Wisdom.
Moses climbed the mountain to talk with a burning bush and came back with the wisdom of the Ten Commandments.
And ever since wise men have ascended above the material world, have climbed the highest mountain, to find wisdom.
Then come back down from the mountain to bestow our gifts upon mankind.
Of course before Spider Jerusalem comes back down the mountain he
bazookas the dive bar where most of his “wisdom seeking” actually happened.
Welcome to Transmetropolitan.
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO ESSAY HERE
It’s the late 1990s and comics are big business
For the Zoomers, comics were a 20th century narrative media of cartoon frames printed on actual paper
Fuelled by media frenzies around Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 in 1991 and The Death of Superman in ’92, combined with rampant financial speculation on rare issues and variant covers that saw almost any comic with a bit of tinfoil attached sell for thousands of dollars…
…comics in the 90s experienced a renaissance that created a generation of superstar comic artists and writers. Image comics was founded as a “creator owned” publisher by Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen and…Rob Liefeld
While DC founded the legendary Vertigo imprint with titles written by Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis. Seeking to expand their success DC headhunted a young writer named Warren Ellis to create a new title with almost no limitations.
Initially published in 1997 through DCs Helix imprint, then through Vertigo comics, Transmetropolitan would run until 2002 and become one of DCs most successful non-superhero comics.
And somehow this cyberpunk comic published 25 years ago is a stark guide to politics in 2025.
“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.”
Spider Jerusalem
Because Spider isn’t a prophet or philosopher.
Spider Jerusalem is a journalist.
In fact he’s Hunter S Thompson. Spider Jerusalem is basically cyberpunk Hunter S Thompson, blasting a path of fear and loathing across the city as he publishes one blistering piece of gonzo journalism after another.
While smoking and necking anti-cancer meds
Which aren’t real
What…did you think I was actually going to set fire to this festering clump of carcinogens then suck on it?
Fuck that
DON’T SMOKE DIMBOS
So this is the basic premise of Transmetropolitan.
In every story arc Spider Jerusalem, accompanied by his filthy assistants, pieces together a new dark truth about the city
to be published to his regular column I Hate It Here, the title expressing the author’s basic feelings about existence
while menacing people with his bowel disruptor, and fighting his arch-enemies the Beast and the Smiler
Who are not Batman super-villains but
Politicians
You know…real criminals
“Nobody wants compassion. It doesn’t sell. You can’t make a living off it.”
The Beast
It’s a-mazing how much these look like MAGA rallies
Bob Heller — leader of America For Americans — AKA The Beast is Spider Jerusalem’s first major antagonist in Transmetropolitan
The Beast is corrupt and violent. He’s as much or more like a mob boss or union chief than he is like a President.
But he’s the President the people keep choosing.
There IS a certain catharsis in watching Spider beat-up Trump…er…Heller…but it’s the Beast who wins.
Spider Jerusalem hates the Beast not for his many crimes, but because time and again the Beast proves that Jerusalem is wrong.
Wrong to believe in the people.
Like all idealists, activists, crusaders and social justice warriors, Spider Jerusalem believes that a better world is possible, IF the people could just get our shit together and co-operate.
But the people just want to screw each other up, and fuck each other over. And they just want a strongman they believe will fuckover other people on their behalf.
Which makes the Beast an archetype who arises again and again from the collective unconscious of the modern political landscape.
For decades Richard Nixon was the avatar of this archetype. But Nixon was a pale shade of the dark hulking beast that is Trump.
Trump’s triumph is as much a mystery to his opponents as the Beast’s is to Spider Jerusalem. But eventually the Beast shows Spider the truth.
Men like Trump and the Beast see humans for the sinners we are. Whether you’re a thief or a fraudster, a huckster or a conman, a philanderer, liar, traitor, narcissist, gangster, debtor, gambler or whatever your human sin is
Oh you’re none of the above?
Really? Really?
Well Donald Trump is all of the above. And more. So whatever your sinful soul, you don’t feel judged by the Donald or the Beast. And you can believe, with good reason, that they will make America a better place for sinners like you.
We thought we’d got past leaders like the Beast.
But then Transmetropolitan shows us the upgrade.
The false guru is a repeat archetype in Transmetropolitan.
Like Fred Christ, leader of the Transients, humans transforming themselves with alien DNA.
It’s the immoral narcissist who will say anything for fame and fortune that you have to worry most about.
Russel Brand’s career was only just beginning when Tranametropolitan ended but the Jesus-like Brand could be a character straight from the comics.
As are Brand’s followers, who will likely be found in the comments of this video insisting that the aging narcissist really IS the messiah.
If Transmetropolitan ever makes it to the big screen we will have to cast Russell as Fred Christ.
The man is so vane he’ll never even notice this story is about him.
It’s not quite accurate to call Transmetropolitan cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk has it’s precursors with science fiction authors like John Brunner and Philip K Dick. It hits its stride with Blade Runner in 1982, then William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Akira and Ghost in the Shell
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in 1992 marks the beginning of post-cyberpunk. The tropes of cyberpunk — jacking-in, virtual worlds, cybernetic enhancements — are now so familiar they are the subject of reinvention and deconstruction. Any book with a hero protagonist called Hiro Protagonist is certainly post-something.
Transmetropolitan, along with novelists like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, is in this post-cyberpunk mode. Cyberpunk imagery is plastered all over Darrick Robertson’s splendid art and woven into Transmetropolitan’s story. But in Warren Ellis’s hands cyberpunk becomes symbol for
Class
Star Trek style matter converters are standard in Transmet. But. A base block of matter is only affordable to the professional managerial classes or above. Everyone else has to subsist on recycled garbage.
Science fiction mostly treats class, if it notices it at all, as a byproduct of scarcity. Warren Ellis own opinion pieces published in each issue of Transmet are frequently critical of traditional science fiction and its visions of a classless future.
Transmet is here to show you that even matter replicators won’t end scarcity. Because humans are greedy and venal, resentful and terrified. And we will remake class divides, even if we have to manufacture scarcity to do it.
So Warren Ellis and Transmetropolitan are best understood as part of the wave of leftist British comics creators of the 1970s, 80s and 90s who made class central to science fiction.
Transmetropolitan owes a debt to John Wagner’s Judge Dredd, the original comic, not to either of the shitty movie adaptations that both try and make the fascist policeman a heroic leading man.
Dredd is a parody of state fascism and police brutality, with the character really hitting his stride after the election of Maggie Thatcher in 80s Britain.
I’m sure the second Dredd movie is an ok action flick, but Dredd isn’t supposed to give you a hard-on watching the policeman blow the brains out of the working class people.
Comics writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis all created comics with similarly left, socialist or explicitly Marxist class critiques, for a generation of working class readers who still had some remnants of class consciousness.
It’s hard to imagine stories like Judge Dredd, V for Vendetta, The Invisibles or Transmet finding working class readers today, when so many young men have been recruited by soft fascism via online movements like Gamergate and the manufactured hysteria against Woke Disney.
And after four decades of neoliberalism.
Transmetropolitan began publication in 1997, the same year Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, and began work to make his “classless society”.
New Labour gutted Britain with sweeping financial “reforms” and privatisations, continuing the neo-liberal project begun under Thatcher.
Gary Callaghan AKA The Smiler is the President who follows the Beast. He’s a composite of John F Kennedy, Bill Clinton.
And Tony Blair
Conservative politicians like the Beast and Trump don’t believe humans can change. Conservatives believe the human condition is tragic and always will be.
But liberal politicians like Tony Blair, and his parody The Smiler, believe you can change. They believe you should change. In fact you must change, they insist.
What Transmetropolitan nails is the pure hate and contempt that neo-liberal politics has for the working class, for not being perfectible parts of their utopian classless society.
Neo-liberalism hates us for being human.
Because the moral and message that Transmetropolitan screams into the face of the reader over and over again is this
There. Are. No. Saviours.
Wild haired and wild eyed Spider Jerusalem is less Moses bringing word of god to the masses than Zarathustra bringing the word of Nietzsche.
Like a pop culture Friedrich Nietzsche, Warren Ellis uses Tranmetropolitan to beat his readers to death with the realisation that there is no ideology to believe, no story to to be part of, no hero to follow and no god to pray too.
There’s just us. Humanity. In all our dirty glorious imperfection.
Which. Look, let’s get the elephants out of the room. Warren Ellis abused his fame with something like sixty to a hundred of his female fans, who all believed they were his girlfriend.
Transmetropolitan’s creator confronts us with the same realisation as the comic. There are no role-models. Even the chap telling you the story is a scumbag.
And if you’re expecting to find even a single empathetic character in Transmetropolitan, well, that won’t happen either. Even the cat is a two-faced chainsmoking pissant.
If you need humans to be perfect, or even just not awful, before you can accept being human, Transmetropolitan shrieks at us, then you’re shit out of luck.
“This city never fails to amaze me. Here we are in a place with no borders anyone can find, full of people who don’t know what year it is”
The City is Transmetropolitan’s title character.
If Spider Jerusalem is Warren Ellis, then the City is Darrick Robertson. It writhes and thrives in the corners of every frame, the background of every page of Transmetropolitan.
And the City never changes.
Transmetropolitan could be set in ancient Babylon, Athens or Rome. In industrial era London or 70s New York. The City is every city.
The City is Spider Jerusalem’s ultimte antagonist and it defeats him as it defeats everyone who tries to save humanity.
Because humans won’t be saved. We’re too stuck in our unique complex patterns to change just because a wise men tells us too.
Spider Jerusalem is a beautiful character because he sees the full ugly filthy reality of why humanity is, and he STILL loves being human.
Listen here
Damien Walter 