New to Me: Warren Ellis

Though I realize the book started back in '97, Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan struck me as some of some of the best writing I have seen - comics, novels, anything. The prose is aggressive: seething, violent, and dirty with occasional moments of radiant lucidity. Additionally, the book is intensely political. Art does not have to be socially disengaged.

A passage from trade paperback volume 5:

Terrible goddamn place. Some days it's like some bastard nailed a ticket for the bus tour down to fucking Hell to the front of my brain. For every wild everything- depends-on-it first-week- of- being- madly-in-love kiss on a streetcorner, for every beautiful woman stopping to feel the sun on her face and every child dancing in clean rain, there's a kid living in its own shit in a dumpster somewhere wile DAddy sells his ass for milk money, tanks breaking down unwanted houses just to stop homeless people squatting there ... Time was this place didn't make sense and I would live with it. Either it's changed, or I have.

There's all the good things on this ticket and pure fucking evil too. And all the same, I'm going down with you.