Transmetropolitan: Lonely City by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson.
Title: Transmetropolitan: Lonely City.
Author: Warren Ellis.
Artist: Darick Robertson.
Genre: Graphic novel, fiction, science fiction, cyberpunk.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2001.
Summary: With a new President in control, superstar columnist Spider Jerusalem finds the rules changing. Not least of all is the diminishing power of his journalism, which the new regime is determined to wrestle from his control, by whatever means necessary.
My rating: 8.5/10
My review:
♥ Don't look for media-approved ideologically sound Right Causes where there are none. Look out of the window instead, and so something about what you see there.
♥ He met God in the night, walking to his hotel in the rain, like he was written by Hemingway, stepping slowly through a place where nurses die if you kiss them and syphilis steals your friends the minute you look away. God stopped and talked to him for a while, quiet solemn words in the heart of the dark. And then by Essential Street Station God sat down and wept. He - the kid who told me this - suffers from the naiveté trait that parents thought were cute twenty years ago. He has a pre-civilization neural connectivity. Where we have instinct that, no, you shouldn't cross the road, he hallucinates God telling him not to cross the road. I've heard that naiveté trait is getting trendy again. If you're thinking about it, think about the boy weeping uncontrollably as God cries for him not to cross the street.
♥ "Monstering is, ultimately, about giving a shit. It's about giving something back to these bastards, these people whom we somehow let run our goddamn lives for us. Giving them a taste of what it means to be us. Every law that curbs my basic human freedoms; every lie about the things I care for; every crime committed against me by their politics -- that's what makes me get up and house these fuckers, and I'll do that until the day I die, or until my brain dries up or something.
"That's what we achieve. We show them they're accountable. We show them that just as they try to herd us back into the cages of quiet mediocrity, we can chase the back to fucking hell with the truth. It's the journalism of attachment. It's caring about the world you report on. Some people say that's bad journalism, that there should be a detached, cold, unbiased view of the world in our news media. And if that's what you want, there are security cameras everywhere that you could watch tapes of.
"I want to see humans talking about human life, personally. I want to see people who give a shit about the world. I want... I want to see possessed journalists! Yes! I want to see people like me, rising up with hate, laying about them with fiery eyes and steaming genitalia -- possessed by ancient volcano gods from Polynesian Islands, waving vast breasts and improbable penises at the secret chiefs of the world -- naked glowing god-journalists brown-trousering the naughty twenty-four hours a day, a new planet earth."