"Silence. I am watching television."

Let me just start by saying "Thanks a lot GonzO, you rotten bastard, for getting me completely addicted to this fucking comic.  I’m powerless to do anything else but read it now."

This particular comic is Transmetropolitan, the life and times of outlaw journalist Spider Jerusalem as he wanders the not-too-far-in-the-future streets of what the world has become and essentially gives folks shit by the metric ass-ton… then writes about it to his great financial and sadistic gain.

He smokes, his assistants smoke and his cat smokes.  He has an unholy love for his favorite toy… a bowel disruptor.  His life is devoted to poking the scabs off of society and those who foul it (worse than he himself can) then liberally sprinkling the wound with salt.  What’s not to like.

The comic is superbly, yet simply drawn without the wholly unnerving and distracting amount of detail that you would get from, say, Todd McFarlane (which has a time and place, like in the Lobo comics I adore so much).  While the artwork is definitely a treat, it is not the shining star of the comic… the writing is.  It is razor sharp and clever, at times mocking itself and at others weaving pointed, almost painful stories from the fictional world Spider lives in.  The dialogue ranges from an observation of a manufactured, bloody riot:

"It’s a show of power.  How dare anybody ignore the authority of Civic Center?  How dare a bunch of freaks try and think for themselves?  So let’s go out and stomp on children, lunatics and incompetents, because by damn it makes our balls feel big.

I can see a blatantly unarmed Transient man with half his face hanging off, and three cops working him over anyway.  One of them is groping his own erection.

I’m sorry.  Is that too harsh an observation for you?  Does that sound too much like the Truth?

Fuck you.

If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog’s cock about Truth, this wouldn’t be happening."

… to the harassment of the President himself (to his face, and just before Spider disrupts his bowels):

"You ought to be peeled, salted, driven through the streets by mental patients with spiked planks, and then used as a toilet and jizz-catcher by baboons in heat.  At best."

I’ve just started reading, and I’m hooked.  If you run across the graphic novels in the bookstore or online (in one format or another), I strongly advise you snag them.

Oh, and I’ll leave you with this last little bit which is taken an issue after I was introduced to the "Air Jesus" all-terrain sneaker that lets you walk on water, or pretty much any surface:

"So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God.

So I tell him I killed God.  I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath.

So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul."

So I hit him.  What would you do?"