Visiting my friendly local comic book store, crossing the road to Cuba Street Cafe, ordering a vege pizza, then spending an hour or so eating pizza, reading comic books and playing pinball was once a Friday morning ritual for me (yes, pizza for breakfast… so??). Two of my favorite comics of this time have recently found their way to a dewey classification near you.
Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan takes the scathing journalistic voice of Hunter S. Thompson and throws it into a twisted sci-fi future. Disenchanted journalist Spider Jerusalem returns to The City for one last obligation filling assignment for his editor, Royce. Aided by his ‘filthy assistants’ Spider’s assignment evolves into a crusade against corrupt presidential frontrunner ‘The Smiler’. The tone of Ellis’s writing can change from issue to issue. Commenting on the plight of The City’s homeless one moment and then having a gag about Spider’s cigarette smoking moggy and a drug dependent household appliance that manufactures its own narcotics the next. If you only read one comic as a result of this post, check out the ultimate futureshock story “Another Cold Morning” from vol.2 Lust For Life. A 22 page story that enscapulates everything great about Transmetropolitan.
Garth Ennis’s multiple Eisner Award winning series Preacher (already blogged last week by mo-mo, but I haven’t noticed that yet, and this is a comic that deserves two posts anyway) really takes me back to all that Friday morning pizza-filled goodness. Southern preacher Jesse Custer, accompanied by his hitwoman girlfriend, Tulip and whisky sculling Irish vampire, Cassidy are on a mission to track down God (who’s become a bit of a slacker and abandoned his job). Along the way they encounter an unrivalled cast of villians and misfits. From the Patron Saint of Killers and Vatican empowered hitsquads, to Jesse’s backwoods cousins Jody and T.C. (you’ve seen Deliverance right?) and a tragic teenage Kurt Cobain fan. Deeply in debt to the caustic wit of the late Bill Hicks and the cinematic heritage of Johns Ford and Wayne (well, maybe the Ford and Wayne of that parallel reality Earth where Robert Mitchum was president), Preacher will either have you laughing till it hurts or writing angry letters to the mayor demanding it’s removal from our shelves.
Where to next? Try Warren Ellis’s brilliant super-hero parody Nextwave. Or Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s long running stint on Hellblazer they completed prior to Preacher.