An occasional series on vintage comics.
Social injustice isn’t the usual battleground for comic books, which tend to be most comfortable with masked vigilantes squaring off against supervillains or saving the solar system from galactic menaces. But that topic is the insistent subtext in two new reprint collections, “Absolute Transmetropolitan: Volume 1” by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (DC/Vertigo) and “Melody: Story of a Nude Dancer” by Sylvie Rancourt (Drawn & Quarterly).
“Transmetropolitan” made its debut in 1997, but its bitter and profane satire is fueled by the class anger that festered in Thatcher-era Britain in the 1980s. That’s when and where Mr. Ellis, the book’s writer, came of age, and the grungy gray and beige of “Transmetropolitan’s” “Blade Runner”-like urban decay feels lived through rather than imagined. The perfect soundtrack for these 544 pages of comics would be music by the Clash and Joy Division.
The hero in this cyberpunk maelstrom is Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter S. Thompson-looking investigative reporter for the newspaper (how quaint) The Word, whose motto is: “The truth. No matter what.” That attitude makes him an attractive target for those who rule the squalid City, where tough-guy police dogs talk, smiley faces unnervingly have three eyes instead of two, and people called Transients infuse their bodies with the DNA of aliens — kind of like interstellar Botox. Mr. Robertson draws all of this in a suitably gritty style.
But it doesn’t help the gonzo, chain-smoking Spider, as he rages and rails against the machine, that he’s just as violent, gun-addicted and insane as those who want him dead. Still, at heart, Spider believes in the power of words. As he likes to say: “The typewriter’s a gun. Show ’em some steel.”
Mr. Ellis is an accomplished writer both in comics (“Planetary,” “The Authority,” “Global Frequency”) and prose novels (“Gun Machine,” “Crooked Little Vein”), and the stories here surge smartly forward like technological progress itself. At one point, Spider says, “There was a time when I liked a good riot.”
A good riot — just the right words to describe “Transmetropolitan.”
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After the rollicking blitz of “Transmetropolitan,” the memoir comics of “Melody: Story of a Nude Dancer” are emotionally intense. While Mr. Ellis takes his anger and transmutes it into satire, Ms. Rancourt takes her life as a stripper and creates a kind of flat pen-and-ink mirror.
Ms. Rancourt’s memoir — Melody is her alter ego — is hauntingly familiar. It’s the 1980s, and Melody and her boyfriend, Nick, move from rural Quebec to Montreal, where they can’t find work. Nick, who later becomes a cocaine dealer and truck hijacker, suggests that Melody go to work as a stripper in a downtown Montreal club — “Just till I find some work, of course!”
An early example of autobiographical comics, Ms. Rancourt originally wrote, drew and self-published these tales to sell to her clientele; eventually they found an audience beyond the strip joints. The writing is honest, but with little self-reflection and no hint of irony. And the simple, childlike drawings of people performing very adult acts are disturbingly reminiscent of the style Eric Hill used in his Spot the Dog series for toddlers.
Ms. Rancourt gives the reader her story in the same matter-of-fact way that a stripper gives her naked body to the voyeur. But that naïve indifference in revealing an underworld of sex and drugs and death of the soul is jarring.
The women are naked. The smiles are phony. And the sadness and despair in these stories is thick and unspeakable.