Transmetropolitan: Dirge

I can't get enough of Spider Jerusalem. ( )

I missed reading Volume 7. However, this book begins with a 'ruinstorm' in city. Spider figures something is happening in city alongside, premediated under 'blue flu' operation - where cops don't show up. A blur suit sniper is firing away in the city. In the end,he collapses unable to write his column based on what he found - his assistant Yelena steps in and writes a column under his name just so that his commitment is not delayed. That's as sentimental as you can get from Warren Ellis. ;) Turns out Spider has a brain degenerative disease with only a year to live and meanwhile Callahan seems to have moved to get all his evidence wiped from Word's archives. Yet Spider must get the truth out in the little time he has.

There are black nice panels when Spider is stirring to consciousness and he wakes up yelling, 'Drugs is good for me'. The street signs are funny and antagonist as ever 'Sweet Corpse toffee', advertisement of home cloned 'piglet', kid wearing T-shirt saying 'little shit', woman with tattoo 'fuck me', Message in cab 'Do not maim or kill driver', popcorn bucket that reads as 'pup bucket' (QI is eating from it) and so on. ( )

A more personal and slower paced story this time around this really felt more intimate than any of the other books so far .
Some major (very major) events do happen in the bigger world, but this book focuses more on Spiders health issues and some of the ongoing changes and developments with the Filthy Assistants and how they are all effecting each other even as the war between Spider and the President amps up and starts to spiral out of control. ( )

Spider Jerusalem only has a year to live— and he intends to make the most of it. He gets to confront his own mortality, but with his usual perversity, he wants to take the President with him before he goes. This is another dark part of the storyline, but I am hopeful that it will make the resolution all the better when it gets there. ( )

An unexpected sort of arc, very sombre, not as frenetic as usual, as Spider gets some very bad news about his brain, one of the Filthy Assistants submits a story under Spider's name, and The Smiler strikes back. ( )