"Post No. 550!"

"Tell you how coincidence, "E.S.P." (whatever) works. It's real subtile.

Today as I drove to our local, little flea market, I passed a laundrymat and I had to recall how, when I was a kid of 15 or so, there was this old man who had a "junk" shop there (which had been later torn down to build the laundrymat). And one day while looking at his wares, I came across a stack of nine copies of Amazing Spider-man #9 (1964), one of which was totally coverless, and the other eight all missing their front covers. The guy wanted a nickle each for them, so I ended up buying the stack.

Later on today I walked downtown to wander around in the Hertiage Festival, which is a celebration this town puts on each year, and one of the stores had a yard sale running inside of it. Of course I walked in to see what they had, and what would be starring me right in the face, but THIS. ("Odd, ain't it?")

Well I finally got that full set of the DC-Milestone title, Xombi in the mail yesterday. Nice complete run of issues #'s 0, 1 thru 21, and all in VFN-NR.Minty conditions. I'll eventually get around to reading all of those, but it'll be a while since I'm still wading thru that full run of the DC-Vertigo Transmetropolitan written by Warren Ellis.

I have read the first trade paperback which collected issues #'s 1 thru 3, plus both of the specials, and perhaps a half a dozen odd issues that I had before I acquired this complete run.

This first collection tells how the central character, "Spider Jerusalem", had abandoned the city and was living quite like a hermit in the wilderness. Rather than the clean shaven version we're all so accustomed to seeing, he first appears as a bit of a naked, wildman with long, stringly, unkept hair and beard, and appears to have not bathed in quite a while.

The tale begins as he received a notice from his publishing company that he'll be sued if he doesn't send them books he's already been paid to write, which forces him to come back to "the city", and clean up his act a bit as he's already spent all of the advanced funds from that deal. He gets a job writing a column for the newspaper, The Word, who gives him pretty much unlimited credit and an apartment when he uses a device something on the level of a particle "shower", and the settings are perhaps set a bit too high since it strips he completely of all body hair!

Then he obtains the eyewear so unique to the character, which is, in reality, a recording camera, and starts out to find material for his first piece.

What he discovers is a group of individuals who are using genetic engineering to transform themselves into beings more alien than human. The attempted extermination of these people by the law enforcement is what ends up being the prime subject of his material to write about in his first column.

I can't give anything but an excellant rating to anything written by Ellis that is NOT mainstream comic book material. He style of writing is geared towards the extreme understanding of such a nature and this, my favorite of his series, quite shows his genius.