Transmetropolitan Volume 2

One-sentence summary: Somehow lesser than the previous volume, Ellis still manages to deliver immanently readable sci-fi packed with his brand of futurism.

If you look back in the archives, you can see I gushed over volume 1 of Transmet. Maybe that's all that was off with volume 2 -- it wasn't new to me in the same way volume 1 was.

It begins with 3 one-off stories that are essentially just packages to deliver three different ideas. The book opens with probably the best of the three, the story of a girl crushed by her boyfriend's decision to destroy his physical body and become an immortal cloud of data. It's a pretty tried-and-true idea, essentially just an examination of one extreme end of post-/trans-humanism (how far can we adjust ourselves and still be human). Ellis does it well, though, by weaving the idea through a story of a betrayed girl who he's, seemingly, genuinely trying to cheer up. It allows Ellis to give free range to his dialogue, as well as dropping small hints about the pre-Transmet Spider Jerusalem.

The second story is probably the weakest, essentially because it doesn't do anything the last one did. While it's an interesting twist on another sci-fi trope -- what if we could successfully cyro-freeze people nearly-indefinitely, but when they come to no one cares -- it's done through the style of a column being written by Spider. Not the worst idea, inherently, but it plays against Ellis's strengths. Ellis builds his characters through dialogue, not backstory, so removing that takes the vigor out of his writing.

The third story I'm ambivalent towards. It's the most interesting idea of all of them, a future where we take the idea of preservation to the point of artificially preserving cultures of people, denying them access and knowledge of the modern world simply so that we can watch, again and again, their cultures exist and fall. The big twist of the issue is that the final environmental preservation is actually an artificially created future-society, in which barely-human techno-organic structures float and swim through the air, dying by the fistful via untested technologies (or, rather, dying through the field-testing of them) as a price to pay for constant advancement. Not much of a plot, but you're being blasted on all sides with shifting perspectives and drops of writing that won't coalesce until the end of the issue (and in some not for another three issues, though you can guess at them). Again, I'm ambivalent towards this one -- I think a decent argument made toward either liking or disliking it could pretty easily convince me. For now I'll slate it toward the "like" just for the eeriness of the final image of the future society, as the mostly-human technorganic man says "Look, it's my children" and turns around to welcome the three half-robot-fish people swimming in the air toward him, extending data cables as their embrace.

The most interesting thing about Transmet is its vision of the future. It is a future where all technology has been realized (to the extent you can artificially create the future, as it doesn't really require more technology) but the human mind hasn't advanced. Violence, struggles for identity, and most of all sexuality exist on all sides and seem the main drive for all the technologies you do see. The first thing the newly post-Singularity individual does upon becoming an immortal cloud of data is have sex with the first peer he sees. The driving theme of the final story is Spider's inability to get laid in the future, as there are now an infinite number of reasons not to have sex. In the future society he visits, we see an even more neutered group -- none of them even seem to have extant organic genitals, and we never see anything identifiable as a female. It's a future where the psychological need for sex is unquenchable, but where the physiological need for sex is essentially vestigial.

Anyway, I find the sexual aspect of Transmet to be interesting, as it's rare to see (especially in comics, let's be honest) an interesting, mature take on what is arguably the most universal theme of art.

The final three issues are one unified story, and they deal with the not-nice person Spider is. Not only has he surrounded himself with twisted freaks out to kill him, you get the feeling they're monsters of his own creation, and he may very well deserve that death (as you have four unrelated parties each trying to kill him for their own unrelated, usually justifiable reasons). It's a much more basic comic book plot, and while it makes for brisk reading, it (as of yet) has not struck me in any particular way, so I won't rhapsodize on it much.

It's interesting that the initial motif of the first volume of the messiah is almost entirely abandoned here. I might just be missing something, though.

I don't mean to ignore Darick Robertson's art entirely in favor of talking about Ellis. I just know writing better, and most of my comments last time remain true here (with an addition that, man, that guy must like to draw bulldogs). It's great art, but I don't have the adequate vernacular to say why.

Beanworld Book 3: Remember Here When You Are There

One-sentence summary: A genuinely unique comic experience, Beanworld is, I imagine, appealing to a very select audience of which happily I am a part.

Larry Marder's Beanworld has an odd history. Having begun years ago, it took a decade long hiatus as Marder went more behind-the-scenes in the comic world, and then joined with Dark Horse in re-releasing the old Beanworlds (which were Books 1 and 2 of this series) and has (yay) started creating new Beanworld tales, this being the first.

An introduction to what Beanworld is like: the genre listed on its back is "graphic novel/ecological fantasy" and that is actually pretty accurate. The long-form story of Beanworld is really about finding out how the world in which it exists works, with the individual episodes revealing some small aspect, or history (though it is, generally, a very linear story with very few flashbacks, and almost no whole episodes ever taking place in the past. We learn the history through the oral tradition of the Beans themselves).

What's most remarkable about all this is that it works. There are odd depths to Beanworld, and ultimately it's a story about stories; in a very Campbellian way, it is about mythology, but instead of being about individual stories or arcs (e.g., the Hero's Journey) it is about the reasoning and formation of an entire mythology.

I'm intrigued to see how Marder adjusts to writing 200-page stories as compared to 22-page ones. In this volume things still seem relatively episodic, but subplots tend to be more apparent than they ever were in the individual stories, and begin to emerge to true plot-dom. To me, it's fascinating that as the world in which this story-about-stories grows, the medium which is used to tell it grows as well.