The following article contains spoilers for the entire run of Transmetropolitan

By Jed McPherson — World building is difficult. If you scrimp on the details your world feels hollow and empty. You go too heavy, and you may as well be writing a Dungeons and Dragon’s source book. Now, if you’re working on a series set in the real world, you can cheat it a little. After all, we all live in the real world — it’s familiar. But for fantasy and sci-fi, you’ve got to do the work.

Today I want to take a look at Darick Robertson and Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, and how it handles this delicate balancing act.

The first issue of Transmet is dense. It’s filled with ideas and concepts and ideas. But it doesn’t beat you round the head with them. Instead the bulk of the issue is devoted to two things; firstly establishing Spider as a character and secondly setting up the book’s status quo.

Spider returns to the city, gets a job at The Word, and decides what his first column is going to be. Sure, there’s a bunch of other stuff —Spider blows up his favorite bar with a bazooka (we’ve all been there), for example. But those are the main beats — the signal.

The majority of the world building, however, is done in the background. Now I don’t mean that literally (though, as you’ll see later, Robertson’s backgrounds do a lot of the heavy lifting). Just that the noise of the book, the stuff that you don’t have to pay as close to attention to, stuff that might be considered fluff or filler, is actually helping to build a sense of place and foreshadowing future stories.

Take for example this page.

Spider flicks through a couple of news stories before getting to the one about Fred Christ that catches his attention. Now, this does two things. Firstly it adds verisimilitude. After all it’d be a little coincidental if Spider turned on the TV and immediately got the info he needed. But it also introduces a bunch of concepts and ideas without beating you over the head with them. That’s the noise. It may seem inconsequential but it all comes back later in the series.

Looking at the revivals, for example. At key turning points in the story we keep coming back to them.

In issue eight (“Another Cold Morning”), we’re introduced to the revivals properly through Mary. It’s one of the best single issues in the entire run. A beautiful short story that neatly encapsulates one of the key themes of the entire book. You can have all the tech in the world but without humanity, without compassion, without care – it’s just another outlet for neglect and cruelty.

Then later we find out that it’s a revival that carried out the assassination that leads to the election of the series big bad – the Smiler. The entire second act of the series stems from the actions of a revival. And it’s Mary herself that provides the key evidence that helps expose said murder and overthrow The Smiler.

Beginning. Middle. And end. There’s a revival there for all of them. And all of this from a throwaway line in the first issue. It demonstrates a commitment to world building and foreshadowing that a lot of comics could learn from.

And it’s not the only detail. The reservations. The foglets. Even Fred Christ, the Alien Sex Messiah himself – they’re all in the first issue and they all keep coming back again and again. It makes you wonder if there isn’t somewhere an entire arc about sex werewolves that was cut for space/decency.

And it’s not just Ellis’ dialog. Throughout the series Robertson layers in a prodigious number of sight gags and Easter eggs into his backgrounds. This level of detail consciously rewards careful examination. At its busiest it can be almost like a page out of a Where’s Wally book (or Waldo for all our American readers).

If that sounds like a criticism it is not meant as one. The world of Transmet is a loud, busy, and chaotic place and Robertson’s backgrounds reinforce this. But he doesn’t just fill the backgrounds with meaningless noise. No, he is constantly seeding future stories and reinforcing the ideas in Ellis’ background dialog.

Scattered throughout the first issue, hidden in the background, are little references to the reservations, to Angels 8, to the foglets. But perhaps most interestingly there’s a small poster of a grinning politician with the caption “I Love You” in big friendly letters. Now at a first glance this might not seem like much but on a reread it’s clear that this is supposed to be the Smiler – the eventual series big bad who doesn’t make a proper appearance for a good few volumes.

And that’s just in the first issue. If we expand our scope a little we see that Ellis and Robertson even take this approach with new characters. We meet Channon (the first of Spider’s Filthy assistants) during the Angels 8 riot in issue 3. She’s just a face in the crowd. An incidental character. Background noise.

But when she’s reintroduced a few issues down the way we’ve already spent time with her and as a result her introduction carries more weight than it would if she had been pulled from the ether.

This duality of purpose, letting something build character and seed future stories or create a sense of place while foreshadowing themes or ideas gives Ellis and Robertson the space to play. They can explore tangents, introduce concepts at their leisure without it ever feeling unnecessary or worse, self-indulgent.

Transmet is first and foremost a book about journalism and journalism is about the details. The majority of Spider’s columns are angry rants, filled with profanity and run- on sentences. They’re fun but he’s at his most effective when he slows down, when he pays attention to his environment, to the people. When he stops being Spider and starts being a journalist.

There’s the aforementioned “Another Cold Morning” but there’s also the three-issue sequence (issues 40-42) towards the back half of the book where we see Spider cover the history of the city, its mental health crisis, and (in perhaps its most harrowing issue) child prostitution. Now, in a less capable creative team’s hands, these three issues could come off as unnecessary or at their worst preachy. But Ellis and Robertson layer in important nuggets of narrative into their social commentary.

It comes back to the duality of purpose. Ellis wants to tell you things about our world but he also knows it’s important to tell you a good story. To make you laugh. To make you feel. Pretty impressive for a comic that’s got a gun that makes people shit themselves.

In Issue #4 there’s a scene where Spider tells his new assistant Channon to go get them monkey burgers. She initially balks, because, well, she wants to be a journalist not a glorified gofer. But Spider stops her and tells her that she’s going to get them lunch but she’s also going to tell him everything she saw on the way “because if you’re going to be a real journalist, you’re going to need to learn how to look.”

In this moment it’s like Ellis himself is teaching us to read the comic book (and comics in general). He’s telling us to pay attention and keep your eyes open. Because all the details matter.

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Guest Comics Anatomy writer Jed McPherson is a comic book writer. He wrote Transmissions and Deadbeat. His latest book, The Show, is funding on Kickstarter right now.

Next month, Comics Anatomy mastermind Harry Kassen will be back.