nixsight

My house has no front door.

My house has no front door, my meats and brain-juice are all fucked up with something that is going round, and everybody hates me, but for all the wrong reasons!!

The dog has been sick, I’m using one of my precious holiday days waiting for someone to attach a new front door to my house, and being ill into the bargain. Inbetween sitting at the computer watching Azureus download things (and don’t tell me you’ve never sat there watching glacial progress bars for hours at a time… it’s another diseased highlight of the modern condition, and a special present to us from Bill Gates), I am sitting, shaking and mucous-raddled, arse-diseased, facing the entrance to my home, where nothing protects me from the street except my angry glare and my attack germs.

There is no food in my house, and Asda’s website isn’t working.

I don’t know if any of these are the reasons why, in the last week, I’ve re-read Transmetropolitan from beginning to end. It’s almost felt like a compulsion, though. Transmetropolitan is a comic written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Darick Robertson, and I had forgotten how much of a thing of beauty it is. I don’t really know how to describe it, because saying that it’s a blackly funny, aggressively political, completely ludicrous story of a gonzo journalist in the far future is to sell it short on so many levels. Another thing I realised this time out is that, despite misgivings I might have had while reading the monthly issues, the series is tight, seldom diverging into dead-end subplots or self-indulgent wankery… The one-off stories, when they happen, adjust the pace of the series perfectly.

I was hoping that the first graphic novel might still be as cheap as I remember it being, because it’s a perfect introduction, really, but here in the UK it’s become quite expensive for what it is (3 issues at nearly 7 quid). In the US, it’s still an absolute bargain. What I can do for you, though, is point you at a one-off issue that someone’s kindly scanned and put online. It was a lovely read when it was released, and continues to be a lovely read now (I’d just passed it in the books when Warren Ellis pointed his regular readers towards it.)

Click here to read Transmetropolitan #8 – Another Cold Morning.