Start with Transmetropolitan Book One, and stay inside that edition for the whole run. Transmetropolitan is sixty issues telling one continuous story — a single presidential election cycle from primary to consequence — so the only real decision is which collected format to buy, and the five-Book line is the one that covers everything with no gaps. Our record for Book One is 320 pages, which is roughly a quarter of the series in your hands at once.
The edition question is worth two minutes because getting it wrong is expensive. There are three incompatible English tiers: these five Books, an older ten-volume line of slim trades, and the Absolute hardcovers. They collect the same sixty issues under different numbering, so mixing them means paying twice for chapters you have read. Searching our catalogue for the bare volume title is where people go wrong — it returns Absolute Transmetropolitan, a larger and more expensive tier, not the slim trade of the same number. Pick the Book line and ignore the rest.
The city: Books One to Three
Transmetropolitan Book One drags Spider Jerusalem off his mountain and back into the City under contract, and its early chapters are mostly standalone columns — satire of the week, world-building disguised as journalism. Transmetropolitan Book Two is where the Beast and the Smiler arrive and the election becomes the spine; the shift from sketch comedy to sustained plot happens across the seam between these two, so read them together. Transmetropolitan Book Three is the campaign proper, and the point at which Warren Ellis stops writing jokes about the future and starts writing about power. Yelena and Channon stop being foils here.
The Smiler: Books Four and Five
Transmetropolitan Book Four is Spider against a sitting president, with the series at its angriest and least funny, and it is the stretch people are remembering when they recommend the book. Transmetropolitan Book Five closes it out, including the illness plot and an ending Ellis had planned from the start. Nothing is missing when you finish here — the five Books are the complete sixty issues.
Where Spider comes from
The debt is not hidden, so it is worth reading after rather than before, when you can see exactly which mannerisms were lifted and which were invented. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the obvious source and the lesser one for this purpose. The book that actually maps onto Books Two through Five is Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson's 480-page account of an entire presidential campaign covered by a reporter who despises nearly everyone in it, and it is the template Ellis is working from.
Ellis in comics
Global frequency is twelve standalone issues with twelve artists and one premise, which makes it the cleanest sample of his high-concept mode with the ranting stripped out. Orbiter, drawn by Colleen Doran, is 104 pages and the most sincere thing on this list: a space shuttle comes back after ten years missing. Nextwave : Agents of H.A.T.E. — catalogued with that spacing, published as Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. — is pure comedy and the best demonstration that Spider's voice was a choice rather than a ceiling. Trees Vol. 1 is the later creator-owned science fiction, colder and slower, and shows where the interests went after the shouting stopped. Note that this list holds only the first Trees collection.
Ellis in prose
Crooked Little Vein is the first novel and the closest prose equivalent to the comic. Gun machine is a straight crime novel, tighter and better written, with the sneer mostly gone. Normal is a 148-page novella about futurists who have broken down from staring at the future too long, and it works as a coda to everything above. Read it last.
There is no real question of where to stop: the comic ends where Ellis ended it, and everything after Book Five on this list is optional context. The staged order is on the Transmetropolitan reading path.
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