Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Book Review: Transmetropolitan, Volume 10: "One More Time." (03 Sep 2004) This isn't the street, it's the gutter. Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's (very) graphic graphic novel Transmetropolitan is a neo-neuromantic romp through a superdense urban core, with the Hunter Thompsonesque journalist Spider Jerusalem at the center of it all, gonzoing his way through the muck and the scum and the info-trash (lusty female assistants in tow). You've been here before: Gotham, Metropolis, mongrel Manhattan, even the spaceport at Mos Eisley. Hans Moravec has become a cult figure, and the mean streets of the eponymous City teem with the corporeal byproducts of a thousand strains of recombinant DNA splicing and spiraling and spinning off their mortal coil - but this may be its least interesting aspect. Transmet's a story of truth and justice and even, God help us, the American way (duly post-nationalized), but whereas Clark Kent's mild-mannered day job was just a foil for his extracurricular exploits in tights, Spider's columns fall to earth like a B-29 brought down a split second behind its erupting payload. Spider as Superman then, but also Everyman, folk-hero: like Woody Guthrie's guitar, his always-on laptop, with its curiously antique Remington-style keys, is a machine that kills fascists. Spider's not a cowboy or a cool hunter a la Gibson's Case or Cayce - he's a journalist, and his cyberspace isn't the raster abstractions of the matrix but a broadband media spectrum that makes our own poor, pathetic feeding frenzies (remember the Dean Scream?) pale by comparison. Matt Drudge wouldn't make it here - he'd be kitty litter for the two-headed chain-smoking cat that rounds out Spider's entourage. Article URL: http://tekka.net/06/?Transmet Read 60 more articles from Tekka sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Book Review: Visualizing Argumentation: Software Tools for Collaborative and Educational Sense-Making     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy