There's a lot of reasons to love Warren Ellis, but here's one of the biggest: His work continues to defy expectation. At any given moment, he's got a prose novel, several ongoing comics series for the Big Two, a couple miniseries for upstart independent publishers, TV series pitches, direct-to-video animated movie scripts, and a burgeoning empire to oversee in his guise as Internet Jesus.

Throughout it all, a fierce portrait emerges of Ellis' thematic obsessions: Technology and its impact on the culture, standing up for the "truth" and what that "means," life as lived beyond the fringe of society, and dirty-mouthed women. Brining together all these and more is Transmetropolitan, a sixty-issue series for DC's Vertigo imprint (and previously launched as part of the short-lived Helix line). Now collected in ten trade paperbacks, Transmetropolitan tells the story of Spider Jerusalem, a vitriolic columnist in a future America where not much has changed--it's just gotten worse, and louder. Over the course of the series, Spider launches an all-out offensive on the U.S. presidency, proving not only that the pen is truly mightier than the sword, but that the bowel disruptor trumps all.

Ellis is also regarded as a key architect of "widescreen" comics, a movement innovated in the 1990s to decompress comics storytelling through use of expansive artwork and dynamic visuals. He employed the widescreen effect in another of his seminal works, The Authority for Wildstorm Comics. More recently, Ellis has helped create a new subformat of comics, which he calls "slimline," featuring 16 pages of story and "backmatter" consisting of prose pieces and letters. Priced at $1.99, the format is currently only in use at Image Comics, where it is used on Ellis' hard-boiled detective series Fell and the Matt Fraction spy romp Casanova.

In all of his work, Ellis demonstrates a desire to push against the boundaries of comics storytelling--its content, its structure, and its themes. He does so while uncorking gripping and action-packed yarns that draw in readers even as they tweak expectations.