Relentless.Warren Ellis and artist Darick Robertson team up for another round of an alternate reality future where outlaw journalist Spider Jerusalem prowls the underworld chronicling the havoc that has become our world.Ellis’ writing and Robertson’s cacophony of visual sensation reveals a world that has exceeded in excess to the detriment of all, this was like a kaleidoscopic representation of a William Burroughs nightmare, and with the science fiction savvy of John Varley.Some of these scenari...

This second volume is where we really see the series find its feet and we launch fully into the weird and wonderful world of Spider Jerusalem's with a tale about humans wanting to turn into sentient gas clouds, the harrowing story of the cryogenically unfrozen, synthetic reservations where you could choose to live in a past civilisation, and finally a three part story of Spider's ex-wife's revenge.All of the stories have the verbal acrobatics and freewheeling genius level writing of Warren Ellis...

Definitely a very interesting series. This volume fills us in a little bit more Spider's past and some of it is soooo not good. He's a hard guy to like sometimes but I think that so far Ellis is doing a pretty good job of walking the line between edgy asshole and guy who is trying to do the 'right' thing [at least as he sees it]. I think mostly he just has problems visualizing future consequences for anyone who is not himself [and sometimes even for himself].Favorite panel:I mean on the one hand...

Unlike with other comics, I've decided not to read this one at all unless I've got a real copy of it in my hands. I loved it from the very start and I'm still fascinated by it, despite its often too disgusting depictions of horrible things. Basically, it explores various ideas of our future. Obviously we'd have progressed in technology and medicine, allowing us to live longer and to alter our physique to our likings. We got a good saying in Bosnia going: "once you have the finger, you want the w...

This second volume delivers some of the most memorable short stories of the series (feat. nanotech consciousness downloads; human culture reservations; people awaking from cryogenic freezing to a hostile future: “Fuck off back to your freezers!”), as Ellis and Robertson are firing on all cylinders. It may not be perfect, but it’s the kind of wild ride that doesn’t have to be. The one thing that actually bothers me is the story’s underlying macho ethos: “How do you know I can’t kill you by starin...

The adventures of our unorthodox Journalist continues!Spider Jerusalem is a certified douchebag. But like every celebrity douchebags, he is also a huge hit. Everybody loves his gloriously controversial column "I hate it here": A Column which spider uses to tear a new one for some unlucky sap or a corporation. So yea, he had made some enemies. But that's the life of a journalist. But today, Some of his enemies are going to fight back. Remember Channon? Spider's Assistant. The first chapter kick...

Like the first collection, the second volume of Transmetropolitan is imaginative and acerbic, often funny, often bitter, sometimes brilliant. There's an amazing story tucked in the middle about a woman who's been awakened from cry-freeze into a world that could care less about her that's astonishingly moving, fully imagined, and simply one of the best things I can ever recall reading by Ellis. This volume would be worth reading for that one story alone, and it's absolutely the high point. The re...

There's not much I can say about this. I'm rereading it for the first time in about 8 years, I'll be reading all 9 (10?) collections and I imagine I'll feel the same as I did the first time, it's one of the most insightful, impressive, damming, polemic critiques of modern society you'll read. Just because it is in comic book form doesn't make it any less a work of art and insight on the level of Catch 22 or 1984 or any other great work of satire and commentary. And in the days of the Orange Chee...

In this second volume, we get a bit of Spider's history, go through a wild roller coaster of a ride with his new assistant and see more of his incredible talent for pissing people off. I believe it's the longest volume in the series and it's easy to see why. This volume does a great job giving you an idea of the kind of person that Spider is and it isn't always pretty. There's a dark side to a man who won't let a story go once he's gotten ahold of it and Ellis isn't afraid to show you every shad...

So in this volume Spider Jerusalem manages to not come across as such a jerk probably because he tries to help his assistant come to terms with losing a boyfriend and more importantly because several people are trying to kill him. Oh he also crashes and burns with some women, too. Some of the ideas within are intriguing even if not fully detailed yet: fogletting (your life essence is put into a nanobot cloud), cryogenic preservation (with a focus on 20th century types awakened and in for a major...

Warren Ellis has so much talent in him. Volume two felt like he could have been an effective journalist as well, a crazy one for that matter.Volume two fleshes out some more about Spider Jerusalem, the past that still haunts him today with a bodiless wife, a headless kid and one woman and a talking police mutt whose lives he has messed up before.Lust for Life did a bit a meandering before it actually develops into a cohesive story, though it does it well with the benefit of spanning for more iss...

I liked the first half of Vol 2 more than the second. It was very imaginative stories, such as a man being turned into a tiny cloud of nanobots, a woman coming back from cryogenic freezing to find out she's unwanted and alone (this is my favourite piece of the book, and one of the most powerful ones Ellis has written in my opinion), Spider Jerusalem visiting 'reservations' where people live as though they were in other native cultures, as a way to preserve them for eternity.It sure is a lot to t...