Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9781563894817
ISBN: 1563894815
Label: Vertigo
Manufacturer: Vertigo
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 1999-02-01
Publisher: Vertigo
Release Date: 1999-02-01
Studio: Vertigo

Customer Rating:
Summary: Warren Ellis is for real!
Comment: This book was as good as the first one I bought.He is a prophet of our American Civilization. Someday; we will be like the society in his books. The best adult comic book writers come from United Kingdom. Since The UK is our best international friend; They earned the right to be our best critics. Again; As usual Amazon delivered.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good even while just starting to warm up
Comment: Even though subsequent volumes in Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's TRANSMETROPOLITAN series would surpass this very diverse collection of stories, it is still a first rate addition to the series. It is always outrageous, frequently funny, sometimes absurd, but always stimulating.

There two aspects of the series that make it especially interesting to me. First, no other comic series explores the meaning of the media in general and the Fourth Estate in particular. For all his cynicism and rebelliousness, anti-hero Spider Jerusalem is a journalist who believes that reporting should strive to make the world a better place . . . or at least not quite so bad. Sometimes Spider's posing and stunts get in the way of that, but Ellis does manage to get the story back around to that conceit from time to time. Second, the series goes further than any other I know in looking at the furthest extremes of what people will do to remake and reconstruct themselves. Many writers have pointed out that ours is already a Cyborg culture. How else can you characterize someone who has an artificial hip, a pacemaker, and lasik eye surgery? Other writers, like Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, have fantasized about a utopian future in which the human brain is sliced up and downloaded into a database, where one's consciousness can enjoy a virtual immortality (though personally, I just think of this as a bizarre way to die). Many of these notions are taken up and explored in the Transmet series.

The two books that begin the series are good, but newcomers should keep in mind that it gets much better in subsequent volumes. So while I recommend this, I even more strongly recommend reading the volumes that follow.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Dull
Comment: This book too much focuses on "being punk" instead of focusing on story. There are great ideas but they are not really explored.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Weakest of the Series
Comment: Lust for Life is probably the weakest collection of Transmet. It falls in between the initial story arc, and when Helix Comics, was shut down and the title was moved to Vertigo. It has some nice establishing moments, and sets up some characters that will play critical roles through out the series. But, it's that point in between where the story starts and where it finds its feet.
It's still a part of the larger whole though, and can't be skipped if you're trying to read the series beginning to end. And Transmet is still one of the best comic series out there, so, even at its weakest, it continues to be a very strong piece.
In the end, if you haven't read the first trade, this is a poor place to start. If you did and disliked it, Lust for Life does expand the characters, but, you probably won't find anything to change your mind. If you loved the first trade, or just found it mildly enjoyable, it's worth continuing, though, mostly for where the series does find its feet, in the third trade.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great read, even for a comic newbie like me
Comment: This is really something I could say is a Graphic Novel without smirking. I'm no veteran when it comes to comics, but I've lent it out to a few people I know that are, and they rave about it as well. It's very much like a Fear And Loathing influenced cyberpunk tale of journalism in a future that, for all its random technical advances, is still populated by people and therefore still plagued by the same kinds of problems we face today.

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