Amazon.co.uk Review
Warren Ellis (whose recent work includes the excellent
The Authority) is a fine comics writer. Spider Jerusalem, his tortured journalist protagonist, is a wonderful creation.
Back on the Street is the first in the
Transmetropolitan series and essential as an introduction to Spider and his world.
Preacher's Garth Ennis introduces the book, rightly praising "the finest, blackest humour, and the purest hate, and a sense of justice hissed through gritted teeth". If the message is sometimes a little heavily, a little clumsily overbearing, this does not detract too much from a great story. Ellis has produced a fine comic series in
Transmetropolitan. This is a future classic.
The scenario goes something like this. Spider Jerusalem left the City ages ago and grew an awful lot of hair up on a mountain. The City was just too corrupt, too sinful, too unbearable a place for a journalist with a heightened, if awry, sense of what's right, what's wrong. Then his editor calls. Spider still owes him two books. A contract from way back when. And if he doesn't come up with the goods there will be consequences. Trouble is, Spider can only write when he's in the City, hasn't written a thing since he left. He doesn't want to go back but he has to write, has to go back. So he returns to the trouble and the turmoil, back to the mess that feeds him as a writer and gets himself a story. A punk he used to know, Fred Christ, is causing trouble. Fred is the leader of the Transients (humans knowingly infused with alien genes) and he wants them to have their own land and is ready to lead a rebellion to achieve that end. The authorities, obviously, see things differently. And Spider sees through both group's hypocrisies... --Mark Thwaite
Product Description
"Transmetropolitan...Here is a city filled with every sin you can imagine, and a few that have been imagined for you. Here is Spider Jerusalem, the cranky, miserable bastard who will guide you through this future Babylon. Here is the finest, blackest humour, and a sense of justice hissed through gritted teeth..." -- Garth Ennis, writer of Preacher In anarchic, tradition-trashing style, we're rewinding to the beginning, before the hugely popular Transmetropolitan: The New Scum, to reveal Spider's first story after emerging from his self-imposed five year exile. Warning: Adults only!