Spider is watching bits of TV about himself, or dreaming about
his relationship with his audience. Thus, it's about how other
people perceive Spider, and makes the use of some disparate
guest artists for each segment entirely appropriate. Clever,
huh?
Basically, you've got your three TV sections which are all
hopeless travesties of Transmetropolitan, and then you've got
your dream scenes which are how Spider wants to be seen and
how he's starting to realise he actually is. And (aside from
the last one which is deliberately grim and paranoid) they're
hilarious. Well, they are if you know the series, at any rate.
I've no idea whether they're funny to a total newcomer. But
if you've even read one issue of the series, you should get it.
On the other hand, part of the point seems to be to give a kick
up the ass to those parts of the audience who've read large
chunks of the series and still haven't got it. "Magical
Truthsaying Bastard Spidey" (Transmetropolitan as cartoon,
reduced to sloganeering and gratuitous offensiveness) and "From
The Mountain To The City" (Spider's life story as TV movie, with
an absurdly heroic rewrite of the Angels 8 story) both seem
intended in part to take the piss out of people who thought
that was what they were reading to begin with.
They're both hilarious, of course - the cartoon with its absurd
Truth Bombs, and the movie with Kieron Dwyer's heroically
proportioned Spider ("What are you writing?" "I'm telling them
that it's... WRONG!"). The pornography sequence by Bryan Hitch
doesn't seem to making any particular point, to be honest, but
it's still ridiculously entertaining. Hitch doesn't do comedy
nearly enough, judging from this. Dick Stone, indeed.
The dreams are a bit stranger. Spider's revenge fantasy, drawn
by Frank Quitely, has him in giant form taking revenge on
everyone who's wronged him in the course of the series. This,
of course, is where he'd like to be. The remaining dream, in
which his audience point out to him that they've never read
any of his columns and just know him from soundbites - all the
stuff we've just been watching, in other words - is thoroughly
depressing, but a useful reminder at this point in the series
of just where Spider actually is, and of how we've been seeing
Spider's veneer of invincibility from the early stories steadily
crumbling.
Now, if you wanted to be picky, you might point out that in fact,
we don't get to see that much of Spider's columns either, which
is arguably a bit odd when they're one of the key elements of
the series. We get the odd quote now and again, but in fact we
hardly ever see anything approaching a full length column. Of
course, we've got the rest of the story to give us our
perspective on Spider's columns, which I suppose makes us
different from the audience in the story itself. Kind of.
But the key point, I think, is that if you've read even one issue
of Transmetropolitan, you'll get the jokes, you'll find them
very funny, and you should buy the issue. Clear?
