Random Warren Ellis Graphic Novels found at local library

I haven't read any Warren Ellis before, but the constant attention he gets has finally resulted in me checking out a bunch of his stuff from the library.

(spoilers all)

JLA: New Maps of Hell

The weakest of the bunch.

Kind of Star Trek-esque plot of a faux-devil with simulated/imitation personal hells for all the super-heros.

It's kind of weird when the story calls attention to incredibly long spans of time that preceded the current generation- were those spans completely devoid of superheros? Is there something about the present that makes hundreds or thousands of anomalous people and aliens become extremely powerful, while advanced alien civilizations thousands of years ago had nothing?


Orbiter

Cool build-up, Baxter-esque levels of moping over the decline of NASA. But the ending has no closure- off into the universe- so what? And why was it the shuttle didn't use anti-gravity to land and avoid killing all the people?


(forget the title)

Sort of like Angel, but with ex-CIA/intelligence agents confined to LA instead of demons and vampires. Or maybe not. The protagonist is sort of like Spider Jerusalem with the thinness and drug use.


Transmetropolitan 0, 1, 2, & 10

These are the ones BoingBoing is raving about the most, and are really good. The one aspect I'm not quite sure I buy is the supposed popularity of Spider Jerusalem's columns in contrast with the city that is shown- he claims his readers are the 'New Scum', but it doesn't seem quite convincing that the world so apathetic, dysfunctional, and violent has also a bunch of readers swayed by Spider's journalistic integrity. Sure it probably happens all the time in real world but this world is much one-track that it can't quite contain such disparity.