By the Cover

I bought a comic based on its cover the other day:

I'd been planning on checking out Vault Comics for a while, but as real life has ratcheted up, my energy for comic shopping has dwindled.

But then I saw this, an obvious homage to one of my favorite books and characters ever, the first issue from the Helix imprint (before Helix was swallowed up by Vertigo and one of the Big Two) of Transmetropolitan:

It was labeled as an ode to Geoff Darrow, which I can understand.

The comic itself follows a self-proclaimed professional guinea pig, a person who subjects themselves to drug testing from pharmaceutical companies as they try to search out a mythological city that...is special...I can't remember that well.

I used "they" as a pronoun instead of "she" or "he" because neither the character nor the writer nor the artist is transparent about the gender of the main character, and that's pretty interesting from my standpoint. Maybe not for everyone, but for someone who'd never purchased Vault comics before and did solely based on the Transmet cover homage, there's a good chance that reader wouldn't be turned away by that.