Product Description

"Transmetropolitan...Here is a city filled with every sin you can imagine, and a few that have been imagined for you. Here is Spider Jerusalem, the cranky, miserable bastard who will guide you through this future Babylon. Here is the finest, blackest humour, and a sense of justice hissed through gritted teeth..." -- Garth Ennis, writer of Preacher In anarchic, tradition-trashing style, we're rewinding to the beginning, before the hugely popular Transmetropolitan: The New Scum, to reveal Spider's first story after emerging from his self-imposed five year exile. Warning: Adults only!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #335579 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 72 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Warren Ellis (whose recent work includes the excellent The Authority) is a fine comics writer. Spider Jerusalem, his tortured journalist protagonist, is a wonderful creation. Back on the Street is the first in the Transmetropolitan series and essential as an introduction to Spider and his world. Preacher's Garth Ennis introduces the book, rightly praising "the finest, blackest humour, and the purest hate, and a sense of justice hissed through gritted teeth". If the message is sometimes a little heavily, a little clumsily overbearing, this does not detract too much from a great story. Ellis has produced a fine comic series in Transmetropolitan. This is a future classic.

The scenario goes something like this. Spider Jerusalem left the City ages ago and grew an awful lot of hair up on a mountain. The City was just too corrupt, too sinful, too unbearable a place for a journalist with a heightened, if awry, sense of what's right, what's wrong. Then his editor calls. Spider still owes him two books. A contract from way back when. And if he doesn't come up with the goods there will be consequences. Trouble is, Spider can only write when he's in the City, hasn't written a thing since he left. He doesn't want to go back but he has to write, has to go back. So he returns to the trouble and the turmoil, back to the mess that feeds him as a writer and gets himself a story. A punk he used to know, Fred Christ, is causing trouble. Fred is the leader of the Transients (humans knowingly infused with alien genes) and he wants them to have their own land and is ready to lead a rebellion to achieve that end. The authorities, obviously, see things differently. And Spider sees through both group's hypocrisies... --Mark Thwaite

Customer Reviews

He's here to stay
You like political satire? Buy this. Like sci-fi? Buy this. Like black humour? Buy this. Like comics in any way? BUY THIS.

Transmetropolitan is a brilliant example of comic work, and at equal times hilarious, thought-provoking and rage-inducing. As our hero, embittered junkie ultra-violent journalist Spider Jerusalem, returns to the futurities City and covers the Transient movement (humans turning themselves into aliens who want more civil liberties), you will see corruption from both the authorities and the movement leaders, and you will see Spider dealing with it... by reporting the truth.

And the truth, as he puts it, "can blow the knee-cap off the world".

Now freaking buy it.

It begins...
"The money had long gone, and most of the goods and weaponry it bought had long since been bartered away for drugs, food and cable TV... I decided to be depressed for a while"

One of very few truly indispensible graphic novel series starts here. Spider Jerusalem - an amalgam of Hunter S Thompson and John Pilger in a Philip K Dick universe - is forced to give up his self-imposed hermitry to keep the wolves from the door.

Ellis is a magnificent writer (although you'd probably steer clear if you met him in a bar) with an almost grudging social conscience. If you told him he was a caring liberal he might well beat you up - or at least laugh at you - but read these books and I defy you to say he isn't commenting about life today...

Wonderful. Even non-graphic novelistas should read this.

Outstanding
Back on the Street is a great introduction into the world of Transmetropolitan. A place that mirrors our own world almost too close for comfort. Warren Ellis' story telling, sharp wit and cynicism, coupled with Darrick Robertson's art (which shows the enormity of Transmetropolitan in glorious detail), make it a captivating setting for the voice of Spider Jerusalem, the best character I have seen in comics in a long while. After I started reading this book I couldn't put it down (yes it's that good!) and it also made me crave for the subsiqent installments to the Transmetropolitan world more than any comic has before. I can't recommend this highly enough, it's a must for fans of Preacher and 100 Bullets alike.