Reading the 2016 US presidential election through Transmetropolitan

ABSTRACT

On the day of Donald Trump’s election, Google recorded a spike in searches for Transmetropolitan, the science fiction series by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson published 15 years before. This article identifies possible reasons for this renewed interest by examining Transmetropolitan’s link to political satire and its use of American political history, building its narrative on canonical events which still serve to frame current events. The article then examines the nature of the online discourses tying the series to the 2016 US presidential election and to Donald Trump in particular, arguing that we can understand the difference between Transmetropolitan and political cartoons, and thus the specific appeal of the series, by taking into account the phenomenon of the ‘case memorable’.

KEYWORDS:

• Media
• politics
• science-fiction
• satire
• Donald Trump
• Warren Ellis
• Darick Robertson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The adventures of Green Lantern or Adam Strange, also published by DC, would be examples of such use.

2. Thomas Eagleton, McGovern’s running mate, had a psychiatric history, which he had not disclosed to the press or to McGovern, but was discovered in the days following his selection and led to his replacement by Sargent Shiver, two weeks after the Democratic convention. In Transmetropolitan, the outsider’s running mate is revealed by Spider Jerusalem to be an empty vessel, a clone created by a populist candidate in order to facilitate a secret alliance between two ostensibly antagonistic factions.

3. I am referencing here the issue number and the page as indicated in the original comic books, in the hope of making the reference accessible regardless of the platform on which the series is read.

4. Marco Rubio was still in contention but dropped out of the race on March 12 and John Kasich, though challenging the nomination for two more months, until May 4, never appeared able to challenge Trump and Cruz.

5. I have not come across ‘uninformed’ uses of Transmetropolitan images, in which the visual elements of the series would be severed from the original comics. However, these uses would be by definition very difficult to track down through text-based search engines, and it is entirely possible that I might have missed them.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicolas Labarre

Nicolas Labarre is an assistant professor at University Bordeaux Montaigne, France, where here he teaches US society and culture, comics and video games. He is the author of Heavy Metal, l’autre Métal Hurlant (2017), a transnational history of Heavy Metal magazine. He has written about political satire in MAD Magazine in the Nixon era, and has worked extensively on the topic of adaptation into comics.