Freelancing

Looks like my review of Transmetropolitan is up in the new issue of Tekka. Here’s the first paragraph:

This isn’t the street, it’s the gutter. Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s (very) graphic graphic novel Transmetropolitan is a neo-neuromantic romp through a superdense urban core, with the Hunter Thompsonesque journalist Spider Jerusalem at the center of it all, gonzoing his way through the muck and the scum and the info-trash (lusty female assistants in tow). You’ve been here before: Gotham, Metropolis, mongrel Manhattan, even the spaceport at Mos Eisley. Hans Moravec has become a cult figure, and the mean streets of the eponymous City teem with the corporeal byproducts of a thousand strains of recombinant DNA splicing and spiraling and spinning off their mortal coil — but this may be its least interesting aspect. Transmet’s a story of truth and justice and even, God help us, the American way (duly post-nationalized), but whereas Clark Kent’s mild-mannered day job was just a foil for his extracurricular exploits in tights, Spider’s columns fall to earth like a B-29 brought down a split second behind its erupting payload. Spider as Superman then, but also Everyman, folk-hero: like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, his always-on laptop, with its curiously antique Remington-style keys, is a machine that kills fascists.

The piece was good fun to write, and it was nice working with Elin Sjursen on the editing.

I liked my original title whole a lot better though.

Which was . . . wait for it . . . “Loose, Watery, Prolapse.”

Fans of the series will understand.

I know Spider would have liked it better too.