[OOC Application]
Series: Transmetropolitan
Series' Medium: Graphic Novel
Character you're applying for: Spider Jerusalem
Character's role in their canon: Spider is the main character of the series, and most of the time he is even the protagonist.
Character's age: Spider usually looks about 30, although in certain lights he can look much older, (50 or 60). He is likely closer to 70 or 80, judging by his era’s average lifespan (150) and his memories of the distant past.
Character's gender: Male
Character’s “Real Name”: Michael Ellis
How long have you roleplayed your character, if at all?: I dressed up as Spider this past Halloween, and spent the day in character.
Where have you roleplayed in general and/or with this specific character?: I’ve been playing/running Dungeons and Dragons games for about 6 years, and also play characters at work, school, and on the street for laughs.
Have you played the game/watched the movie or anime/read the book or comic, etc. that your character hails from?: I have read each of the ten trade paperbacks in the series at least twice. I have also read issue zero, which is a collection of Spider’s columns.
Please give us a detailed personal history of your character: Spider Jerusalem’s early history is patchy at best. The narrative as written picks up well into Spider’s life, and what little we know of his childhood comes from offhanded remarks and a few short anecdotes he tells during the series. From these we can gather that Spider grew up ludicrously poor. He was born in the slums of The City (a sprawling, high-tech evolution of New York), the only child to a perpetually drunken father and a mother who - either out of poverty, insanity, or drunkenness - furnished the household, clothed Spider, and fed her family with nothing but dock lizards.
Spider survived public school by learning to construct and conceal weapons of all sorts. The way he tells it, if he hadn’t made his own weapons, “the teachers would have had an unfair advantage.”
It is never made clear when Spider first became a prostitute, or when he ceased to be one. It is only clear that he was one at some point - most likely in his early teens.
How Spider Jerusalem initially became successful is also unclear. All he says on the matter is that he spent all of his life by the Docks trying to “build up enough momentum to escape.” Once he got into journalism, and out of the Docks, he wasn’t anxious to return. A lot would happen before he did.
Within two months of leaving the Docks, Spider lived out every fantasy he ever had about living in the heart of The City, and spent the following years inventing new ones. During this time, Spider was never far from his editor and childhood friend Mitchell Royce, who accompanied him through many a tight bind. Chief among the events of these years were “The Prague Telephone Incident” (in which Spider induced 6 Prague politicians to suicide over the phone), “That Horrible Night In The Car” (Which involved screaming genitals and a taxi driver) and “The Galloping Cock Rot” (Which is exactly what it sounds like).
Spider’s unique brand of journalism and entertaining antics brought him a great deal of attention in the city, and he soon found himself famous. His shocking exposé of the president’s corruption earned the executive the nickname “The Beast” permanently. After Spider was through with him, no one ever called him anything else again. His writing landed him a book deal, two in fact, with a publisher Spider referred to only as “The Whore-Hopper.” One book was to be on politics, and one was to be on whatever Spider wanted it to be. That was the plan, at least.
For Spider, becoming famous began a cycle he would be destined to repeat. He craved attention, but despised the people giving it to him. These contradictory feelings of contempt and desire, coupled with his access to a wide variety of drugs, could lead only to bad things. The longer Spider was in the public spotlight, the more drugs he used, and the worse he behaved. When the Beast was re-elected despite Spider’s columns, he finally gave up on everything. Mitchell Royce found Spider, as he later explains, lying in his bathtub wrapped in regenerative tape to repair massive damage to his veins. He was injecting heroin into the veins between his toes because all of his other veins had already collapsed, and had rubbed cocaine into his tear ducts because he mistakenly believed it would keep him awake.
Shortly after this, Spider took the substantial advance his publisher had given him, and went to the mountains.
Five years passed. Spider did drugs, added fiendish booby traps to his mountain home, and did not write a single word. All was well in his hideaway until the Whore-Hopper gave him a call. Apparently, Spider was still contractually bound to pen the books he agreed to write all those years ago. And he was out of money. He had to go back to the city. This is where the series as written begins.
Spider returned to the city, but he was by no means happy about it. He literally assaulted the office of his old newspaper, The Word, in order to speak to his old friend Royce. Royce had become the head editor in the interim, and when famous old Spider Jerusalem offered to write him an exclusive column he “got a six-foot-tall erection with ten-thousand dollars balanced on the end of it,” as Spider described it. Suddenly, Spider was back where he’d been before he left, minus the pesky fame.
He started his new career small enough, by investigating a brand new cultural movement. The “Transients” as they called themselves, were a group of humans who willingly decided to splice their genes with alien DNA, thus slowly transforming into aliens themselves. After interviewing the group’s leader, a washed up band-manager turned alien love-god named Fred Christ, Spider stumbled upon a shady plan to stage a riot between the transients and the police. This, if successful, would justify the police in massacring the entire Transient community. Spider took the matter into his own hands, and broadcast his written account of the massacre live from a rooftop in the neighborhood, a place known as Angels 8. The attention he drew to the riot got the cops called off, and many lives were saved. Thus began Spider’s second climb to fame.
However, what would have been a “climb” to fame for others was really more of a violent dash for Spider. For someone who was supposedly in the city to write books, Spider spent a lot of time harassing inconsequential politicians, punching people in the street, and of course doing lots and lots of drugs. He acquired two “filthy assistants,” Channon Yarrow and Yelena Rossini, both of whom were assigned to him by Mitchell Royce in order to keep him in line, and both of whom grew to hate him immeasurably. It wasn’t until well into the presidential primaries that Spider began to find a kind of purpose.
Spider held off writing about the election for a good, long time. He followed it, all right, but didn’t write a word about it because he was still smarting from the Beast’s re-election all those years before. When the primaries rolled into The City, however, Spider finally agreed to cover politics.
At first glance, Spider favored challenger Gary Callahan (nicknamed “The Smiler”) over the incumbent Beast, but after using illegal biotechnology to eavesdrop on a private Callahan campaign meeting, he realized that “The Smiler,” as Callahan was widely known, viewed the people of The City as nothing more than “New Scum” to be toyed with and manipulated. Suddenly, he found himself forced to pick the lesser of two evils.
As it turned out, the lesser of two evils was neither of the candidates, but rather one of Callahan’s political advisors, Vita Severn. While conducting interviews, Spider grew to like Vita, and his columns convinced the people of the city that she was the best thing about the Callahan campaign. Then she was assassinated. On national television. Callahan’s sympathy rating went through the roof, and so did Spider’s natural suspicion.
Spider spent the following months stockpiling information on Vita Severn’s assassination, each piece of evidence pointing to The Smiler as the one who called the hit. In a private interview with the Smiler, Spider revealed his accumulated knowledge, gloating at the damage he was about to do to the campaign. The Smiler laughed at Spider’s collection of circumstantial evidence, confessed to the crime, promised to kill Spider once he was inevitably elected president, and revealed that the only reason he wanted to be president was to fuck with people. Only afterwards did Spider find out that his recording equipment had been disabled prior to the interview.
The Smiler was elected in a landslide, and, as promised, Spider’s life got worse. During a protest outside a local police station, police blockaded the street and opened fire on Spider, his filthy assistants, and the rest of the protestors. When Spider and his assistants were the only ones to make it out alive, they tried to submit an account of the massacre to The Word to be published, only to be informed that Callahan had authorized the federal government to censor all media considered potentially “embarrassing to the country.”
Without a legal outlet for his column, Spider turned to a pirate-run feedsite called The Hole. Under an anonymous alias, he leaked his own column to The Hole, and let the media catch wind of it. Soon, Callahan’s approval rating was dropping. That’s when The Word was forced to fire Spider.
Luckily, Spider was already in talks with the operators of The Hole to have his column published there regularly. He stole as much money as he could from The Word before they cut off his credit, and disappeared to evade government troops.
Unexpectedly, a massive storm struck the City. In the midst of the storm, Spider passed out, blood leaking from his nose. He woke up in Yelena’s rich father’s house, being tended to by an in-house doctor. The doctor diagnosed him with Infopollen poisoning, a disease similar to, but more deadly and incurable than modern Alzheimers. He was told there was a 1% chance that his brain would stay in the state it was now, a far greater chance that it would continue to deteriorate until he died, probably within a year. Spider got up, got himself a cane, and got back on the streets.
Meanwhile, things only got worse for the people of The City. Callahan walled off the disaster area and renamed it the “Vita Severn Reclamation Zone.” This allowed him to claim martial law over the entire city, and as Spider continued to publish columns attacking Callahan’s family, advisors, and personal life, Callahan sent the military marching through The City looking for him.
Now free from the constraints of legal journalism, and both empowered and terrified by his impending death, Spider decided to take a more direct route to the truth. He tracked down Fred Christ, the leader of what had become the Church of Christ - a full-blown religion fueled by the Transient movement. Without journalistic ethics to stop him, Spider put Christ through a good old-fashioned interrogation, beating the truth out of him with a broken chair leg. On camera, Christ confessed his involvement in Callahan’s conspiracies, backing up every one of Spider’s suspicions. Spider broadcast this out over the Hole for the whole City to see.
The City’s many newsfeeds, tired of the blackout imposed on them by the Callahan administration, picked up the story and spread it further. Soon, impeachment proceedings were in motion. Callahan’s presidency was finished. So he got in a jet and flew to The City, to meet his destroyer.
Spider met Callahan inside the police station where the protesters had been shot months before, going in alone despite his assistants’ arguments. He was searched for weapons. He had none. Callahan, now disheveled and openly crazy, laughed at his stupidity. His plan was to pretend Spider had smuggled in a weapon, then have his secret service bodyguards shoot Spider in self-defense. The guards, however, were not on board with the plan. They walked out of the room, leaving Callahan alone with his enemy. Callahan raised his gun, yelled that Spider was attacking him, but didn’t pull the trigger. Spider revealed, smiling, that he had brought no weapons, but had instead soaked himself in the same information-transferring “source gas” he’d used to spy on Callahan’s campaign meeting so many years before. The entire scene was being broadcast to the outside, live. Callahan was finished. So was Spider. He walked out of the building and passed out, delirious, in his assistants’ arms.
Within a few days, he was out at the city, back at his house in the mountains. Months passed, while Spider lived with his assistants and planting vegetables. Yelena and he became lovers, and she became pregnant with his child. Spider appeared to be getting steadily worse, but at least he was happy.
After a while, the assistants left, and Spider - supposedly too uncoordinated to even light his own cigarettes, pulled a gun from inside his vest. He put a cigarette in his mouth, placed the gun at his chin, and pulled the trigger. It was nothing more than a novelty lighter.
“One Percent.” He cackled to himself. He was finally at peace.
Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality: Spider is overwhelmingly egotistical. It is likely his most pronounced trait. Towards the end of the series, just before his diagnosis, Spider repeatedly refers to himself as Jesus, the Messiah, and the Second Coming. The more fans he has, the more invincible and all-powerful he believes himself to be.
However, for Spider, popularity is a two-edged sword. He craves attention, but can’t deal with being mainstream. Not only does it keep him from getting at the truth the way he can when he’s less well known, but it offends his sensibilities. Seeing himself merchandised, his life turned into screenplays and cartoons and porn, drives him murderously insane. To Spider, popularity is intoxicating, but it is also embarrassing, infuriating, and counterproductive to his real mission.
Spider’s real mission is the discovery and distribution of absolute truth. All other goals fall by the wayside when the truth is at stake. Spider will lie, steal, cheat and murder to get at the truth, if that’s what it takes. He’s single-minded man with a brain built for righteous hatred and burning vendettas.
Then, of course, there are the drugs. Oh lord, the drugs. Spider takes drugs constantly, but never without a reason. There are three major ones. The first is “professional enhancement.” Often, before he writes, Spider will take a large amount of drugs to put him in the right mode. At one point in the series, he places a request for a substance that will give him “The thoughts of a serial killer, and the steaming genitals of Genghis Khan.” Soon after, he is seen injecting a vial of green fluid directly into his eye in a restroom stall, typing feverishly. The second reason Spider takes drugs is to escape the reality of his situation. Whether it is his incessant popularity, or the enormity of his campaign against the president, Spider often uses drugs as a simple escape. The last reason, of course, is just for fun. Spider has always liked drugs, and samples new ones with the enthusiasm of an avid collector.
Spider does not spend all of his time as a drugged out psychopath - though that is how he spends most of his time. As is occasionally seen throughout the series, he has an extremely kind heart. When talking about his column, Spider laments his inability to directly change things, having to rely instead on the people who read his column. Because of this perceived impotence, Spider is quick to help the needy when it is directly within his power. At various times throughout the comic, Spider saves a man from a mob of angry stone-wielding Christians, buys a kid’s teddy bear for her out of a pawn shop, buys dinner for a couple of child prostitutes, and helps a woman who was cryogenically frozen hundreds of years ago adjust to the present. As someone who grew up in horrible circumstances, Spider does his best to use the money he has acquired to help those less fortunate than he.
Finally, Spider has an intense distrust of any and all large organizations. He is a devoted atheist, a skeptic of any and all social movements, and a borderline anarchist. He is extremely suspicious of anyone in a position of power, and makes it his mission to make all influential people accountable to the people they control. He does this through constant harassment and aggressive journalism.
It’s worth it to note that it’s the city that does this to Spider. He’s perfectly capable of living a quiet, peaceful life when he is up in the mountains, which is why he goes to such great extents to get left there at the end of the series. He is, ultimately, a lot saner than he looks. His antics are often mere ploys to get at information or influence.
Please give us a detailed physical description of your character: Spider is around six feet tall, well-muscled for a man of his age, skinny, white, and - other than his eyebrows - has no body hair whatsoever. Here is an inventory of his tattoos:
- Silhouette of a spider on forehead
- Three bold, black lines on each side of his chest, tapering from thick to thin as they move towards the center
- Four tiny triangles around each nipple
- Six wavy lines emanating from his belly button
- Grim-looking sun on right shoulder
- Grim-looking moon and stars on left shoulder
- Barbed wire encircling left bicep
- Abstract design encircling right bicep
- Open eye on right elbow
- Abstract designs covering right and left forearms
- Fancy question mark on right wrist
- Circle with “POTI” through middle over right shoulder blade
- Devil’s head on right side of lower back
- “KISS HERE” on right ass cheek
- Abstract designs encircling left and right thighs
- Cross on right knee
- Star on left knee
- Abstract design encircling left shin and calf
- Two abstract designs encircling right shin and calf
- Written on penis: “READ MY SCRIPTURE: I WILL NEVER ABANDON THE CITY I LOVE.” Actually looks more like “RAT,” and only if you squint.
What point in time are you taking your character from when he/she appears at Landel's?: At one point during Spider’s campaign against The Smiler, he uses experimental technology to broadcast his consciousness to California, where he interviews Callahan’s wife. The procedure works by creating an identical clone of Spider at the destination which Spider controls remotely in the same way he would control his own body. No mention is ever made of what happens to the clone after Spider gets what he needs. At the end of the procedure, either Spider or his clone (who can be sure which?) finds himself in an entirely different place than where he went to sleep. It is important to note that this is prior to Spider’s diagnosis with Infopollen poisoning, so he has the disease but is unaware of it.
What kinds of magical/special/crazy powers does your character have, if any?: Spider is immune to cancer and heroin addiction, and will live to be well over a hundred, even with his current lifestyle.
If present, how do you plan to tweak those powers to make him/her appropriately hindered in the setting of Landel's?: I don’t.
Does your character have any other non-magical skills or abilities that we should know about?: Spider can build weapons from scratch, but need the appropriate parts to do so. He can hack most high-tech machinery, and probably most modern computers given time. He’s an excellent marksman, a passable martial artist, and is probably pretty good in bed. Also, he can write really, REALLY well.
Additionally, I’m not sure what you want to do about this, but in the second book of the series it is mentioned that people from Spider’s era possess a wide variety of engineered diseases, immunities, and infections that would absolutely obliterate past populations. He’s probably got a truly sick variety of STDs as well.
How about improbable appendages?: It is improbable that Spider’s penis is long enough to hold the entirety of the tattoo he claims it bears. Does that count?
Please give us an idea of where you'd like to take your character within the scope of the Landel's Damned RP: Throughout his stay at Landel’s, Spider will continually do the following things:
- Ingest any and all drugs made available to him
- Hoard any and all weapons made available to him
- Make every enemy possible.
- Wear as few clothes as possible
- Scream. Constantly.
- Proposition any female character who is at all friendly to him. He has had sex once in the past four years.
- Write a column. The column will be called “I HATE IT HERE TOO.” The column will be posted on the bulletin board for all to see, with special “Color Editions” written on the institution walls in feces every alternate Sunday.
What kind of psychological effect do you see Landel's Institute having on your character?: At first, Spider will remain fixated on his project prior to entering the institution. He will insist on waking up and taking down President Callahan, convinced he is trapped in one of his own hallucinations. He will behave towards other inmates as if they are figments of his imagination, alternately yelling at them and asking them questions about his own psyche they couldn’t possibly know the answers to.
After a while, he will begin to wonder if the entire institution is the result of something wrong with his seriously addled brain. He will dismiss this, however, in favor of the theory that President Callahan has fucked him over in the worst way possible: drugging him and imprisoning him in a mental institution. He will see the doctors as agents of the corrupt president, but as his stay wears on, Callahan will become less important than the administrators of the institution itself. He will resolve to uncover the secrets of the asylum and write them out for all to see, hoping that some of the more capable members of the patient population will take matters into their own hands.
Most importantly, Spider is not used to being held captive. He is accustomed to taking long walks through the city whenever he feels like it, and the boundaries of the institution will start to drive him, gradually, into a state of depression (I’m taking this from book 4 where he begins to settle into a malaise while cooped up in a state-of-the-art, maximum security penthouse.) Hopefully, though, his focus on his quest will do a little to keep him from becoming completely despondent.
Given that this RP takes place in an unsettling and outright horrific environment, how do you justify your character as being appropriate in both body and mind for this kind of setting?: Every few years, whenever the government lifts the ban, Spider loads up his harpoon gun, puts on a pair of fake tits, and hunts super-intelligent, sociopathic Rottweilers in The City’s sewers.
Third-Person Sample:
“GIVE ME DRUGS!” screamed the exhaustively tattooed bald man, struggling violently against four silent orderlies. He was, as seemed to be becoming a custom for him, naked.
“YOU PEOPLE ARE DOCTORS, DAMN YOUR EYES. YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO GIVE ME DRUGS. IT’S YOUR FUCKING JOB.”
The orderlies said nothing. Spider was all right with that for the time being because he was not yet finished screaming.
“YOU VD-ADDLED EARFUCKS,” he hollered, “I’M A FUCKING JOURNALIST. I MAINTAIN ACCESS TO LEGAL PROTECTION SO FAR-REACHING IT COULD POKE ITS GOLD-PLATED ARMS OUT YOUR MOTHER’S TERMINALLY STRETCHED WOMB AND PULL YOU RIGHT THE FUCK BACK INTO THE PUS-ROTTED HIDEY HOLE YOU SQUIRTED OUT OF. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
The orderlies gave no indication that they did, except to apply themselves more vigorously to the task of restraining him. The two largest orderlies got a good hold on each of his arms, while the other two grappled less successfully with his flailing legs. Spider spat furiously, the fluid in his eyes on the verge of boiling with righteous rage.
“YOU LIZARD-FUCKING POOL OF CONGEALED GOAT EJACULATE,” he bellowed, addressing the orderly struggling with his left foot. “I WILL CUT A HOLE IN THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD, SQUAT OVER IT, AND SHIT DOWN YOUR SPINE.” With that, he jerked his left leg violently, throwing the unfortunate orderly holding it onto his companion and freeing the leg. Progress!
With one leg free, Spider was finally able to get a foot on the ground, which - in the short term - was all he needed. Bracing his free foot against the cold, cement floor, he brought his right knee up to his chin, breaking the tenuous grip of the already distracted orderly. Now he had two feet to work with.
Spider had been consciously trying to sweat since the orderlies first converged on him in the dining hall. He’d just ripped off his pants at that point, and was in the process of breaking plates on his forehead, but he knew the trickle of blood coming from his scalp would not be enough to give him the upper hand in the melee that was about to ensue. Now, slick with perspiration, he braced both bare feet against the floor and slipped his arms out of the grips of the two orderlies behind him. He was free. He laced his fingers behind the head of the more alert of the two orderlies in front of him and drove his knee into the bridge of the man’s nose. The poor orderly fell to the ground, his hands doing little to stop the blood flowing out of his newly broken nose. Okay, now he was free.
“I am a modern incarnation of the ancient Egyptian god-kings!” he cried, streaking down the hall away from his former captors.
“Look upon me, ye mighty, and despair! Bring me my Pharaoh hat!” He skipped down the hall with as much poise and dignity as a screaming, naked man can have while skipping down a hallway in an insane asylum. He wasn’t making very good time. The orderlies were catching up. He glanced over his shoulder, grinning wildly.
“Gaze upon my royal procession! On, Dancer! On, Elmo! On, Anthrax! On, Dopey!” Spider was now almost at the end of the hall, the orderlies mere inches behind him. The nearest one reached out and caught his wrist, a dripping syringe grasped expertly in the other hand. Another step, and the needle was in Spider’s arm, its contents indelicately discharged into his soft tissue. His steps faltered, and stopped. His vicious, predatory grin melted into something more placid.
“Finally,” he mouthed.
This place, this asylum, was too small and too terrible for him to confront. He needed to be diluted, to forget himself, to wash away for a few seconds on a pristine mountain stream of engineered pharmaceutical narcotics.
When he woke up, he could start writing some fucking journalism.
First-Person Sample:
It hurts to inhale here. I can only smell two, three things at a time, and each one of them is so strong it crawls up my nose and stabs me in the brain like those hyperintelligent rats that always used to come pouring out of the sewers before the culling. Except these smells don’t carry weapons-grade diseases. They’re too clean. They’re making me sick.
I remember remembering things by how they smelled, coming back to my apartment and reliving the last week in the stenches on my lapel. Even the mountain smelled like something was happening. This just smells like someone took a dump in one of the cells and spent the next ten years trying to cover it up.
What kills me is I’m starting to get used to it.