Mitchell Royce

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Mitchell Royce is a fictional character in Transmetropolitan, a comic book published by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics.

Royce is the editor of the Word, a major newspaper in the City, and thus is Spider Jerusalem's boss. He also hires Channon Yarrow and Yelena Rossini to act as Spider's long-suffering assistants.

Spider and Royce's antagonistic but fruitful writer-editor relationship goes back many years; at the time of the War of Verbals (a heated exchange between the British and French over keeping French as the first language of France,) Royce was only an assistant editor and Spider was not yet at the peak of his notoriety. However, after Spider became involved in political journalism and released a reportage book called 'Shot in the Face', his popularity reached its peak and his creativity dried up. Unable to write or function in the City and adored by the very people his writing decried, he retreated to the Mountain to escape the pressure to perform.

After five long years, however, after a phone-call from the 'whore-hopping editor' of his books, and strapped for cash, Spider returned to the city and contacted his old editor, Royce, in the hope of a steady contract job and the luxuries this would entail until he could sort out the book deal. However, as Spider stumbled from one high profile scoop to the next, he found himself being treated to better and better accommodations and his notoriety returned.

One of the main themes of the series was the relationship between Spider and Royce. Whilst the two share an antagonism that is almost a caricature of modern journalism, the two know how to get the other to co-operate, and Royce has saved Spider's life and reputation several times during the series (most notably in Year Five, in which he provides Spider with key, hard-earned leads to help Spider rebuild his case against Gary "The Smiler" Callahan). In issue #32, Spider mentions Royce in an interview, describing him as "a good man"; high praise by Spider's standards. On leaving The Word, he also tells Royce that he "only ever did right" by him.

Royce is a chain smoker, often seen with an entire pack of cigarettes lit in his mouth at once - typically as a response to Spider's demands or lateness of his column. His favorite pick-up line is "Call me Mitchell Royce, Two-Fisted Editor." He mentions on at least two occasions that whenever he attends a party with Spider, he contracts some form of disease (which, of course, he blames on Spider). He is divorced, and he claims at one point that at least one of his previous wives is a prostitute. His most uttered line is "Where's my fucking column?" to Spider, with varying levels of annoyance and emphasis; so ingrained is the phrase in the context of their relationship that Spider has occasionally pointed out when Royce failed to start their conversation with it.