Комикс «Трансметрополитен» спустя 29 лет остается актуальным зеркалом реальности

29 years ago, DC Comics premiered one of cyberpunk's most iconic masterpieces, and even today, it remains unforgettable. Transmetropolitan launched under DC's Helix imprint in 1997 (and not long after, following Helix's shutdown, DC's Vertigo imprint), promising a story with a particularly unique vantage: a raunchy journalist by the name of Spider Jerusalem who is charged with heading back into the city he'd hoped to escape so that he can complete a book deal contract. In the process, he takes up work at his old newspaper, The Word, heading a column entitled "I Hate It Here." Transmetropolitan 's world unfolds through vignettes of beautifully grotesque spectacle, the brainchild of co-creators Warren Ellis, the series' writer, and Darick Robertson, whose fame has since skyrocketed following the record-breaking adaptation of The Boys —another series he co-created. In many ways, Transmetropolitan falls in line with the tropes and tendencies of the cyberpunk and transhumanist stories with which it finds kinship. But through its storytelling quirks, Transmetropolitan sets itself apart as a story that only grows more important with each passing year, and as the vessel for a critical, rare message of the genres it often represents. How Spider Jerusalem Is The Voice Of Transmetropolitan's World Transmetropolitan 's world will feel instinctively familiar to fans of cyberpunk fiction: a dystopic society abounding with bodily augmentation, strange technologies, and a rich tableau of people, behaviors, and objects, all of which are at once uncanny and strangely distorted. Meanwhile, the series' perspective is grounded by the aforementioned Spider Jerusalem, a rough-around-the-edges gonzo journalist who seeks out grit and trouble to inform his stories. The first trap to fall into when trying to grasp Transmetropolitan would be focusing too much on either its world itself or its infamous protagonist. It is absolutely true that Spider's infamy is deserved: he's callous, argumentative, self-absorbed, obnoxious, and absurdly vulgar—but too often, he becomes an obscene centerpiece that organizes the comic's reception, a tendency that can easily mask some of Transmetropolitan 's most interesting themes and ideas. It's critical to note Spider's flaws, because they're essential to how he positions himself, a lead readers shouldn't follow: for Spider, his cynicism is grounded in an obsession with exposing the truth, particularly if it means getting into the gunk to do so. But there lies the hitch: Spider claims to stand for the truth, but at the same time, he's clearly opinionated on everything in a way that explicitly directs how he perceives events and which events are worth perceiving. His objectivity is a self-referential joke, and the irony is what makes it matter. This narrative voice sets Transmetropolitan apart from the start. This specifically flawed perspective is rare: it's so easy to summon up a character who apparently exists to narratively expose the truth of a rotten society from the inside. Spider, for all his efforts, is so self-awarely distant from any capital-t Truth that he couldn't and wouldn't ever pretend to do that. Instead, Transmetropolitan 's story necessarily follows his gonzo fascinations and his ideas of what truth ought to be—which in many cases pertain to the city's downtrodden, but in many cases also feature his hunches being sporadic, ill-composed, or completely wrong. As a result, Transmetropolitan never becomes a story that says things must not become a certain way, so much as the simpler story of a dystopic future where Spider, compellingly, fits an anachronistic commitment to good ol'-fashioned muckraking. Why Transmetropolitan Shows Cyberpunk's Value Transmetropolitan can never be prophetic; it was never meant to be. Much like its protagonist, it was forged within a society to comment on that society, a role it can't leave. And that's something common to cyberpunk fiction in general. Often, the point is crucially missed with cyberpunk, as works are unfortunately routinely morphed into apparent predictions and surface-level readings. That vantage isn't remarkably productive, even though Transmetropolitan 's dystopia is particularly disturbing. The view (and hope) of cyberpunk comes from the difference it can transpose on current life, not some apparent prophetic potential. Of course, saying some work presented some phenomenon can be a fun game—it can even be applied to Transmetropolitan: the "buy-bombs" that incorporate advertising into dreams feeling eerily prescient in an era where increasingly more people report ad breaks in their sleep; the sudden TV appearance of a late politician once allied with Spider is revealed to effectively be a deepfake in service of a contemporary campaign. But again, that kind of analysis, although fun, isn't always productive. Transmetropolitan never promised truth any more than Spider's gonzo pursuit of truth ever shied away from stylization and opinion-making. (The implication that a comic like Transmetropolitan could even predict the future, ironically, would be viewed with scorn and great skepticism by its own protagonist.) However, just like Spider's own columns expose apparent truth to a game of interpretation, so too does Transmetropolitan show how fiction itself doesn't have an easy relationship with reality. Its technologies and realities might seem prescient—even horrifying—but always from an intentional distance. The remaining question is what that distance aims to accomplish. And the answer is, simply, that stories like Transmetropolitan don't have to follow a tired binary of predicting reality versus existing solely as fiction. In fact, it's possible fiction's greatest value arises precisely when it doesn't reflect reality, but refracts it instead. Transmetropolitan 's greatest use is as a funhouse mirror that opens up a new way to interpret the real world. For two concrete examples: Transmetropolitan 's world almost seems lawlessly libertarian when it comes to pharmaceuticals and drugs; in the real world, medicine's relationship to society's underclasses has become far more institutionalized, covert, and occasionally sinister. The same applies, for example, to body modification; it's the crucial difference between the real world and Transmetropolitan 's world of cryostasis and zany biological augmentation that makes real world questions about things like hormone therapy feel realer than ever. Transmetropolitan's Central Lesson Is Crucial Today Despite their tenuous relationship with the idea of truth and reality, Transmetropolitan and Spider alike refuse to drop their belief in something essential and which makes Transmetropolitan such a radically useful work in the cyberpunk corpus: radical sincerity. Underneath the cynical and jaded veneer, Spider and Transmetropolitan never give up on the series' apparent future, nor the people within it. Despite his column being entitled "I Hate It Here", Spider recognizes the city as essential to himself; he feels a responsibility to make it in his own image, and to do well by its people, even (and especially) its forgotten populations. Behind Spider's hate for the city hides his love for the city. Behind his apparent distrust in the words coming from everywhere else, he feels the need to inject his own. As much as he bemoans the responsibility when his words bring fame and shape the world, he also relishes it. Seeing him crawl out of his hermit hovel and return to the city as nothing more than him trying to complete a book deal and save himself would be a grave mistake. In Transmetropolitan 's world, truth is the dangerous grounds of eternal war, where words and guns carry equal potential for violence and disenfranchisement. It's no coincidence that Spider, in turn, calls his little typewriter and column a weapon or a gun in multiple instances. Through his highly-opinionated gonzo stylings, Spider's quest for truth isn't so much about truth per se, but about the power of trying to say what one really means and trying to express what one really sees and feels. His frustration, over and over, comes back not to things being false themselves, but to concerted and protracted insincerity. He finds kinship with those he sees as sincere, too. What both Transmetropolitan and Spider suppose is that, with enough sincerity, something close enough to a world worth fighting for might be approached, and that any individual—even a washed-up journalist who simultaneously craves fame and can't stand it—can play a part in the dance that weaves truth and work to create a world worth living in. What makes Transmetropolitan age like fine wine in particular is its unique stance within the genre. For all its warts—it is not an easy story to read, insensitive by design, dripping with intentional edge, and certainly aiming to put the "punk" in "cyberpunk"— Transmetropolitan holds a brilliant place where its story doesn't position itself as a warning, nor does its protagonist position itself as a savior or doomed guide within a damned world. It presents a strange hopefulness: regardless of a future it knows it can't predict, it argues that radical sincerity might just be the groundwork for something better. Because in Transmetropolitan, truth is hard to come by, and communication and conviction are all one has—sometimes, one barely even has those; it may not always bridge the gap or even elicit the desired result, but at a certain point, all that's left to do is try to speak, write another article full of vague allusions and incomplete metaphors, and pray that sincerity can fill the void that exists where words and intentions always seem to fail.