Transmetropolitan
Listen up, you primitive Barbary shitfucks! I, the secret Jesus of your sexual fantasies, the Lord High Headkicker Spider Jerusalem, am here to tell you about Transmetropolitan, an experience that should make every single one of you wastes of sperm shit yourselves in pleasure. Transmetropolitan is a comic book, unless you're one of those cowardly shitheels who call them graphic novels, written by the mad evil Buddha of the Internet, Warren Ellis, and it's every bit as fucking incredible as shooting up speedballs strong enough to give a whale motor neuron disease.
The main plot concerns me fighting for the Truth, bringing down presidents, tearing bad bastards apart, getting girls' panties soaking wet and generally being sexier than Zeus himself. Along the way I get drunk off my gorgeous tits and get so high I vanish from this shitty physical body and actually become drugs. Aren't you goddamn jealous? Along the way I'm helped by a tall blonde with industrial-grade cleavage and a pouty brunette girl who smokes like a reactor after a meltdown. They are my Filthy Assistants and they help me by fighting my enemies, doing my work and scooping up my rancid semen wherever it may fall. They have the best job known to man since Hazard Stew had a heart attack while beating Republicans into jelly.
Everything I do, write and inject in this series is amazing as fuck. Read it and you will agree.
Setting[edit]
Transmetropolitan is set in America, land of the brave, where men are free to eat powdered children, beat their wives and fuck polar bears with baseball bats. Not that we do any of that, you understand, we're too busy stuffing drugs in our ears and trying to remember what year it is. What a country. The majority of the awesome stuff I get up to takes place in The City, which you smart pissbags will probably work out is New York, you clever little ratfuckers, you. The City is like every worst nightmare Hieronymus Bosch ever had stuffed to the gills with mutants, transvestites, things that have sex with car exhaust pipes and the most savage type of debauched goings-on you could ever jack off to. I fucking hate it here. I fucking hate it so much that my column is called I Hate It Here, and if you ever ask me why I don't just drop it all and leave I will fuck you in the ass with a bowel disruptor.
The City has a whole bunch of different things going on, and a sense of morality that amounts to the square root of fuck-all, to the extent you could cover your arm in illegal drugs and stick your fist up your own ass without anyone giving a shit. Most of The City is far, far into the future, with weird technology and huge screens everywhere advertising pornography, but it has a few tranquil parks scattered around. There's also the reservations, where we stick people who are too scared of the high-tech and generally cleverer-than-fuck lifestyle we have going on. These poor bastards stick themselves in some walled-off corner of The City that's made up to be like any one of a number of lost civilisations, and then they live there. Forever. Until they die. And nine chances out of ten the retarded baby-eaters who live in The City don't even know they exist.
There's a much nicer spot as well, you get to see it at the start of the series when I'm covered from fuckball to eyeball in body-hair. It's called The Mountain. It's gorgeous in a way your shitty City eyes can never understand, except for the smoking ruin of that bar I destroyed back in issue one. [1] I want to be back there so much it hurts.
Plot Summary[edit]
I, Spider Jerusalem, am happily living up a mountain taking drugs and jacking off over slash fiction of The Bible. It's all going swimmingly until I get a call from The Whorehopper, a piece of publishing scum I should have wiped off my shoe years ago, demanding two more books. Since I've run out of money I seem to have little choice. I head on back down to The City and start having a poke around, which ends in me stopping a riot. No big deal.
From there I spend a bit of time checking out The City, getting back on my feet, looking for the Truth, and then things start to get serious. It's election year, and the lizard-raping shitheel The Beast is running against some rubbery axe wound called The Smiler. I interview them both. They are both unbelievable cunts high as fuck on the smell of their own shit, so I expose them for this like the good little journalist I am (well, I expose The Smiler, everyone already knows The Beast is worth less than the rag you wipe your mother's vaginal mucus up with). This gets my friend Vita killed. No, I'm not going to fucking talk about that. Fuck off.
The Smiler wins the election, but I am fully armed and ready to rhinocerous my way over his bloody corpse. Not long after the election, a young guy called Rory Lockwood is beaten to death in a hate crime, and the attackers leave his bloody, mangled corpse in an alley for anyone to find. The snakes who did it get caught, detained...and then released without charge, ticking off quite a few of the New Scum (that's you, me, the folk in The City, basically anyone who isn't primarily interested in directly fucking with the lives of other people) and inciting a riot that ends with the police shooting a crowd of people dead and the government banning me from talking about it. It's quickly becoming apparent that our President is not only an ass of the highest order, he's turning out to be genuinely insane.
After squirming like a child being fed cocaine for a bit, I decide enough is fucking enough. I dig up all the shit I can find on the President and his men, send it to my editor Royce, and have him publish it so every single one of you can read about the unbounded turbofuckness of our government. Then I go on the run and start publishing my work through an underground feedsite called The Hole, run by a cool Chinese-American woman called Qi and her fuck-buddy John, who let me say whatever the hell I want all the time, making the President increasingly angry and unbalanced, which makes me smile.
Right in the middle of Operation: Fuckwiththepresident The City gets hit by a storm of face-wrecking proportions. I get knocked out by the force of it, and when I come to I find that I have some weird disease that's eating my brain, but I resolve to carry on regardless. In the face of the President's refusal to actually fucking do anything about repairing the storm damage, we take our campaign up a notch and finally discover concrete proof that he fucked an alien hooker and had Vita killed to further his own campaign of dickheadedness. Goddamn, it's magnificent, and the beautiful New Scum of The City go right ahead and start their own fucking riot in return! Finally, I get to have a showdown with The Smiler, and the bastard gets arrested right in front of my eyes. Happy fucking birthday.
Since my brain is effectively dying, I head on back to the mountain to rot in peace. Y'see, only one percent of people who get what I have ever recover, so my odds are pretty grim.
Right at the end, of course, you find out I'm actually totally fine and using my weird brain as an excuse to have the Filthy Assistants look after me. One percent? Easy money. Spider Jerusalem: higher than Jesus, harder than Buddha and more right than Wikipedia.
Characters[edit]
Magnificent Bastards[edit]
Spider Django Heraclitus Jerusalem: I am the steaming fuckhead pile of Truth that's been shat into the middle of your lies. This story is all about me, and my constant crusade to smash some fucking sense into your stupidity-fuelled worthless lives, which I can achieve with my near Godlike status as the best writer in America. I grew up on the docks as a poor little boy, eating lizards and watching the incredible fuckery of our government, finding work as a stripper, a drug mule and a professional consultant in dog castration.
I believe in the Truth, something nobody else around here seems to do, so I use my journalist skills to make you, the moronic public who believe every fucking thing you read, listen to the Truth and believe in it as well. It's the best job in the world, especially when people try to kill me.
The Filthy Assistants: Yelena and Channon are my assistant and bodyguard, respectively, inbetween their bouts as high priestesses of the Unholy Temple to Spider's Penis. Yelena does most of the assisting, and ends up becoming a bit like me, mostly because the experience of being around my wonderful furious mind is too much to resist. Channon is hard as nails and spends a fair bit of time kicking the piss out of anyone who gets in my way.
At some point in the narrative (I forget when because I was all fucked up on horrible tasty drugs) I have sex with Yelena and the sheer power of my semen turns her into a super-bitch. I couldn't be prouder.
Royce: Royce "Two-Fisted" bastard editor is the wimpy bitch who runs The Word. Since this is the publication I write for, I have to put up with his severe sexual deviancy and constant demands of "where's my fucking column?" in order to make my quest for the Truth possible. He has an infection of tiny hyper-intelligent rats infesting his lower colon and regularly attempting to rape his pancreas. At least, that's what one of the sub-editors told me, before I tried to make him choke on partially digested monkey brains.
Vita: About the only bearable thing about politics is the fact you sometimes get someone with a half-decent sense of what's Right and doesn't also have shit for brains. Enter Vita, who works on The Smiler's campaign before his election. She at least tried to curtail that fuckers insanity, while the other guy on the campaign was too busy fucking kids, but it doesn't work. She gets killed by The Smiler. She gets killed because of me.
Oscar: Yelena's dad, who is lucky enough to look a little bit like me. He's a decent old bastard who lets us hole up in his house when the President is trying to have us all killed for discussing his sheer fuckery. The last we see of him is sharing a glass of wine with Lau Qi, another friend of the Truth, before the police come and try to arrest them.
Fuckheads and Vipers[edit]
The Beast: The President when the series starts. A huge, hulking pissflap of a man who likes nothing better than to jack off with his own shit into a burning copy of the constitution while five dozen Australian whores lick his sweat up and piss it out as whiskey. He gets voted out of power a third of the way through the story. Last I heard, he was running around the Alaskan wilderness trying to fuck wolves.
The Smiler: Bastard bastard bastard of all bastards who could give bastard lessons to the sickest bastard you know without breaking a bastard sweat. Elected to the Presidency after The Beast and quickly turns out to be a bastard. Before becoming President he has Vita killed, then once elected he orders too many deaths to count, including his own wife. I finally catch him out after getting proof that he stuck his flagging penis in an alien hooker, and the look on his face will keep me warm for many nights to come.
Fred Christ: Ex-band manager and general alien fuck. He causes suffering and misery wherever he goes by being a selfish asshole only concerned with how many things he can fit his dick in, but revenge comes in the form of the Chair Leg of Truth. His final act is to lead his alien 'followers' in a charge against the police. They all die, and he's the only one I'm not sorry about.
Joe Heller: Motherfucking Hitler with hate-juice pouring from his ears like the mad semen of a thousand KKK-friendly apes. He gets onto the winning team by growing a politician in a vat (I thought that's where they all came from) and selling him to the Smiler, clean record and all.
Alan Schact: Enormous peadophile.
And the Rest of Them: This series is filled with the kind of scum who stick hotdogs up their asses while vomiting over the Truth. These fucks are my mission, my crusade, to get them to stop shooting dolphin piss into their veins for five minutes and actually listen to something important. Every time I get one of these sub-human simian bastards to realise the damage they're doing, I get a little closer to my goal. You might be one of them yourself. In which case, I'm coming for you.
Major Themes[edit]
What do you think it is, you primitive assholes? What, too blunt for you? It's about power! It's about the limitless capacity of man to be incredibly fucked-up and inhumane and what happens when the little people try and fight back, or find a little bit of hope, or even just try to go about their day without being molested, shot, stabbed by ugly children or otherwise intruded with in any way, shape or form. Throughout the series we see first one President, then another, try and use the American people as cum rags, only for them to fight back when they finally get pushed too far. The first one just gets voted out, but The Smiler (basically a bag of pus, hate and coyote blood with a rubber mask on top) actually manages to get The City to riot and damn near burn itself to the ground. The lesson here is simple: if you treat my people like dicks then we will eventually get steaming hard and come after you, dripping primitive jism, throbbing with anger, and you can run and hide but eventually we will find you and fuck you in the brain.
On a similar note there's a message of hope, because whilst Warren Ellis may come across as a rampaging bull with raw fury pouring out of his ass, he's a human being like the rest of us, and that's kind of the point. The world might be run by uncaring, faceless babyfuckers who would rather fist a horse and eat what they find than do any actual good in the world, but underneath their Valhalla of dripping pus and hate there's us, all of us, and whether we're bastards or angels individually doesn't matter, because at least we're not them. We're us. All of us. Whether we want love, or money, or sex, or revenge, or friends, we can always remember that we've never screwed people over in the way they do to get what we want.
Although given the chance, most of us probably would.
See Also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Nobody makes me pay my tab on time, and I will make you bleed through your foreskin if you even try.