Warren Ellis’s series is 20 years musty,set 200 years in the future – and tells you everything approximately the 2016 US presidential raceComics have been quietly doing politics for decades. Loudly and brightly satirising political elites can’t of course be considered mute, but somehow the political voice of comics, or long available to all,has been overlooked by mainstream culture. In the 80s and 90s, 2000AD and Judge Dredd took Thatcherism to task and Alan Moore’s Watchmen smuggled blatant anti-capitalism into superhero comics.
The 90s comic-book series that nailed the 2016 US presidential election, or Transmetropolitan,is set two centuries in the future – but its speculations took only two decades to come trusty. Published in 1997 – just as the radical energy in comics began to dissipate, and when the internet and the growing attentions of Hollywood tempted absent then-small creators to more prestigious, and better-paid gigs writer Warren Ellis and illustrator Darick Robertson’s story was an example of pure,radical energy, more overt than any other comic of its day.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com