Citypunk: Transgeographies in Science Fiction Comics
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In the history of cyber-fiction in comics there have been bizarre cities with both utopian and dystopian foundations. Mostly located in the future, those urbanscapes are built in space to be recognizable from the present. In fact, they are inevitably linked to variations of our everyday territories. In comics like Dan O’Bannon and Moebius’ The Long Tomorrow (1975) or Warren Ellis and Darick Richardson’s Transmetropolitan series (1997-2002), cities are characterized and designed as merged environments and inverted punk territories. Urban places become sites of addiction and starvation while technological enterprises continue rising. Mainly set in Europe and North America, the future exposed in these science fiction comics seems rather ungracious and grotesque. Metropolises have grown overscaled and overrated as Paris, London, the generic Cité or The City (a continental compound of New York City, Chicago and San Francisco) have turned into recognizable cities with disturbances and awkward morphologies. Banal places and exquisite architectures become obsolete and opposite versions of themselves. Economic conflicts or politic scandals bring social anarchy and urban-biological ambiguity to these places and their inhabitants. In science fiction comics, protagonists like Pete Club, Alcide Nikopol, Spider Jerusalem or Michael (Desolation) Jones drift through the streets, towers and trash, solving mysteries, testing drugs, and exploring vicious media circles. Paradoxically, these fictions produce a common and complex sense of disenchantment in human and urban promises, as if fiction was just a symbol of our monstrous realities. Mostly based in science fiction comics, this chapter aims at revealing resonances and representations of the contemporary human and urban aberrancies within the graphic genre.