Transmetropolitan - Warren Ellis and Derick Robertson

I am rereading through this series of graphic novels by Warren Ellis and Derick Robertson. I have a love-hate relationship with the stories. I picked up the first issue as a reprint of the Vertigo line: for $1 it was being offered as a hook to engage new readers to successful stories of the past.
I liked Warren Ellis's writing in most comics mediums that I read. He has a rich and dark draw to character detail, while Derick Robertson was unfamiliar to me until I read this.

The first issue features Spider Jerusalem, acclaimed journalist & best-selling author of three books, living in squalor at the top of a mountain. He has been a recluse for the past five years, when his publisher calls, reminding him that his contract calls for two more books. Spider had long spent the advances on his book contract, and is now faced with legal litigation if he fails to fill his end of the contract.

He packs up his junk and disarms his mountain shack's heavy defenses, put in effect to ward off any visitors or fans from his days in the city. But to this city he must return, because if he is to write two more books about the city, he has to experience it for himself. And, as chronicled in the ten volumes, that is what he does.

The city is an entity in itself. The population drowns in constant media advertisement, addictive mind-altering pharmaceuticals, and thousands of start-up religions. Everything is tailored to the consumer, but nothing fits for long. And Spider Jerusalem has returned to reclaim his position at the center of the information web, pulling strings and uncovering the decaying flies trapped in the city's framework.

And that is the crux of the matter. I have conflicting thoughts regarding this series' premise and presentation. Ellis's writing is excellently plotted, though it uses a channel of much swearing and creatively distasteful epithets. Robertson's artwork is mind-numbingly detailed, from street litter to background billboards, an environment is created and fleshed out. It is the flesh part that is troubling: the city's inhabitants are very carnal in their appetites and unashamed of their vices. In a world where almost everything is recorded, the probability that your vices will merit the attention of others is curiously inversely proportional.

The artwork depicts a city that is quite depraved and given whole-heartedly to the newest novelty, once the nasty business of preparing to survive the next day is settled. Spider is a novelty among novelties. No other journalist writes like he does with such success and popularity. He is not a personable fellow, like a Socrative gnat, he buzzes about the city with a recorder & a determination to uncover the truth behind the lies. The problem remains that his audience sees him as entertainment, and whatever he shows them, the changes do not last for long. They find new and more horrible ways to enslave themselves to no greater purpose.

Spider is self-destructive in his habits, smoking constantly, drugging himself in his off-days, and chasing stories which usually result in him having a wolf by the ears. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And Spider grins and demands them served as a double and knocks it back. He will live that way until he can not or does not have the strength to do so.

Because Spider loves and hates his city more passionately than I love and hate these stories. He loves it for what it is and that it gives him a purpose to seek out truth, but he hates that the city is what it is and that it will not listen and change for better.

One more Time

Titled in reference to the Daft Punk track from the Discovery album. The track itself is repetitive, but has a catchy rhythm. It has enough of a pulse to get through to the audience, but in the middle there is an interlude. It scales back on the party-feeling with an atmospheric vibration backing the vocalist's musing.

"You know I am just feeling celebration tonight. Celebrate, don't wait too late. We can't stop no. You can't stop, we wanna celebrate. One more time (3x). A celebration. You know we're gonna do it alright now. Tonight. Hey, just feeling - music's got me feeling a need."

But these words do not communicate the experience of the song. They are merely the tool, not how it was used. It is the same with books and most art. It can be described, but there is a communion with the art and the audience. What each has brought to the table and whether it satisfies the audience when it walks away.

My friend has given me a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges. I had never heard of the fellow, an Argentinian writer of some renown in the 20th century. But my friend assured me that I will like it. At the moment, I think that it tells me more about what my friend enjoys more than I do. But I am genuinely touched by the gesture. The excitement that he had when giving me this copy of "The Aleph and other stories. 1933-1969."

He told me that it was an out-of-print treasure and was translated by the original author. Reworded to convey the short pieces to the American mind. The author's widow had it reprinted so that she could receive royalties from her late husband's livelihood. I can understand that the career of a writer is difficult and often doesn't pay well. You are trading in ideas, in giving your perspective to the public. Asking them to try on your lenses through how you perceive the world.

The first story, The Aleph, was my friend's favorite one. It concerned the author's persona mourning the death of a woman who never returned his affections. Her cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, was a librarian and aspiring poet. Trying to condense the world into the metre of a masterwork poem entitled "The Earth." Borges was not impressed by the man, or his work, but kept company with him because he was a reminder of his late beloved. But Daneri has a secret in his dark cellar. A secret that drives his grand inspiration and ambition to fit the world within the covers of his comprehensive prose.

As this was my first experience reading the author, I have not acclimated my mind to how to read him as of yet. Different authors have certain fondnesses for me to visit. I have a pleasure in reading Neil Gaiman, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Kieron Gillen, Matt Fraction, and Warren Ellis. Each has their own feel to their mind.

Gaiman's is like a thick dreamscape (I am not convinced that he is not Morpheus incarnate, his character from the Sandman graphic novels).
Chesterton's is seriously amusing rather than amusingly serious, he plays with words, tenses, and tensions like a solo artist with his instrument.
Lewis has good thoughts distilled into simple language and examples. He guides the reader along patiently and with good humor to meet his conclusions like old friends.
Gillen plays and plies upon the reader with wit and grins. Snappy dialogue and intricate situations to allow for seeing the present issues through multiple character's eyes.
Fraction is chaotic, swinging from finding the unusual in the everyday to finding the everyday in the unusual. It is sometimes an exercise, others a sigh of contentment and pleasure.
Ellis is gritty and philosophical. His characters are gritty and grind on each other. His words smile grimly and pack heat even in a-sidearms.

I will add more observations as I am in the mood.


Usually ended
These posts of thought and reviews
With some rough haikus

Horror and Isolation

I was told by a person whom I respect that I shouldn't review what I didn't like. I think it was meant that I shouldn't mock an author's work and enjoy my own attempts at cleverness. That is too stereotypically the balm of a failed or frustrated writer.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt [excerpt from the speech "Citizenship in a Republic"; 23 April 1910]

I believe I first heard this quote in the movie "The World's Fastest Indian" about a kiwi and his garage-engineered motorcycle, dreaming about taking it for the speed trials on the Salted Dunes of Utah. The three novels which I have recently come across allow you to watch vicariously through the eyes of those in the arena - to understand their pains and triumphs.

First, there is Warren Ellis's "Gun Machine." I have liked this writer ever since he appeared on a podcast and spoke of writing the graphic novel series "Transmetropolitan." These novels follow around the cantankerous journalist Spider Jerusalem, who lives in a future city of squalor and corruption.  I've only read the first three volumes so far, in which Jerusalem returns to the city which he left on a high point.  He wants to be a hermit and not deal with the noise of the city. He must be in the city to be provoked to write, but the masochism and loathing in his column "I hate it here" published in the newspaper The Word nearly kills him.  He needs to be loathed to get off in writing his scathing and insightful pieces on society.  He stirs up troubling matters wherever he goes, but has a point. Although he makes no claims to being a role model, with his drugs, drinking, and swearing, he has a great respect for the truth and no tolerance for lying hypocrites.

But I digress, "Gun Machine" has John Tallow, a disillusioned cop following the trail of a hitman with an artistic bent towards his victims. At the beginning of the novel, a cache is discovered in a condemned building by accident. This room was sealed shut by a state-of-the-art secure doorway, and within rests a pattern of firearms. On the walls, on the floor, arranged with gaps to be filled like  massive immobile machine with gears awaiting delivery.  Each of these firearms is linked to an unsolved homicide, opening a can of worms for the Manhattan Police Department, who had not linked these killings - writing each of them off as isolated events over the years.
When the hitman discovers the breach, he is not pleased - he will have to begin anew his collection. As an artist, he must reconstruct the machine from scratch.  It becomes a slow game of weary cat and patiently insane mouse between Tallow and the killer. Tallow gradually takes an interest in this job, knowing that the discovery is pinned on him. It is a win-win for the Manhattan department - if he fails to locate the man behind the guns, Tallow is the fall guy. If, most unlikely, he manages to locate this elusive figure who has managed to remain undetected for years, then Tallow merely solves the problem he created by the discovery. As the investigation continues, the killings are revealed to be a tangled web of distressing connections. Highly recommend reading this book.

"I am surrounded by everyone I know. If you know what I mean. I say that a lot. I worry that people don't always know what I mean these days. I don't think I speak as clearly as I used to. Or think as clearly. But that's hard, because life was always simpler before, and there just weren't as many things  to think about. It's like, walking through a city, on sidewalks, you only have to think about one thing at a time. But if you are walking a deep forest trail, you have to think about three of four things at the same time." - Emily Westover {pg. 199}

"Sometimes the rain is so heavy that we look up at all the raindrops when we should be looking at the shape of the puddle that forms from them. All this has been rain. It's been rain for twenty years, and everyone was looking at the raindrops falling while all these people have been moving invisibly. They weren't even traveling through streets we'd recognize. And the rain was so heavy, all over the city, that no one looked down and saw the footprints filling with water. I'm starting to see the shape of them now. I just need to be able to see the maps." - John Tallow {pg. 210}

Secondly, there is Joe Hill's "NOS4A2." I admit I was puzzled by the title, when I should have read it phonetically.  I like Joe Hill's writing - his characters are human, flawed, and desperate. But they try to survive and play the cards that fate has dealt them. But they are often in a card game with the devil, with their choices culminating in fatal games.  Hill is also a comic book writer, with his series "Locke & Key." This storyline features a set of magical keys forged from the otherworldy "Whispering Iron." Adults are prevented from seeing the effects of many of these keys. Gabriel Rodriguez works wonders with the demented details of the plotting. It is a creative and enthralling tale which is plodding forward with a doomed plot. Two more issues remain in the series and it is a grim outlook.

Hill is unflinching in the fleshing out of his characters. They suffer mightily from the choices they've made, the careless mistakes of overlooking the potential consequences. It doesn't make it any easier when they face the music. I am almost tempted to sympathize with the villain so I can receive some sense of triumph in plots.  Hill has said that most villains believe that they are heroes, even when their actions are monstrous. That is what imbues them with such undertones of terror and desperation when viewed with the eyes of the potential heroes.

NOS4A2 follows the life of Victoria McQueen.  As a child, she owned a Raleigh Tuff Burner which could cross a memory bridge to locate misplaced items. The actual bridge collapsed in 1986, but Vic can manifest the concept as a knife into reality, bridging the space between the woods behind her house and the destination she seeks.  Each time she crosses to retrieve an item, her left eye burns and she becomes feverish for days afterward to recover.
Vic cannot explain this phenomenon to her parents. Her mother, Linda, nags her father, Chris. And he physically lashes out to stop her criticism. Both love her, but neither would understand her.  When Vic searches across the Shorter Way bridge for someone to believe her talent, she encounters Maggie Leigh, a 20-something punk librarian in Here, Iowa. Leigh is also a strong creative, whose reality knife is a bag of infinite Scrabble tiles which answer her questions through anagrams.  Leigh explains that each talent takes a toll on the user, in her case, the more she uses the bag, the more her speech is impeded by a stutter. It is in the library that Vic first learns of Charles Talent Manx.
Mr. Manx has lived off his talent for years - his knife is a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith.  He takes children from their parents, and takes them to his thought inscape of "Christmasland" - where every morning is Christmas and unhappiness is abolished. He believes that he is saving the children from lives of abuse and disappointment, preserving their states of innocence in a winter wonderland amusement park.
Vic encounters Manx, and the consequences of that meeting poison the rest of her life. Manx is imprisoned in a federal facility, while Vic's spirit is trapped in a cage she constructed to deal with her trauma.  She soon receives phantom phone calls from children in Christmasland, who laugh and blame her for keeping their "father" away from them.
Miss McQueen's life takes on a self-destructive trajectory, where she feels guilty and insufficient to deserve the love of friends and family.  She lost her bike after meeting Manx, and conditions herself to view the trips over the bridge as a childhood coping mechanism. One day, Manx wakes up from his coma, and seeks out the girl who ruined his life. Vic is forced to choose between the stable reality she constructed, or face the chaos and fear wreaked by reopening the wounds she has stitched over as fantasy.

This is a really long book. But once I got to page 400, I hardly bear to put it down.

"Adults had a harder time with it than children did, and Vic had gradually realized that this was because grown-ups were always trying to see their way to the end, and they couldn't do it because there was too much information. There was too much to look at, too much to think about. Children, though, didn't stand back from the puzzle and look at the whole thing... The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way." {pg. 533}

Lastly, there is Charles Yu. My first encounter with him was his novel "How to survive in a science fiction universe." This was an in-context brilliant piece of work regarding time travel in continuity. The main character encounters himself stepping out of a time machine, panics, and shoots himself in the stomach. Future him stumbles outside while he falls inside. The door shuts behind him, and he has all the time in the world to consider the massive paradox he has and will create. He discovers that he has/will have written a book and spends a lot of his time in the machine both reading and dictating a manual/memoir about his life and learning, while embarking on a quest to find where his father disappeared many years ago in a prototype time machine.

If you do not understand why or how such a confusing story can be constructed or reconciled, you are most likely right. I didn't understand it the first time around, and will probably appreciate it better when/if I read it a second time.  But it was an intriguing concept and a testament to Yu's cleverness in building such a concept and storyline.

I just finished the first short story in
[]Sorry
[] Please
[] Thank You
[X] Stories

"Standard Loneliness Package"

It is the story of a cubicle employee for a corporation which outsources bad emotions. For predetermined fees, as the protagonist rattles the price tags off throughout the story, and a set appointment, you won't have to deal with feeling bad for rented times.  Heartbreak, guilt, despair, grief, pain? Someone else can feel that for you.  The protagonist endures days of reaching emotional breaking points with each clock out for $12/hour.  He convinces himself that it is a job like any other, that he is renting his life rather than selling it like his father did. For $40,000 adjustable to 3% inflation annually, his father gave up 40 years of his life as a human hard drive, excess storage space for the bank to use. At 70, his contract will be served and he will be free to return to society.
The story is narrated in tones of impersonal, matter-of-fact events for the job.  Privately, the protagonist hopes that he can afford a pre-packaged life at a secondhand store. A "standard happiness package." Yu's short story is beautifully constructed, with sorrow, hope, and resolution. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book's contents.

"There are 247 ways to have your heart broken, she says, and I have felt them all." [pg. 21]

"I want damage. I've looked down the road I am on and I see what's coming. A lot fo nothing. No great loves lost. And yet, I feel I have lost something. Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? How about this: I lost without the love. I've lost things I've never even had. A whole life." [pg. 22]