Rancourt originally wrote, drew and self-published these tales to sell to her clientele eventually they found an audience beyond the strip joints. Nick, who later becomes a cocaine dealer and truck hijacker, suggests that Melody go to work as a stripper in a downtown Montreal club - “Just till I find some work, of course!”Īn early example of autobiographical comics, Ms. It’s the 1980s, and Melody and her boyfriend, Nick, move from rural Quebec to Montreal, where they can’t find Rancourt’s memoir - Melody is her alter ego - is hauntingly familiar. Rancourt takes her life as a stripper and creates a kind of flat pen-and-ink mirror. Ellis takes his anger and transmutes it into satire, At one point, Spider says, “There was a time when I liked a good riot.”Ī good riot - just the right words to describe “Transmetropolitan.”Īfter the rollicking blitz of “Transmetropolitan,” the memoir comics of “Melody: Story of a Nude Dancer” are emotionally intense. Ellis is an accomplished writer both in comics (“Planetary,” “The Authority,” “Global Frequency”) and prose novels (“Gun Machine,” “Crooked Little Vein”),Īnd the stories here surge smartly forward like technological progress itself. As he likes to say: “The typewriter’s a gun. Robertson draws all of this in a suitably gritty style.īut it doesn’t help the gonzo, chain-smoking Spider, as he rages and rails against the machine, that he’s just as violent, gun-addicted and insane as those who want him dead. With the DNA of aliens - kind of like interstellar Botox.
No matter what.” ThatĪttitude makes him an attractive target for those who rule the squalid City, where tough-guy police dogs talk, smiley faces unnervingly have three eyes instead of two, and people called Transients infuse their bodies Thompson-looking investigative reporter for the newspaper (how quaint) The Word, whose motto is: “The truth. The hero in this cyberpunk maelstrom is Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter S. Soundtrack for these 544 pages of comics would be music by the Clash and Joy Division.
Ellis, theīook’s writer, came of age, and the grungy gray and beige of “Transmetropolitan’s” “Blade Runner”-like urban decay feels lived through rather than imagined. “Transmetropolitan” made its debut in 1997, but its bitter and profane satire is fueled by the class anger that festered in Thatcher-era Britain in the 1980s. That topic is the insistent subtext in two new reprint collections, “Absolute Transmetropolitan: Volume 1” by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (DC/Vertigo) and “Melody: Story of a Nude Dancer” Social injustice isn’t the usual battleground for comic books, which tend to be most comfortable with masked vigilantes squaring off against supervillains or saving the solar system from galactic menaces.
Spider Jerusalem, from "Absolute Transmetropolitan: Volume 1." Credit
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