Transmetropolitan #34

Transmetropolitan #34 arrives in 2000 with a cover that perfectly captures the series' biting tension: a half-skeletal, cybernetically enhanced figure tears open his jacket in a dark alley, framed against a propaganda mural proclaiming "a brighter today" — the irony hard to miss with huddled figures lurking in the shadows behind him and a flickering pamphlet reading "a new hope" at his feet. Darick Robertson's cover art lays the contradictions bare with gritty confidence, juxtaposing the City's hollow political cheerfulness against its street-level grime. Warren Ellis's "Gouge Away Part 1" promises exactly the kind of unflinching storytelling this Vertigo series built its reputation on.