Choice Slices of Entertainment, Travel, & the General WTF of the World

It’s hard not to see Spider Jerusalem when reading about the private detective Mike McGill in Warren Ellis’ debut novel, Crooked Little Vein. The book reads much like the Transmetropolitan comic, the graphics are simply replaced by explicit imagery of human depravity limited to words. The circumstances of the novel’s coming into this world are also suspiciously reminiscent of McGill’s alter ego’s state of affairs with a never-tiring editor hounding him for a book.

Aside from all the commonalities with the comic that made Ellis’ reputation, Crooked Little Vein certainly stands up on its own as a decadent and hyperbolic catalogue of perversities visited upon the (human) body and mind beginning with some fairly innocent lizard loving and continuing on into sexual needs requiring suffering of innocents. All this is tied together by McGill’s mission to retrieve the American Constitution. The one bound in hide of extraterrestrials with untold power within its pages.

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Comic books haven’t been simply comic for some time. In fact, if they were ever innocently funny, that was very quickly taken over by sex and violence and, of course, masked men who took tights much too seriously. So, comic book fans allot much bookshelf, or under-the-bed, or behind-the-couch space to the hundreds of issues that comprise story lines of their favorite superheroes and supervillains, or maybe horrible and gory murders, or whatever. Then, someone decided to bind a few issues of comics into one book, call it a graphic novel and deliver it to you via Amazon.com or whatever huge bookstore happened to be near you. And this is how comic books bridged that gap between your average caped fanatic and your basic bookstore browser too haughty or overwhelmed to enter a comic book store. From there several graphic novel canons were derived which sucked the average book reader into the world of beautiful illustrations and succinct dialogue.

So, if you were ever curious about the comic book world, like I was, the following five graphic novels can very easily become your gateway drug. At least that’s what they did for me, especially because they are (mostly) finite and I am not left forever wondering just what will happen next.

1. Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis as drawn by Darick Robertson (a collection of 11 books): I am almost ashamed to say it, but I really haven’t picked up anything by this master until about a week ago. And I am completely hooked. The main character, Spider Jerusalem, is the perfect anti-hero in a post cyberpunk dystopic world. He is jaded, cynical, aging and quick to apocalyptic anger. He is not exactly a protector and he is not entirely a marauder; he is a journalist actively digging for the truth and trying to fulfill an infernal book contract. We meet him atop a mountain, naked, covered only by a mane of hair, holding a gun and surrounded by filth while screaming obscenities at a phone receiver and clutching his last 5 dollar bill. It is gory and hilarious. It also makes me ashamed as the horrible truths of the book are not that far off from what is truly happening in the world. Or could happen. Every page brings with it a new atrocity.

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