Transmetropolitan/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• The number of editors Transmetropolitan had over the course of its run: 6.
  The number of skulls on sticks in front of Spider's house, helpfully labeled "These were editors": 6.
• In the grim, weird future of Transmetropolitan, there are people who sort of merge with aliens (of the grey variety), who are called transients. When Loon Shia first read it, he simply figured that they were "between bodies", that their biology were transient. But lately, today in fact, he came to another conclusion: Since changing your DNA would become such a stigma and base for Fantastic Racism, they would find it difficult to get jobs and places to live and whatnot. So they would become transients in the more everyday sense as well.
  • My Fridge Brilliance hit with reading the above. Today, people dye their hair wild colors, get piercings and tattoos, and completely modify their bodies (implanted horns, forked tongues, stretched earlobes, etc.) in order to proclaim themselves outside mainstream society, thus forcing themselves to live outside mainstream society as they are unable to get "normal" jobs and, in most cases, ends up with them living in semi-poverty. However, these sorts of body mods are normal and seen everywhere in the background of almost every scene. Transients are pretty much the exact same thing in Transmetropolitan, both choosing to live outside mainstream society and complaining that mainstream society rejects them.
• The One Percent thing seems like a little bit of a cop-out, until you read the series a second time. The dude at the Farsight Reservation explicitly says that they think they've found a way around the I-Pollen side effects, and that Spider will almost certainly be fine. Assuming Warren Ellis intended this as Foreshadowing, it's actually fairly clever. Remember, this is the second time in the series that Spider is exposed to I-Pollen. When he starts exhibiting symptoms, we naturally assume that either A) the Farsight guy was wrong or B) it was the first exposure (to unaltered pollen) that caused his illness, with the second having no effect at all. In fact, it probably was this second exposure that caused it, but this was altered pollen with a better chance of recovery.
  • It may actually be better than that - all Spider's symptoms may well have been caused by the second exposure curing the first exposure.