Transmetropolitan: The New Scum by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson.
Title: Transmetropolitan: The New Scum.
Author: Warren Ellis.
Artist: Darick Robertson.
Genre: Graphic novel, fiction, science fiction, cyberpunk.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2000.
Summary: The New Scum: the people of the City, the public whose adulation futuristic journalist Spider Jerusalem both craves and dreads. From his new luxury apartment headquarters, Spider conducts savage interviews with the two presidential candidates - the Beast and the Smiler - while his assistants run wild with his credit cards. As election night draws near, Spider becomes ever more determined to deliver the truth to the New Scum. But once they have it, will they do the right thing?
My rating: 8.5/10
My review: My favourite book in the series so far mainly because, I'll admit, by tackling politics and a presidential election specifically, Spider Jerusalem comes most fully into the brilliant man whom he is based on - Hunter S. Thompson. Like with Thompson, Spider's substance use and abuse, personal issues, violence, controversial opinions, and bizarre antics are a delight, but politics is the clear calling (often overlooked) to which he contributed the most useful, thought-provoking, and scathing criticisms.
♥ We need a voice, they say. That's all. We're sick of your hate, and we don't need your pity. We need a VOICE. Just for us. All of us. The new scum.
♥ They don't care. The billboards, the TV pitches every five minutes, the flyers and the canvassers and all that; and they don't care. They're not thinking about the election. They don't even notice. They're thinking about going to the movies and stoning people and reinventing the street and having a quick smoke during their lunch hour. They're thinking about themselves. That's all.
♥ And there you have it, reader. The Beast believes in something, perverted and filthy as it is. And the Smiler doesn't. I was so shocked I almost forgot to plant the guerrilla neurotransmitter gel I'd hidden in the oil of my fingernail. And that, Mr. President, is why you've been hallucinating having sex with speed-crazed Barbary Apes suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome for the last week. And now you know what it's like to have you as President; what it's like to be constantly fucked by someone who stinks like shit.
Spider Jerusalem: cheap, but not as cheap as your girlfriend.
♥ The future is a dense place. Everything you look at tells you it's the future. But everything you hear is the same old same old.
♥ These are the new streets of this city, where the new scum try to live. You and me. And here in these streets are the things that we want: sex and birth, votes and traits, money and guilt, television and teddy bears. But all we've actually got is each other. You figure out what that means.
♥ It's been a long hard day scaring the shit out of children of the Tolerable Terror Infant Therapy Institute.
♥ "We're playing "Honesty with Mister Fucking Truth and Justice", Alan. How about it, Spider? You like this game?"
"I own this game."
♥ "Things get better one winter at a time. So if you're going to celebrate something, then have a drink on this: the world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year."