Transmetropolitan still feels uncomfortably modern today: nearly 30 years on

Nearly 30 years after its 1997 debut through DC Comics’ Helix imprint, before the series moved over to Vertigo, Transmetropolitan still feels a little too current for comfort. Warren Ellis wrote it, Darick Robertson drew it, and a lot of what they put on the page doesn’t feel like it stayed back in the late 90s.

The setup is straightforward enough. Ellis and Robertson built Transmetropolitan around Spider Jerusalem, a journalist very much in the Thompson vein, who comes back from exile to write “I Hate It Here” for The Word. He’s dropped into a city jammed with body modification, subcultures, media overload, transhumanist excess, and nonstop urban spectacle.

What keeps the series moving isn’t the technology so much as the journalism. Spider Jerusalem is always chasing the next piece of rot, exposing corruption that reaches all the way up to two U.S. presidents, and Robertson, who’d later go on to co-create The Boys, has said the future of Transmetropolitan feels less fictional as the years pass.

Rumors about a Tim Roth adaptation have been floating around for years, but Ellis has said nothing ever made it into production because of the cost.

If you’re looking for one of cyberpunk comics’ high-water marks, with black comedy, savage commentary, and a grotesque sci-fi angle on truth, power, consumerism, and collapsing trust in institutions, media, and leadership, this is absolutely worth grabbing. That’s true even if Spider Jerusalem himself is vulgar, cruel, self-important, and deeply unpleasant.

You can get Transmetropolitan, which ran for 60 issues and ended in 2002, in 10 trade paperbacks or in the Absolute Editions.