Rick, any idea when he book with be available on amazon.ca?

It's only listed as a pre order. June 14th is listed as the date, but still it's only a pre order.

Another great review, this time from CHUD.com:

RATING:


Can’t Get No
(Vertigo)


By Mark Wheaton


Jay McInerney tells a story that when he mentioned to Gore Vidal, soon after 9/11, that he was planning to write a book about it, Vidal replied, “Wait five years.” Earlier this year, we got McInerney’s first truly great book in some time, “The Good Life” and Vidal’s advice couldn’t have been better taken.


In the world of comic books, the reaction to 9/11 was swift with the big guns releasing tribute books to the police and fire fighters of New York as well as independent books collecting various stories of reflection that was filled with raw emotion and reaction. But now, five years later, writer/artist Rick Veitch comes along with an incredibly challenging and layered meditation on the events of 9/11 in the form of an epic poem that recalls Homer, but most interestingly, “Queen Mab,” one of Percy Bryce Shelley’s reflections on the State of Things that became a rallying point for the English working-class opposition (well, the Chartists) even years after it was written.


We’re introduced to Chad Roe on the day of his greatest triumph – his super-permanent marker company is turning super-profitable and everything’s coming up roses…until an unexpected side effect of the markers, the fact that they become the favorite for graffiti artists and taggers, destroys them overnight. Frustrated and distraught, Chad ends up drunk and subsequently attacked by two female guerilla artists who use his markers to cover him from head to toe in half-Maori/half-Samoan-looking tribal art that effectively makes him a pariah to anyone who sees him in public.


And then 9/11 happens.


What happens next to Chad is almost indescribable (so, um…go to the comic shop and pick it up for y’erself). He goes on an epic journey that’s equal parts road and acid trip. Coupling striking visuals (the kinds of things we’ve seen Ralph Steadman conjure in response to Hunter S. Thompson’s writings) and a breathtaking, stream-of-consciousness poem, Roe descends into a surrealist/nightmarish vision of America – assaulting its icons left and right – as he tries to come to terms with his condition and the feeling of madness that sweeps through him after witnessing the destruction of the twin towers and the violent patriotic zeal it immediately inspires.


By the time Roe reaches the end of his journey, the reader is nothing short of exhausted. Veitch infuses his book with so many thoughts, words and images (from the cartoonishly funny to the profanely vile) that “Can’t Get No” is the kind of thing that takes several reads to take everything in. Though that may make it sound dense, it is similarly a page-turner that refuses to be put down. Poetry, for the most part, has been relegated to funerals, weddings and graduations beyond a few opera fan-like aficionados who still push the medium forward and retain a small, easily encroached on section of Barnes & Noble. With “Can’t Get No,” Rick Veitch proves that it can be as powerfully vibrant and devastating today as it was in the hey-day of “Original Sex Pistol”/Dracula Lord Byron or Shelley himself.

I'm so pleased to see the multitude of positive reviews for the book, Rick. Let's hope that translates into big, bazooming sales.

And you and Gary Erskine on a book together? Count me in, and I don't even know what it's about yet.

Sir Jon

A brief one from the AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN:

“Can’t Get No” by Rick Veitch (DC, $19.99) - A trippy, tone poem meditation on Sept. 11, the dangers of permanent markers, the big lie that was the 1990s economic boom, a thinly disguised Burning Man and the existential crises we face everyday without knowing about until something really goes wrong. It’s the sort of measured, intimate weirdness than comics do amazingly well.

Recine?


P.S. Veitch you did Tecknophage and worked for epic?


Wow.

From Utne Reader on-line:

You don't often expect a graphic novel to be a challenging read, but Rick Veitch's Can't Get No (DC Comics imprint Vertigo, 2006) is one of those rare finds that furrows the brow even as it entertains. The story is set in New York on and around September 11, 2001, and gives new, puzzling, surprising meanings to the day's events and after-effects. The absence of spoken language forces the drawings to the forefront as the main storytelling mechanism, Veitch's narration, is not really narration at all but a kind of dreamy, philosophical voice-over that deepens the meaning of the images but does little to clarify them. Veitch's illustrations carry the plot and define the characters all alone, a testament to the author's artistic prowess. -- Rachel Jenkins

I still wannit! Alas, I have no decent comic store nearby. Hopefully I'll go home on leave in a week, and I'll try then.

Chris,
Order it from Paneltopanel.net. He's got the free signed and tipped in color plate.

Rick,

Reread CAN'T GET NO. It is powerful.
There's a scene at the end that really gets to me.
It's the one with the ravers watching the video screens, and the towers rise out of the dust.

It is exactly like a recurring dream I had after Sept. 11. Gives me a gut-ache just to think about it. I was working in NY that day, and ended up staying at the Hilton by Rockefeller Center for two days, as I was unable to go home for work-related reasons. I spent the nights on the phone with my wife, 25 miles away on Long Island. The same stench of burning rubber and plastic that filled the hotel also filled our home.

The recurring dream started in the hotel and continued for many months. I always felt it was a mass, communal dream, that I was not the only one having it. Like a wish that everyone shared. The scene in CAN'T GET NO confrimed it for me.

Early in 2002 I cut a video version of the
recurring dream.
Even though it is incomplete (the dream continued back about a thousand more years), actually seeing it did the trick, and I stopped having the dream.

I don't expect everyone to appreciate it. Not everyone I showed it to did. But I feel like sharing it as that page at the end of Rick's book gave me that same feeling of sadness and hope.

Well done.

Sorry, couldn't get the url thing to work.