The Loudest Voice in the City

A man who hates people is hired to write about them. That's the engine of Transmetropolitan, and Warren Ellis never lets it idle.

Spider Jerusalem is a gonzo journalist who has retired to live as a hermit. A publishing deal drags him back down into the City, a sprawl of advertising, noise and bodies, and he takes a column at The Word under his old editor, Mitchell Royce. The comic ran for 60 issues, from July 1997 to September 2002, written by Ellis and drawn by Darick Robertson. It started under DC's short-lived Helix imprint and moved to Vertigo from issue 13. Spider owes a good deal to Hunter S. Thompson, and Ellis has said so. The president he ends up fighting is the Smiler, Gary Callahan, a man Spider decides wants power only to hurt people. The Beast, the incumbent, he first takes for the lesser evil.

It's a comic about a newspaper columnist. In 1997. Read that sentence again from the far end of 2026.

The art: every wall is talking

Robertson's City is the real star of the early issues. Every surface has a sign on it, every sign has a joke in it, and the jokes are in the background where you'll miss them on the first read. A street scene is a pile of detail: holographic ads, news broadcasts, people who have rebuilt their bodies, the mess underfoot. In the first collected volume, a reviewer at Reactor described the place as "a wall of color, smells, noise, advertisements and people", which is about right. I can't think of a future more crowded.

The character design is better still. Spider is a thin, shirtless, bald man in a black coat and mismatched glasses, one lens green and rectangular, the other red and round. He is ugly in a way you'd want on a poster. The glasses do double duty as a still camera. The Maker, a household machine that rebuilds raw matter into food and clothing, is a wonderful ruined appliance, and it is as likely to misfire as to deliver.

The weaknesses are the weaknesses of anger, sustained. Over six years the column becomes a pulpit, the supporting cast (his two assistants, Channon and Yelena, are more interesting than the sermons) get less to do, and the villain exists to confirm what Spider already thought. It is still among the best comics of its decade. It just got louder than it needed to be.

The prophecy: the news that talks back

Four bets, and it's the unglamorous ones that landed.

The columnist as the whole news. In the comic, Royce sells Spider's column and it's streamed across the City, and Spider's persona is the product. In 1997, with most Western readers still taking their news from newspapers and an evening bulletin, that looked like a cartoon. In 2024, Pew found that 21% of US adults regularly got news from news influencers, individuals with big followings rather than institutions, and 37% of those aged 18 to 29. The Reuters Institute's 2025 report found a turning point: more Americans (54%) used social and video networks for news in a week than TV (50%) or news sites and apps (48%), for the first time. One podcaster, Joe Rogan, was seen discussing news by 22% of the US sample in the week after the inauguration. It's a Spider economy. What Ellis didn't draw is the difference in backing: Spider has an editor and a newspaper behind him, while most of these voices answer to nobody.

The risk of the job. Spider is constantly threatened, and the comic assumes that reporting on the powerful gets reporters hurt. This wasn't a prediction so much as a refusal to look away, but it has aged without any help. The Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least 124 journalists and media workers killed in 2024, its deadliest year on record, and at least 24 of them deliberately murdered because of their work. Reporters Without Borders, in 2025, rated the global state of press freedom "difficult" for the first time in the index's history, with the economic indicator at its lowest ever. The comic got the danger right and the economics worse than it knew: the newsrooms that pay to protect a reporter are the ones shrinking.

The glasses. Spider's shades carry a camera. The comic plays it as a throwaway detail; it's also a fairly exact description of a product now on sale. EssilorLuxottica reported selling over seven million Meta-branded smart glasses in 2025, with a 12-megapixel camera and the option to go live to Facebook or Instagram. The comic's version came with the same anxiety attached. Google ended its Glass Explorer programme in 2015, after a run in which privacy worries and the nickname "Glassholes" dogged it, and Google X's Astro Teller later said the project had been given too much attention. The wearable camera isn't a future technology any more. The open argument is who gets to be recorded by it.

The Maker. Here, Ellis misses, or at least is early by a lot. A machine that recombines matter into food and clothes from a base block, or from trash for the poor, is nowhere in sight. The nearest thing is the robot that prints walls: ICON's Vulcan system is building 100 homes at Wolf Ranch in Texas, structural walls only, the roof still put on by people. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry press release called the molecular motor as undeveloped as the electric motor was in the 1830s. So the Maker stays a wish.

The reading

Transmetropolitan is a lousy way to learn what the future will look like and a very good way to learn what it will feel like. The gadgets in the City are mostly jokes. The attention economy at the centre of it isn't. Ellis understood that the real novelty of the near future would be the person with the loudest voice and the nearest camera, and that nobody would have much idea who ought to be accountable to whom.

Spider says he'd like to change the world with a column. The years since have given a lot of people that option, and the column didn't need a newspaper to carry it. What most of them haven't had is an editor like Royce. The comic's grimmest forecast isn't any of its machines. It's the quiet gap, in 2026, where the editor used to be.