Testing out the new Google News Archive, I found this little bullet review in the Atlanta Constitution; part of a larger article on graphic novels. No link because its in the pay per view stacks.

Can't Get No. By Rick Veitch. Vertigo, $19.99. Mature readers (violence, nudity, sexuality).

Free of dialogue but far from wordless, this odyssey through Underbelly America builds impressive resonance after a shaky outset. Writer- illustrator Rick Veitch uses narrative captions that relate ironically to his often grotesque drawings. Early examples read like bad verse ("They force-feed us lyrics written down in Tin Pan Alley"). As businessman Chad Roe goes from financial ruin and a surprise tattoo, through the Sept. 11 attacks and beyond, Veitch's average with his hit-and-miss commentary improves. Likewise, his people look less freakish by the time this tale is told -- perhaps because he invests them with a semblance of true heart.

Found this from Cory!! Strode over on BartCop Entertainment :

Cory!! Strode On Graphic Novels

'Can't Get No'
"Even as it opens, the eye might recoil."


When it comes to the events of 9/11, the comic book artistic response has been slow in coming, much like the response in movies. Usually when a large tragedy happens, there is an immediate reaction, and then, as time goes on, a response by artists to what happened, and comics aren't any different. In the month after 9/11, there were benefit books from every major comic company, and a number of smaller ones. Marvel even tried a series in which firefighters and policemen were the main characters, not super-heroes, but it did poorly and was quietly canceled. Movies are starting to deal with it, but they are sticking to the heroic stories of that day, rather than the effect on the rest of us.

Rick Veitch has put out what could be the first true artistic response in the graphic novel arena with "Can't Get No." Veitch has long been an artist who pushes at the barriers of what is acceptable in comics, using dream-like images and unconventional storytelling in his work, and is probably best known for his revisionist superhero work in "Bratpack" which told an adult story of super-hero "sidekicks" that delves into psychological and sexual issues, and quitting his run on the long-running series "Swamp Thing" after editors scrapped a story in which the character met Jesus during the crucifixion. His fascination with dreams led to a self-published series where he illustrated the lucid dreams he experienced called "Roaring Rick's Rare Bit Fiends".

It is that series that came to mind as I read "Can't Get No". The book is unconventionally laid out, only half as tall as a normal graphic novel, but is still the same width. As I read the story, it took a while to understand the kind of storytelling Veitch was doing, as the captions seem to have little to do with the story being told by the pictures. While it tells the story of an executive whose company is destroyed when the permanent markers end up being permanent on human skin, the captions read as a poem that overlays the art, seemingly unconnected, but running in parallel.

However, as I turn the pages, things become more clear. The art carries the story effortlessly, showing the lead character, Chad Roe, as he becomes a victim of his all-too permanent markers after a night of drinking in Soho, taking the reader through the events of 9/11, and Roe's personal breakdown mirrors with a breakdown suffered by the country itself. The story has a dream-like feel to it, with the reality of events being questionable as we follow Roe's journey. As I read, the counterbalance of the thoughts expressed in the captions provides a deeper thought process behind the story. What at first seems overly complex and hard to read becomes clear about halfway through the book, and during a second reading, the impact of Veitch's poetic captions hits harder than on a first reading.

The artist leaves it up to the reader to decide what it means, what is real, and what is a nightmare, mirroring how many people said at the time of 9/11 that it all seemed like a bad dream. Roe, even with the absence of dialog, becomes a fully rounded character through Veitch's use of body language and storytelling style, using symbolic imagery as well as the reader's own knowledge of other stories involving characters who are scarred in some way and have to live apart from normal society.

"Can't Get No" gives no easy answers, doesn't rely on conventional storytelling, and avoids the jingoistic response that most fiction I have read connected with 9/11 has been connected to. It is a meditation on events big and small, the meaning of art, and an examination of personal reality in a way that couldn't have been possible in either prose or film. It is not an easy book to read, but I feel it is an important one, and shows that Veitch is capable of great works, this being one of them.

"Can't Get No" gets a 5 out of 5 and is highly recommended.

This piece isn't so much a review of CAN'T GET no as a look at how various Vermonters have reacted to the 9/11 attacks over the years. I guess I'm the token artist.

Rutland Herald.

From The Metrobeat.

Tattoo You
Rick Veitch goes looking for America.


BY MICHAEL BROWN


There are people who consider silent movies the ultimate artistic expression of the cinema. Sound, these people say, was a weight that strangled moving pictures of all that was unique to the medium. Instead of finding an inventive way to indicate love through editing, for instance, sound meant the characters could just come out and say it, like in a play, and the medium was poorer for it. Only the most pretentious dork would argue this point today, of course, but it has at least some merit, both literally and, as you will see, as an extended metaphor.

Comics are, to state the bleedingly obvious, not movies, but that hasn’t stopped scores of comics creators from creating comics in the guise of movies that don’t move. And why? The comic book is its own medium, with its own conventions, with its own unique ability to express. Over the years, luminaries like George Herriman, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby have embraced these unique qualities and shown what heights comics are capable of reaching when given the proper respect. It is taking a while for them to receive all of the mainstream respect they deserve, but things are getting better. When Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s brilliant League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was devoured by Hollywood and unscrupulously shat onto celluloid, movie reviewers accused the filmmakers of dumbing down the original work – a sign that comics have at last achieved some level of critical esteem.

It would be weird, then, and a little presumptuous, to attempt to reinvent the medium. But that’s just what Rick Veitch – himself a giant in the comics industry who has collaborated with Moore on a number of projects and produced some terrific work on his own – has tried to do with his new graphic novel, Can’t Get No.

The story concerns a businessman named Chad Roe. As the story opens, he’s fabulously wealthy, but his permanent-marker company is soon dealt a mighty litigious blow that causes its stock price to fall to three cents. Chad immediately starts popping pills and draining booze, but his co-worker, Quint, thinks maybe the situation isn’t so grim; he wants to talk things over, so he schedules a meeting at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th. But the night before, two young women find Chad passed out in an intoxicated stupor and drag him to their apartment. They proceed to draw all over him with one of his own Eter-No-Mark ultra-permanent markers. The trouble is, marks made with these markers are indelible (thus the six-billion-dollar lawsuit) and Chad is now covered from head to foot in an ultra-permanent tattoo. He tries – and fails – to make his appointment. He lives. And after the attacks, Chad, like Peter Fonda before him, goes looking for America; unlike Fonda, he finds it everywhere.

Now that’s a pretty straightforward summary. Aside from the full-body tattoo, there isn’t anything particularly weird about it. It’s a road novel. Fine. But what’s weird is the execution. Veitch has pared down the comics medium’s resemblance to other media and accentuated the elements that make it unique. There is no dialogue in Can’t Get No; there are only captions, which are both omnipresent and rarely relevant in any immediate way.

The following quote has not been altered for affect: “Skimming the skin from the gruel of existence... We find at the bottom of our beggar’s bowl... an unblinking eye. It gazes into infinity... Observing space and time and solid matter... As a Liliputian subset... of some eternal multidimensional hierarchy.” And so on, for the length of the work. These Captain Beefheart-style ruminations border on incoherency, and you could go mad trying to unravel them. It’s possible, though, that Veitch doesn’t mean for us to.

Can’t Get No functions, in some ways, like a song. The panels tell the story; they are the lyrics and the melody. The captions, however, provide rhythm and, occasionally, a counterpoint that creates a harmonic relationship between words and pictures. The panel, for instance, that precedes the lines “In its hands we’re silly putty... Pressed flat against the Sunday comics section... imprinted with the wit and wisdom of Dagwood Bumstead” features a dog whose loopy wanderings are represented by black dotted lines straight out of Bill Keane’s Family Circus. But this kind of obvious relationship is rare. Most of the time, the words are a rhythmic fog.

Can’t Get No is an endlessly strange, surprisingly exhilarating piece of work. It doesn’t really succeed – at least not as a reinvention of the medium – but it doesn’t really fail, either. Probably the oddest thing about the whole endeavor, in fact, is that Rick Veitch made such an esoteric comic worth reading.

A bunch of graphic novels arrived from amazon.ca the other day. Can't Get No was among them. I am glad to see that this book was printed in Canada. By being printed in Canada (or the US) it's much more likely that the workers who printed it are unionized and are able to bargain collectively for good wages, health benefits, job security, etc.

Also, by being printed in North America it is supporting the North American industry which is in a downturn right now. We either use the infrastructure we have or we'll lose it. I happen to live in a town where the paper mill shut down within the past year.

Part of the reason the industry is in a downturn is because people are getting more of their information and entertainment from non-paper sources (ie: tv, the internet, video games). Another major factor is that the North American has to now complete with cheaper production from overseas where good wages, working conditions, evironmental mangement, and unions are not included in the price because they're not part of the production.

I applaud Vertigo for printing this book in North America and more specifically Canada. In the past Rick Veitch has printed his books in Canada but has more recently switched his newer publications to overseas publication, so it was a joy to see thing book reverse the trend. However, this is likely more to do with Vertigo's choice than Veitch's. (Though I may be wrong about that point).

As a self publisher for much of his work, Rick Veitch is in a unique position to control almost every aspect of its production, including where it is printed. Most comic artists don't have this ability with contract work. Obviously he has to balance issues of quality, cost, and distribution and that shapes his decision. In the future I hope to see more of Veitch's book's printed within North America as it would support more local industry, workers, and the environmental principle of keeping prodution near where it will be consumed.

The means of production and transportation of goods in our society relies heavily on the idea of "cheap oil" to create and move products around. That is why we often see our resources transported overseas, go through a manufacturing process and have the end products shipped back over to us for consumption. While this may not seem like good enivronmental sense it does make good economics sense in our society at the moment. However, this depends on the concept of "cheap oil". However, cheap oil doesn't come cheap. It comes at a heavy price. We all pay for it when our militaries interfere with oil rich nations and go on misadventures called invasions and occupations. Cheap oil costs us billions of dollars each year and it's paid for with our taxes.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 and it's aftermath are indirect results of ecnonomic dependence on Middle EAst oil in the production and transportation of products in our consumer society. I am therefore glad that Can't Get No helped lessen its dependence on oil by keeping its production more local. That's not to say that by having a product made overseas one is directly complicit in the violence, however, every action is a political action.

Hopefully I haven't gone on too many tangents or became too preachy so that I have obscured what I am trying to communicate. As a unionist and an environmentalist I want to reiterate my main message and applaud Vertigo and Rick Veitch for having this book, Can't Get No, printed in Canada.


And no I haven't read the book yet, but when I do I'll post my thoughts of it sometime afterwards.

I just ordered my copy off amazon.com, along with The One, Maximortal, Making Comics and a few other books without pictures.

Paul
I made the move from my Canadian printer because their quality was so abysmal. The folks I ended up with in Hong Kong are in another league all together in terms of producing a beautiful book that can compete in the marketplace. They also have the latest CTP presses (which is what really gives them the price advantage against the antiquated film based system my old printer used.)

These days, with oil so high, that price advantage is pretty much evened out by the high shipping costs from Hong Kong. But I am so happy with the quality and the customer service that I plan to do my next book with them as well.

While I understand the economic and political reasons for working closer to home, I also recognize that the secret hand of capitalism, which rewards innovation and quality, will push North Americans to improve their services to stay competitve.

When you see the gorgeous job I just got on ABRAXAS AND THE EARTHMAN, you'll understand why I like these guys!

In a review of the 9/11 Graphic Adaption, the Chicago Sun Times says:

"In the five years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the day the United States came of age in becoming aware of its vulnerability, numerous words have been written, our government has been reformatted, and wars have been launched. In addition, several graphic novels, like In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman's moving, appropriately chaotic 2004 conjuring of 9/11, and a notable book of 2006, Rick Veitch's Can't Get No, a haunting conflation of that day's horrors with other, anxiety-related incidents and fantasies, have dealt with
terrorism and its consequences."

Thanks for responding, Rick. We've talked a little about this before.

As a artist seeking quality reproduction of your work, I can totally understand why you would seek out a higher quality printer. I can attest to the quality (or lack there of) of one of your Canadian printers on one of your older self-published trades (the binding separated from the pages while I read it for the first time).

I too think North American companies will be forced to raise quality to compete with overseas printing. Even in my humble province, the two major printers both use computer-to-plate (CTP) printing. One of them even uses frequency modualation (small randomized dots) to print tones rather than amplitude modulation (line screens).

I understand that once you find a relationship that works well for you that it is hard to break it, but when the time comes to do another book, please consider a more local printer. You may find that quality has improved and prices have become competitive with overseas prices + the cost of shipping.

I'm absolutely sure that Abraxas and the Earthman will look great.

I just got my copy today!

I also got a copy of Maximortal, and I'm struck by the colors on the cover. Rick, is that an example of the job your new printers do? If so, I look forward to seeing new printings of your Epic airbrushed work.