posted 12-05-2000 10:19 PM               

There are two things you realize quickly when reading Transmet -- Warren Ellis is an intensely creative writer, and he's one cynical, angry SOB. (Both of these impressions can also be confirmed by checking out his website and/or his message board.) The City makes the megapolises of movies like Blade Runner look like backwater villages; I can't even begin to catalog the different technologies -- much of it attached/implanted to various citizens -- and creatures encountered in this book. Darick Robertson deserves a lot of credit for his design work here. In one story, a character decides to undergo a transformation into what is essentially a floating cloud of nano-devices; in another, Spider visits a series of reservations designed to accurately preserve and exhibit older societies. It's fascinating stuff.

At the same time, Spider spends a lot of time ranting about the state of the world, the corruption, the deceit, the cruelty and the stupidity that seem to pervade his world, in ways that are at heart not too different from the way they pervade ours. It's not a nice world he inhabits, and he is not a nice guy -- he swears, he insults people, he threatens them with a bowel disrupter. The rage feels real, but I admit that I initially put this book down after reading the third story because I was tired of reading Spider rant.

I'm glad I picked it up and kept reading through, because this is a well-written comic, and I enjoyed exploring the City and Spider's reactions to it. I wish Ellis would have spent a little more time with some of the concepts -- a lot of these single issue stories have material and potential enough for three or four issue arcs, at least. And you need a strong stomach to read this -- there may not be a bodily function that doesn't get mentioned here. There's also a lot of swearing and discussion of sexual acts, and many scenes of Spider writing while naked. It's definitely worth reading, though.

posted 12-16-2000 12:39 AM               

I read the entire Sandman series and loved it (Didn't Gaiman pen an episode of B5?), but thought that at times it seemed to use some pretty graphic stuff in a gratuitous manner. I've read some other Vertigo titles that seem to do the same.