What Spider watches on TV.
Written by Warren Ellis
Penciled by Darick Robertson
Inked by Rodney Ramos
Published by Helix, an imprint of DC Comics

Dear Lord we have a winner! A winner to what I hear you ask? Best New comic of 1997 I tell you, and it's true. And if you don't believe me I'll have to send Spider round to talk to you.

I've got to admit that I didn't have particularly high hopes for this book, largely based on my long standing and entirely justified prejudice against Cyberpunk fiction. Cyberpunk is dull, dull, dull. I work for a dehumanising international company. I have no desire to read second rate pop futurology saying that what's bad's going to get worse and what's tolerable's going to disappear. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I don't think it is. Neither do I think I'll have to have a neural interface fitted in order to continue with my work.

Transmet certainly looks like it's Cyberpunk, in that it's urban, it's corrupt and people wander about with computer parts built into their heads. But they're the weird ones. I know goths, and nothing's going to convince me that dressing in long black coats, painting kohl around your eyes and complaining endlessly that you've got a half way decent job and no trace of rickets in your family for three generations is the wave of the future. Computers are there, but for once they're just tools, used by people. There are probably some multi-nationals out there, but they just seem to be acting like big companies, selling stuff and employing folks rather than setting up their own nation states or whatever else it is that we're supposed to beleive that all big companies really want to do.

So I think I'm going to have to come up with a definition of cyberpunk that isn't compromised by my loving Transmet. Or perhaps just admit that what I hate is Piss Poor Cyberpunk, and in defiance of Sturgeon's Law, 99.9% of Cyberpunk is shit.

Transmet is not Piss Poor Cyberpunk.

Transmet is the story of Spider Jerusalem, journalist. Probably SJ is really Hunter S. Thompson with his head shaved, but having never read any HST (yes, people keep saying I should) I don't know that for sure. Spider lives in the moderately near future and hates. Since most of what he hates, authority figures, human stupidity, hypocrisy and the like are things that bug me, I can admire him without having to confront the basic truth that he'd hate me as well. Well he's Spider Jerusalem. He hates everybody. And he has a two headed cat that smokes unfiltered Russian cigarettes.

This issue Spider watches TV. For 22 pages. 22 superb pages parodying everything thats bad about TV, everything you've ever seen on those late night roudn ups of terrible cable TV shows taken to the worst degree. Hell, there are even shows here that are in pre-production for Channel 5! And having watched TV, Spider becomes sucked into it, starts phoning into every call in show he can find, there to abuse the guests, ultimately making his attempt to passively observe the beast called televison into a story in it's own right. Spider becomes televison and so becomes part of what he hates.

All this, in a lesser writer could be pretty dire. In the hands of someone like Ellis it becomes genius. Buy this comic. It IS worth it.

Writing though is only half the comic. Sure it's the half that I usually worry about (I can count on the fingers of one hand the artists I'll follow no matter who's scripting them), but the pictures play an important part. About half of the panels of this comic show Spider sitting in his armchair watching TV, generally from the angle of the TV. Not many artists can pull this off. Dave Sim, Matt Wagner, Paul Chadwick, a few others. Most artists though manager to make this sort of thing look like a time and thought saver. Darick Robertson here joins the elite. Boy that guy can do faces. Spider's expressions are priceless, especially given that you hardly ever see Spider's eyes. I'd never really rated Robertson before, mainly because almost all I've ever read by him was Superhero, and he's an effective, but nothing particularly special, superhero artist. But he's a damn fine Transmet artist.

Transmet IS the finest new comic to happen in 1997. If you've not been reading it, beat yourself about the head and neck with the nearest available blunt object and then START. Got that? Or I'll give Spider your phone number. And you wouldn't like that.

Link to Bryant Durrell's excellent Transmet Page