Warren Ellis

In order to shed light on the current worldwide success of Marvel's comic-book inspired Endgame and the overall rise of “heroes in tights” in cinematic as well as televised form for the last decade or so, one must consider a phenomenon that revolutionized the US comics' mainstream industry, the British Invasion, which started in the early 1980's and lasted for about thirty years. It also seems to have played a key role in the recent transmedial success of comics, and its influence seems to grow even more as the quality of those productions improves.

Transmetropolitan, a long form graphic novel series ( 1997-2002), is the story of Spider Jerusalem, a gonzo journalist seeking to expose the truth in a futuristic world of lies. The first six issues, collected in a trade edition entitled 'Back on the Street', see Spider returning home to an unnamed east coast American megacity to resume his career as a journalist. In issue six, Spider and his assistant Channon attend a New Religious Movement (NRM) convention, held because a new religion emerges every six minutes. The city is full of technological marvels, allowing its denizens to be constantly connected or constantly distracted. Houses and apartments have mechanical 'makers' to reconstitute matter, creating new from old. The city's citizens can do and be what they wish, allowing seekers to join or start a NRM; that these religions are still created and are popular in a society that seemingly has it all, permits the exploration how NRMs in society work.

This paper investigates Transmetropolitan's author Warren Ellis' statement that "Science fiction is social fiction" to anchor the future NRMs in the series to ideas he found in his own world. The paper attempts to understand how NRMs created in the twenty-first century, were in answer to societal ills or injustices that required solutions. Transmetropolitan is set in an unknown future, but the society it portrays can be utilized to explore twenty-first century first world culture. NRMs were seen as a problem in the 1960s when first studied by sociologists, but are now regarded as a normal part of human social interaction, and have been facilitated by advances in Internet and communications technologies. Using Transmetropolitan as a guide for how we could view NRMs in the future, also allows us to explore the way that NRMs are designed to solve the ills of modernity (what was modern for Jim Jones, for example, reflects the fears and anxieties of specific times and places), which in turn reflects thoughts, attitudes and beliefs that become inherent in new religious movements.