18) Transmetropolitan: Tales of Human Waste, by Warren Ellis

I got this because I had picked up recommendations for Ellis' Transmetropolitan series from various sources, and this fairly slim volume was numbered #0 in the shop, so I guessed it might be important introductory or prefatory material. Well, if it is, I'm not sure I can be bothered to follow up with the rest of the series. The book starts with a short story about how much protagonist Spider Jerusalem hates Christmas and other people, and it's then a series of several dozen single-shot images by different leading comics artists, each ostensibly illustrating a different instalment of Jerusalem's misanthropic newspaper column. Some of the illustrations, as you would hope, are indeed striking, but the combined effort is neither thought-provoking nor funny, and I began wondering pretty soon why I was supposed to care about this unpleasant character or his unpleasant opinions. Perhaps if I'd read the rest of Transmetropolitan I'd know the answer, but based on this I am not going to rush to do so.