Live Shades must not be limited to Spider Jerusalem, as his maker created him a pair of them without question. He specifies them for still photography, with "2 gig onboard" and keyed to his optic nerve, with standard control. Over the course of the series he does everything by tell his shades to snap a photo ("Picture.") to set them to capture motion. The shades are capable of taking widescreen photographs as well. I imagine that in the age of Transmetopolitan, Live Shades could also be created to handle video.

The strange appearance of his shades can be attributed to his Godti 101 Maker, which came equipped with self-made hallucinogenic hardware upgrades. The right lens is a narrow green rectangle, while the left lens is a red circle.

In Spider's first journalist life, he also had a pair of live shades. When he visits Theirry Bernier in Paris, France] (issue #11), we see Spider wearing a pair of shades that look similar to his modern sunglasses. The lens frames are both rectangular, and are the same color. Behind the left lens, however, is a circular dark-red lens. On the next page (p3), we see that the dark-red lens is indeed a TV monitor, as he watches the BBC newsfeed. However, on page 6, Spider is standing up, with the "live shades" on, and there is no dark-red left lens. Though one can assume that they had other capabilities, the flashback doesn't give us any more information than that.


Sources: Transmetropolitan: Back On The Street, digital archive of Transmetropolitan Issue 11 (Freeze Me With Your Kiss Part 2 of 3. I own Lust For Life, but it's easier to look at JPGs at 2AM than it is to search for a TPB])

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