Transmet Panorama

Now that the Transmetropolitan Art Book has been out for a good long while, I’d like to show you my contribution to its majesty.

So, I started with some brainstorming sessions with some friends. The initial idea was to deface a WalMart with some black paint, sticking 3rd eyes on every goddamn smiley face we could find. That idea was quickly chucked out in favor of some kind of massive graffiti installation, trying to recreate a portion of the future San Franciscan landscape right here in good ‘ol modern day New York.

The completed book looks freaking gorgeous.

After some plotting and wandering about the city I found the location. Some long hours of photoshop, scanned versions of Transmet, and a visit to Kinko’s later I had myself some posters. In retrospect I wish I’d made so much more. There’s so much potential with layering advertisement on top of advertisement until it becomes a massive cluttered jumble of incomprehensible throbbing gristle. Still, there’s a little golden nugget of an idea inside of this piece that I’ll always cherish.

I’ve already harped on about how eerie it was that no one batted an eye at two young punks slapping up posters in downtown Manhattan in the middle of the day. Maybe people are just so inured to this cheap brand of rebellion it takes a coup and a few race riots to divert their daily course from gym to bodega. More probably it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to make comment. It wasn’t their wall after all.

You can find the remainder of my poster designs on Flickr and a big, unobstructed version of my panorama here. Be sure to pick up the Art Book. The proceeds from it go to the Heroes Initiative, helping retired comic book artists get medical aid for the myriad of ailments that a lifetime in comics tends to accrue (mostly bad backs and arthritic hands) and the CBLDF, which defends comics books as an artistic medium with the right to express any idea in any form.