When the alien secession movement runs up against a civil authority that’s anything but, crusading reporter Spider Jerusalem just has to be there! Plus, we celebrate the 100th episode of Vertiguys, Rob Gordon style. Happy holidays, everyone, and we’ll see you next year!
Show Notes
2:39 – I might have accidentally quoted Love Actually there.
4:25 – As we discussed in our last Transmetropolitan episode, Andre Ricciardi is a friend of Darick Robertson who served as the model for Spider Jerusalem.
5:35 – Helix lasted only from 1996 to 1998 and covered only the first 12 issues of Transmetropolitan. It did have some reason for existing – DC courted a number of science fiction and fantasy authors to collaborate in making the imprint a success, but most of its titles that weren’t cancelled ended up under the Vertigo umbrella anyway.
5:57 – This year, as we’ve discussed, DC has mothballed the Vertigo line and is going all in on DC Black Label instead, despite their being… basically the same thing.
8:23 – Sean was not, as I first thought, misusing the word “allay,” which means “soothe,” but rather being inscrutably sarcastic.
9:43 – Spider has a line here: “You think professional people are afraid of guns? Do you?” This can be read simply as Spider bragging about his own fearless pursuit of the Truth, or the professionals he’s referring to could be the police, but we also thought it might imply that guns are much more commonplace, and facing them endemic to many more professions, in this future.
11:02 – Destructo Vermin Gobsmack, a.k.a. Martin Peters, a.k.a. Patrick McDonell, a punk rocker turned music manager turned real estate developer who Constantine remembers from his Mucous Membrane days, turned up in Hellblazer Annual #1 and again in Hellblazer #33, “Sundays are Different”.
11:47 – In another incredibly uncomfortable piece of dialogue, Spider taunts Fred that all the transients in Angels 8 are “failures” because they haven’t fully transitioned yet.
17:02 – As we saw in the first issue, Spider uses jumpstart pills to boost his intelligence and make writing easier. It’s not far off from the way that adderall is often abused by students today.
18:18 – Ed Gein killed two women in Plainfield, Wisconsin between 1954 and 1957, and may also have been responsible for the death of his brother in 1944, in addition to stealing many other bodies from graves in order to fashion household objects from the remains. Gein is considered to be the inspiration for the fictional killers Buffalo Bill, Norman Bates, and Leatherface.
24:41 – Sean liked the adherence to aesthetics that has Spider banging out stories on an old-fashioned typewriter instead of a computer, even if his future typewriter has some added features.
31:31 – I meant to say that Spider stopped the crackdown, rather than the riot.
51:28 – Sadly, we are not on Stitcher, though that’s coming soon. The real reason Sean tried to install Stitcher on our mother’s cellphone was so she could listen to the Washington Post’s Presidential podcast.
53:17 – “Nothing clean” is a reference to The Terminator, although I don’t know why Sean was doing Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein voice instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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