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Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis.

If it's future-shock complexity you want, then you should take a look at the Transmetropolitan comic book series (all published by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, prices between £7.99 -- £10.99), written by Warren Ellis and pencilled by Darick Robertson. This ultra-noir satire, set in a future transformed by biotechnology, nanotechnology and plentiful energy, is centred on the career of outlaw journalist Spider Jerusalem, a heavily tattooed, drug-addled avatar of Hunter S. Thompson, a post-cyberpunk reinvention of the tough guy with a heart of gold.

In the first collected volume, Back on the Street, Spider Jerusalem finds himself unable to complete a two-book contract in his self-imposed rural exile, and must return for inspiration to the nameless, hyperkinetic city he loathes but helplessly loves, encountering along the way hypocrisy on both sides of a rebellion by Transients, humans infused with alien genes, against the powers-that-be. The vignettes in the second volume, Lust for Life, give some idea of the imaginative density invested in Warren's and Robertson's depiction of a metropolis that's a mutant cross between Jack Womack's Ambient New York with William Gibson's Sprawl, in which obscene wealth rubs shoulders with every kind of abject poverty, talking dogs police streets populated by posthuman werewolves and nanotech foglets, and something's always exploding somewhere or other. Ellis is one of sf comics' most inventive writers, and his hyperkinetic, polymorphously perverse future, a vigorous dystopia that could be the best we could hope for, is perfectly conveyed by Robertson's crammed, jagged and overlapping frames.

Year of the Bastard and The New Scum settle down to a more straightforward narrative, in which Spider Jerusalem and his two sidekicks become involved in the election of the next President, a choice between the incumbent blue collar thug and an apparently squeaky clean Senator whose fixed smile masks a monstrous contempt for those he calls 'The New Scum' -- Spider Jerusalem's natural constituency. While the story, with its rather mechanical twists, doesn't quite overcome the problem of satirising American politics in the era of spinmeister Clinton and 'President' Bush, Spider Jerusalem's scatological, acerbic, scabrously funny and relentlessly energetic voice carries it through to a slingshot conclusion where the election is won and Spider Jerusalem declares war on the winner, who has already declared war on him. Goody goody, we say, and hope for fireworks.

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