Saturday, May 14, 2011

Paying Off

I took a punt on a comic today due to the lure of a bargain.

Now, as I've mentioned before, certain types of comics get me down. Like way down. I hate bleak, nihilisitic topics, and tend to find both ultra-violence & cyberpunk grating and uninteresting.

So I was as surprised as you when I both purchased, then enjoying the living hell out of TransMetropolitan.

It's really, really good.

I had been avoiding it for ages, despite my liking of The Authority & NextWave & Fell & Planetary, due to the one Vertigo short I had read consisting of Spider Jerusalem running through a party shouting sound-bites at people.

The main book is like that too, but also much more awesome. It's funny, and it's rude (Mr Ellis seems to be tired of the word fuck, some uses new combinations, such as "whorehopper"), and clearly has a message. The futuristic city (which, as seemingly every future city needs to be, has every square metre plastered with shrieking ads, but at least the characters dislike it as much as I do) is far enough into the future to make what needs to be possible possible for the story. Need a gun that causes bowel release? They have a kit for that. (Yes. Yes, they do. And it's hilarious.) Need your sidekick to be an incontinent gecko-hunting two-headed cat who smokes? Done. It's a place where even the on-board AI on a food-dispenser is addicted to drugs.

So I highly recommend TransMet. Go read it. Especially you.

I also understand that the liking of this counter-culture book may have coincidently occurred on the day I have to buy new formal shoes, shave off my sideburns, and take out my eyebrow ring to go work for my first proper corporate job. Yeah.

No comments: