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| (c) Mitch Hell flickr.com/photos/chiffheed/ |
Spider Jerusalem is the manic futuristic mash up of
gonzo journalists HL Mencken and Hunter S Thompson. I first found him lying in
his own filth on the bottom shelf of a comic book bay in Ottakars. I picked him
up and dusted him off. I had long been looking for something with a bit more
bite, something that didn’t try to cater to both the children’s market of
comics and the adult. Transmetropolitan by
Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson was just the thing; a sick, foul, pungent
smelling world of the future with sex puppets, bowel disrupters and a
double-headed cat that smoked twenty a day.
I was drawn in by the humour and the
twisted sensibilities of the comic, the crude jokes and very graphic pencilling
of Robertson, but most of all the voice of the writer was present, and it was a
voice I was compelled to read more of. A quick search on the then-creaking
internet found that this Ellis chap was…notorious.
By the time I reached the tenth trade
paperback, I was amazed at the quality of the writing, the series arc, and the
perfect circularity of the series as a whole. And I was hooked. I read all the
‘proper’ adult stuff I could find, and particularly anything I could get by
Ellis. Ministry of Space, Crecy, Frankenstein’s
Womb, and Global Frequency
showed me what could be accomplished in the genre, and by god I was impressed.
Comics seemed so free, so creative and so direct that I made it my goal to
write one (a task I still haven’t accomplished).
Series such as Y:The Last Man and Watchmen
only compounded the notion that works of greatness could be
achieved in this format, and I began to drink in the single-volume novels too;
Blankets and Ghost World spring to mind.
The library service was amazing in getting
anything I wanted – the fact that I worked for them and didn’t have to pay for
reservations was good too. And it was during the long hours spent staring at a
screen in a library, pretending to work, that I stumbled on the future, and the
murky world of webcomics.
To be continued…
Editorial is a series of posts from StoryWorld Editors,
containing random thoughts and musings. All views are our own, and please leave
a comment below.
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