>>989432
An idealistic and unrealistic ending is the necessity of having a journalist as a hero. The Poirot style denouncement, the last, desperate attempt by the crook to get away and the eventual hauling them off to prison in a story with a passive, investigative protagonist is a classic literary move, and an easy out to keep the protag in character and make the story exciting whilst wrapping up the story, albeit at the expense of overall believability.
Anyway, Spider:
>lives in a world where microscopic cameras are everywhere, even in stray gusts of wind, yet never gets caught breaking the law
>has a gun which makes people violently sick, manages to get through numerous assassination attempts and combat situations by just being a better shot and more lucky than everyone else
>relies on "journalist's insurance" to get away with crimes
>routinely hurts people to get what he wants, as before, never gets caught
>relies on increasingly improbable and zany gadgets to succeed, and his opponents have never heard of them nor know how to check for them
Really, Spider is just a Gary Stu, always rising to the occasion, always having a new plan, a game changing gadget or secret tucked away. Transmetropolitan succeeds by hiding that fact away for long enough stretches that the reader can forget for a moment that it is effectively a superhero comic.
It's a pretty unrealistic story, for better or worse, and in retrospect is quite dated, reflecting a kind of retro, punky mid-90's vision of the future - this can be nice for nostalgia reasons though. It exhibits elegant world building and good pacing, at least, but the real-world sharp decline in the relevance of news media was something the author could not have predicted (that and the dominance of corporations), and is evidently unthinkable to him as an outcome for the future in spite of the fact that he presumes so many other trusted institutions will degenerate in the meantime, and upon re-reading, this is perhaps what dates the work most.
All things considered, there are a few good points about society and civilization tucked away, and it hails from a time when the left wasn't quite as left as it is now, so should be palatable to even those on the right, even as it endorses some of the left's points (muh melting pot, evil police) (as an aside, I think all politicians covered in the story are democrats, which is not strongly emphasized, but makes figures like Heller a bit strange). I'd say it's a good romp that is worth reading once, if only because criticising it takes a little more effort than modern trash and it has an earnest quality to it.