Back in around mid-December of last year I read through Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson and Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. Transmetropolitan is a comic book series from the late nineties and early noughties (it ran from 1997 through 2002) and Lust for Life collects issues 4 through 12 into a single edition. I dived into it without really realising all this, thinking that it was a single graphic novel and that I was starting at the beginning (oh well). There are some ten volumes (collected editions) of Transmetropolitan, so what I read is admittedly simply a slice of what forms the 'complete work'. Hard Boiled is a three-issue comic book that ran in the early nineties (from 1990 through 1992) and is collected in a single volume. Needless to say I was able to get a hold of and read the entirety of Hard Boiled.
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Both Transmetropolitan and Hard Boiled present sort of retro-futurist visions, that is ideas of the future that remain very rooted in the present. Hard Boiled is more cyberpunk in its aesthetic, with a narrow scope and middle America focus that makes it feel like the premise of a Philip K. Dick short story, while Transmetropolitan is more expansive and transhumanist. Reading them one after the other it was impossible to not compare and contrast their styles and their different approaches to portraying the future. Further, I was primarily interested in their stylistic conventions, the language of comics that they employed, and how these methods were put to work for storytelling. Herein follows a few of my thoughts.
Transmetropolitan
In Transmetropolitan we follow the futuristic escapades of gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem, who seems to have been crafted in the mould of Hunter S. Thompson. It's actually quite a good story premise for showcasing a novel world, since such a character is always seeking out the weird and esoteric aspects of society.
I noticed that there is more than a passing resemblance between Hunter S. Thompson and cyberpunk author William Gibson, and I wonder if this perhaps served as a certain amount of inspiration for the series.
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Spider Jerusalem is basically a professional piece of shit and specialises in pissing off just about everyone he comes into contact with. There are some small details of his character that I appreciated, such as him not being the tallest person in the room. His assistant, Channon, is quite a bit taller than him, and I found this to be a welcome break from the conventional "superhero" style protagonist. Given that Roberston's art leans heavily into that traditional superhero mould, such a touch was not expected by me.
That Western comics DC/Marvel house-style art does become irksome though. I also felt that the line weight was too heavy throughout, and while this is also a stylistic preference, I couldn't shake the feeling that the same art would be better served by some thinner lines. In fact I'm not a fan of the inking in general, which is again the "superhero" style, with heavy use of blacks on characters, imbuing everything with a slick look that I find off-putting. I was also bothered by the way people are drawn, often too stiff or not emotive enough, with an emphasis on the wrong details (wrinkles, creases, etc.) intended to increase realism but effectively making faces look more restrained and artificial. Further it seemed to me that the character style, especially in conjunction with the ink shading, was somehow poorly served by the flat colours. I wonder if it would be better if the black ink lines had been rendered as coloured lines.
In terms of panel layouts there isn't really anything interesting going on. There's lots of breaking the panel boundaries (that is, characters popping out of a panel), but this is done seemingly without any purpose other than for visual variety. Having said that the layouts are generally effective and make for easy reading, which is the most important function to be served.
There are mostly close-ups and front-on, eye-level views of the characters, often with simple backgrounds. It all feels visually uninteresting, yet the setting (a futurist transhumanist cyberpunk dystopia city) suggests that it should be a visual smorgasbord. And overall I found the world building to be very disappointing - this is no Moebius - with few scenes depicting interesting sights and perspectives. Where such panels occur they appear to be devoid of the fine detail or visual interest or compelling composition necessary to encourage repeated visitation. In fact I found Frank Quitely's covers in the cover gallery to be far more compelling than any of the interior art done by Robertson. I should note that Quitely only drew a few covers, with most being done by Robertson.
With a disappointing world and off-putting art, the series hinges on its writing, which I honestly found to be not very compelling. Rather it simply made me want to seek out Hunter S. Thompson's articles and books.
Hard Boiled
Hard Boiled is in many ways a painfully simple story. Simple stories are fine, but the trick is all in the telling. Despite being only three issues long, the text of the story feels drawn-out and repetitive, without any interesting ideas to contribute. Essentially the main character is a robot made by an appliance company. He specialises in eliminating corporate rivals with violence, but is blissfully unaware of his true self, thinking himself to be an everyman with a job, a house in the suburbs and a family. The appliance company perpetuates this lie as it seems to be necessary to his continual functioning, but naturally things start to escalate.
Hard Boiled is jam-packed with over-the-top ultra-violence and the cloying detritus of a deteriorating hyper-capitalist society. Darrow packs his panels full of detail and text, often a parody of real world branding. There is more world-building in a single panel of Hard Boiled than there is in the entirety of Vol. 2 of Transmetropolitan. Darrow is continually pulling out the view, offering sprawling vistas of depraved sex orgies, Art Deco run amok and super-sized super-stores.
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| Retro-futuristic Americana, I can almost smell the spent uranium smog mixing with the morning's Dunkin' Donuts coffee [Hard Boiled] |
Darrow is obsessed with minutiae and with the line, so much so that nearly everything in his images is subordinated to the line. There is little in the way of hierarchy or differentiation in the line weights, meaning incidental details are often afforded the same weight as outlines. This can make the panels hard to read, with careful scrutiny required to comprehend them. Admittedly this can also be part of the appeal of the images, as each image becomes a "Where's Waldo" style game of decoding. The detail offered is hyper-real, beyond what the eye sees in any one viewing, which, while impressive in a technical sense, does tend to compromise the overall compositions. As with the line weight though I can see an argument for the sort of "decomposed" or flattened nature of the images (one might even say democratic - every detail is as important as every other one) as being part of their appeal.
The setting feels pure PKD: it's a future America that has been extrapolated from the Atomic Age. Buildings look like Art Deco jukeboxes, their rooftops adorned with toxic chemical plants, while vehicles mesh the exterior stylings of the 50's with jet plane interiors complete with an excess proliferation of switches and gauges. Meanwhile a sinister corporation with an innocent sounding name - Willeford Appliances - and the logotype to match, manufactures killer robots. While the setting and setup has potential, honestly there's not much plot here, and what is here doesn't impress. Often the dramatic action falls flat because we are in the dark about who is fighting and why. The book reaches its climax while failing to introduce a single compelling character and were it not for the heavy lifting of Darrow's art there wouldn't be any reason to keep with it.
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| A great scene from Hard Boiled, if only the textual story had something worthwhile to offer |
One thing I really liked from Hard Boiled that I want to highlight is the way Darrow has much of his sound-effects (SFX) text "inhabit" the space, moving three-dimensionally with the motion of the source (albeit existing on a flat plane), and able to be overlapped by objects in the scene. I found this technique to be particularly effective in helping me to 'hear' the sounds.
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| Call me crazy, but I can definitely hear that siren going by [Hard Boiled] |
In one story of Transmetropolitan a woman is awakened from a cryogenic freeze and her brain is repaired and put into a new body. When she comes out she sees the world of the future which is depicted through a series of close-up shots of strange faces - two alien-looking people, a cyborg woman, some faeces on the ground, etc. - leaving her trembling on the ground in a fetal position. The scene falls flat not just because the details are simply unremarkable, but because the way in which the world is showcased is so narrow and frankly bland. By contrast there's a scene in Hard Boiled, a double-page spread, depicting a pursuit through the red light district showcasing a wealth of characters and world details. This kind of shot would have been far more suited to what Transmetropolitan was trying to accomplish.
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| How Hard Boiled reveals its depraved dystopia |
References
Ellis, W. & Robertson, D. (1998) Transmetropolitan Vol. 2: Lust for Life. DC Comics.
Miller, F. & Darrow, G. (1993) Hard Boiled. Dark Horse Comics.
