Transmetropolitan

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2020 update: on June 16th, 2020, several women came forward to discuss Warren Ellis' emotional abuse. I believe them. I encourage you to read their accounts for yourself. The behavior described is similar enough to the less acceptable aspects of Spider Jerusalem's behavior that I wanted to update this site for the first time in twenty years.

The comic itself is the same as it was a week ago. The brilliance is brilliant. The darkness is just as dark, although we know more about it now. Ellis knew that his character was abusive.

It's definitely not my job to judge his apology or his amends for anyone else. For myself, I hope that he figures out why he was able to write about an abuser without realizing what he himself was doing.

At one point I linked to Ellis' apology, but I think it's more appropriate to link to So Many of Us, the web site created by those he abused.

Other than this note, the remainder of the site remains unchanged as yet another historical artifact of those strange times before CSS.

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Transmetropolitan is the brain-bendingly cool comic by Warren Ellis (the non-humble writer) and Darick Robertson (can't tell about the artist's ego, since he never gets to write letter columns). DC Comics has been wise enough to publish it, under the Helix imprint. It is, on the surface, an amusing, obscene story about a guy who's a lot like Hunter S. Thompson. He lives in some science fictional city and writes a newspaper column. He has a cat. It's very funny and you will laugh often while reading it.

But that's what's on the top. Fuck the obvious. What we really have here is a stingingly potent social satire. It's Ellis and Robertson writing and drawing everything they hate and love about the City, every city, all cities. It's a protagonist who partakes of the bile and anger and righteousness of every moral journalist since H. L. Mencken. It's got a stiletto hidden during the entire pratfall, and if you get too close you'll find out it stings.

Read the comic, if you aren't already. Get on with it.

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What's new -- I suck. I apologize. Maybe some day... but I think the issue summaries and all are useful even if out of date, so I leave them up.

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