I'm scheduled to record a podcast of me doing a reading of the poem today.

Will let you know when its available for down-load.

CAN'T GET NO was named one of the Best Books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly.

A short one from Amazon's Listmania . In terms of what I was trying to do, this critic nails it.

Can't Get No by Rick Veitch
Buy new: $14.19 / Used from: $6.95
Maybe this was really pretentious. I'm not sure. I do know it somehow unlocked part of my subconscious. Not much does that.

I was always of the opinion that Abraxas and the Earthman was truly Arr Vee's masterpiece and my personal favorite of all his works, but I was wrong.

Congratulations on all of the glowing reviews as well as the blowing of my mind.

Mania.com includes CAN'T GET NO on a list of "best examples of non-superhero related graphic novels from about the last decade. "

Can't Get No by Rick Veitch. It almost feels like cheating to include this as the first selection for this list, because what Veitch has done here is create a sort of post-post-modern costumed hero tale. It's the story of Chad Roe, an ordinary businessman who, under a set of rather extraordinary cirucumstances, acquires a bizarre kind of full-body tattoo. This tattoo immediately sets him apart from the rest of his New York commuter world, turning him into a societal outcast; and a day after this new condition is set upon him, 9/11 occurs. What follows is an account of Chad's journey through a bruised new America, seen from the perspective of an unwilling outsider. The entire book is a series of nearly wordless panels depicting the story, using no word-balloons or dialogue, but including a stream-of-consciousness narrative that wanders near and far from the action depicted by the artwork. From the way it's described here, it may sound like an incoherent mess, but the book has a strong central narrative pull, and a handful of twists and turns to the story. The book is unique in physical format as well, printed in "landscape format," a short, wide horizontal construction about half the height of a normal comic page. This format allows for Veitch to explore some large ideas with large spans of picture. The book is unique in many ways, and bears repeated readings well.

Isn't Shad Roe a type of fish eggs?

This from Comic Book Resources.

Rick Veitch takes us on a weird acid trip through pre- and post-September 11 America, and the results are decidedly mixed.  Can’t Get No is very much an allegorical work, and bogs down as a result.  It’s not a bad book, because Veitch is far too talented to write and draw something bad, but while the metaphors - even when blunt - drive the book along and make it worthwhile, the story and method Veitch uses is very distracting and detracts from the power the book could have.

The story is simplistic enough.  Chad Roe is a successful businessman who owns a permanent magic marker company.  He lives in a beautiful house and is married to woman who pays no attention to him.  One day he goes to work and discovers that his company is being sued because the graffiti that is drawn using his markers (which are called Eter-No-Mark) won’t come off.  In despair, he gets drunk and hooks up with a couple of women, who take him back to their apartment and, when he passes out, draw intricate lines all over him with his own marker.  He can’t go through his day normally because he looks like a freak, and when he goes back to the women, they have sex.  He leaves New York with them, but things fall apart when the women get busted for drugs in a rest stop in New Jersey.  Chad escapes, but at that moment, the planes fly into the World Trade Center.  The people at the rest stop stare across the river as the towers collapse.  The world has changed for them all.

This is really the beginning of Chad’s journey.  Before this his life had fallen apart, but now he needs to figure out what he’s going to do with it.  He can’t return to his life in New York, and he scared his wife when he showed up covered in marker lines.  He wanders to Atlantic City and eventually to the Nevada desert, where all the people he has met on the road end up in a celebration/eulogy for the events of September 11.  He discovers that he has become a cultural icon, as others are drawing strange symbols all over their bodies.  He also discovers that there is a way to get the marker off, and he is filmed and shown on television getting cleaned off.  Finally, he returns to his life and regains his business, because his stunt at the festival has made his product viable again.  At the end of the book, Chad is back to the status quo.  Has anything really changed?

Veitch’s art is spectacular in this book.  There is no dialogue, and therefore we need to be able to track the characters’ emotions through their movements and facial expressions, and Veitch is up to the task.  The lack of dialogue makes the scene at the rest stop, when all the people watch the towers fall, all the more powerful, as we linger on each face and feel the horror they experience.  The scenes at the end, when Chad ends up in Nevada and gains a measure of redemption, are also strong, especially when he hallucinates that he is on one of the buildings as it collapses.  It’s truly a gorgeous book to look at, and it makes a powerful impression on us.

Unfortunately, Veitch adds an omniscient narrator telling a convoluted story that mirrors the art but doesn’t follow it.  The narration is supposed to be portentous, but it’s much more bloated and pretentious than that, and it meanders through long sentences stretched over pages and pages that appear to mean deep things but really don’t.  Let’s look at the first few pages: “Even as it opens …” in one box, and “… the eye might recoil.” in the next, over a full-page shot of Chad’s nouveau-riche bedroom, our star in the bathroom looking into his medicine cabinet.  Next page: “Fearing the temptation …” in the upper-left panel; “Of all that low-hanging fruit …” in the upper-right panel; “… on the Tree of Knowledge.” in the bottom panel.  All this while Chad takes out a pill from the cabinet.  It continues: “Better to stare straight ahead … and affect the chiseled grimace … that goes with one’s prescribed position … on the totem pole of life.”  Open any random page of this book and soak in the goodness: “As false arguments are rocked and toppled … The illusion of separation between I and thou … collapses … Leaving a fragmenting certainty … that each of us is just as disposable as the next poor cabbage-head … sliced and diced in the Veg-O-Matic of life.”  Or: “Delirium successfully postponed … He hands over responsibility for his upkeep … to the nearest false idol.  But phony gods don’t generate heat … They absorb it.”

I shouldn’t bash the narration that much, because Veitch does keep it pertinent to the images we see, but the point is - we don’t need it at all.  Everything he writes, in that overwrought, pompous tone, is spelled out on the page, and it’s much more interesting for us to follow Chad through his journey to his own heart of darkness and imprint our own thoughts on it than have some disembodied voice intoning dull words to us that only reinforce what we could have figured out on our own.  It’s extremely distracting, and only weakens what Veitch is trying to do.

Because, when it comes right down to it, this is an allegory about America.  It has to be, obviously.  Veitch offers both a celebration and a critique of the American way of life and our response to September 11, which is an impressive achievement in its own right.  He fills his book with American icons, especially when Chad wanders into an abandoned bicentennial theme park with giant papier-mache heads of all the presidents.  He experiences a weird rave there of the dispossessed, with all sort of little symbols - the woman dressed as a colonial soldier with the child sucking her breast, for instance, and the fake harelip on the woman who looks and dresses like Jackie O - that are heavy with meaning.  Veitch does not want to deal with the attacks themselves, which is a subtle dig at how we as Americans want to bury our heads in the sand.  Chad flees New York instead of dealing with not only his own problems but the problems suddenly present in the country.  The fact that he goes through this very weird time is a reflection of what happened to our country in the aftermath of the attack.  Directionless, we clutched at icons to lead us out of our despair, and Chad does that as well.  In the end, however, he must confront the tragedy head on, and it’s only when he does that he can be reborn.

Veitch is celebrating America by saying that we are strong and even something as devastating as the attack on the World Trade Center, despite sending us into a tailspin momentarily, cannot dampen our spirit.  Chad recovers from his depression and his weird markings to resume his successful life.  This is, however, also a critique.  Has he actually learned anything?  He is no longer addicted to pills (I assume he’s taking them for anxiety, but I can’t find the drug on-line so I guess it’s made up), but other than that, has he grown at all?  Veitch believes that this can-do spirit of America is, on the one hand, admirable, but also somewhat shallow.  Chad Roe had a chance to leave his old life behind and become something new, and although it’s heartening that he was able to resassert himself and get back up on his own two feet, it’s also a bit of a tragedy that he does not appear to have learned anything from his experience.  Has America learned anything? is what Veitch wants to know.  He leaves the question unanswered.

Can’t Get No is a difficult and challenging book, and it’s fascinating to page through it.  Veitch shoots himself in the foot with the over-the-top narration, but if you can get past that it’s a troubling yet hopeful view of us after a great national tragedy.  Like any interesting work of art, it asks you questions but provides no easy answers.

Here's a Yahoo! translation of a Spanish review on the comics site La Carcel de Papel. Its fun reading in its own right!

Readings: Can't Get No

If I say that ground to have certain homing by the authors more "raritos", I suppose that, at this point, nobody will be surprised. But cured that is one of frights after so many readings, with the "sense of to wonder" lethargic from long ago, the truth it is that the "rare thing" began to have a worrisome appearance of normality, although somebody able one to cause an earthquake in your neurons, to squeeze them, to twist them, to cause electroshock luckyly, always there and soon to leave them there, means undone, so that soon we spend hours returning to put each thing in its site.

Like Rick Veitch, that with Can'get (Vertigo the USA) has not been able to leave me nailed in the sofa. You do not ask to me exactly what I have read, because it would not know to define it with words. Can't get is not a tebeo of sensations, images and flashes that are projected in our retinas and causing hipnóticas impressions, is a lysergic trip, a philosophical treaty, a reflection on the moral and the humanity... He is all that and, possibly more.

Starting off of the massacre of 11-S, Veitch is centered in the life of a manufacturer of permanent labellers to take it to a iniciático trip by America pre and post 11-S, that begins following Bradbury, awaking a completely tattooed day, disturbed as they were it the Americans 11-S. And, from there, a dream, a trip, a madness... America is opened in channel before our eyes, reflecting the incoherences, resistances and greatnesses in a mesmerizante route.

Much of the fault of these sensations that the reading causes is arriesgadísima narrative option that chooses Veitch, counting as a dumb history the epic of the poor man tattooed while a voice in off is speaking to us, developing to a philosophical speech on the existence and its sense. Paradoxicalally, and although letter and drawing take different ways, these are crossed and descruzando, with moments where the reflection agrees with the drawn thing, and others where the writing is against, generating a strange confusion in the reader, that is forced to enter the narration, must necessarily decide on which is reading, to stop to think and to emit a judgment that allows him to follow in the reading. The most complicated game, but that is absolutely fascinating.

A tebeo which it does not leave indifferent, that is able to put in doubt the scale of values of one same one, our own conception of "good" and "badly", of internal coherence. A demolishing document that is, without a doubt some, most surprising than I have read east year. And it can that in long time.
Published in Vertigo in the USA; let us hope that Planet publishes it in Spain (4).

From this month's Guttergeek.

The Discontinuous Review of Graphic Narrative

November 2006

Rick Veitch, Can’t Get No (DC/Vertigo, 2006) $19.99, paper.

By Alex Boney

On the whole, Americans aren’t very good at talking about national tragedies. My uncle served in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded, but my parents never talked about it. For many in my generation, Vietnam was (and remains) a mystery war. I suspect that the same might be true of the present conflict in thirty years. But after September 11th, 2001, Americans had no choice but to talk about that day. The political and financial centers of the United States were directly attacked, and the symbolic heart of the country was covered in ash and debris. There was a moment of confusion, then a short time of harrowing clarity, and then the rhetoric started up at a fever pitch. The discussions taking place in the public sphere soon became redundant and unproductive, and we are where we are now in large part because we’re not good at talking about these things. Or creating films or television shows about these things. Or making music about these things (thank you, Toby Keith). The one medium that has successfully engaged September 11th in any meaningful way in the last five years has been comics. The twin anthology volumes titled September 11th 2001: Artists Respond (published by DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics in January 2002) were compiled quickly but offered a multi-faceted portrait of that day that was simultaneously thoughtful and visceral. A few years later, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadows of No Towers provided the same type of insight, this time from the perspective of a single accomplished creator. And in the more recent Can’t Get No, writer/illustrator Rick Veitch makes the most convincing statement yet that comics provides the most effective way for capturing what September 11th means to a collective American psyche.


Can’t Get No presents the story of a man named Chad Roe, a CEO of a company called Eter-No-Mark that has created a marker that is truly permanent. The ink from the markers cannot be removed. In fact, the streets and buildings of Manhattan have been so marked up by Eter-No-Mark markers that New York City files suit against the company and sends its stocks plummeting. The story opens on Friday, September 7th, 2001—the day Chad goes into his office and receives the news that his company is spiraling toward inevitable bankruptcy. That night, Chad goes on a drunken bender and wakes up the next morning to discover that two art students with whom he had spent the previous night have drawn an intricate, full-body pattern on him with his own markers. He can’t remove the pattern, of course, and the following weekend turns into a Dionysian, hazy binge. On the following Tuesday, Chad is on the verge of being arrested when he and the cops who have stopped him see the World Trade Center billowing smoke. The rest of the novel follows Chad as he leaves New York and embarks on a surrealistic trip into dark, symbolic recesses of America. In broad strokes, that is the story.

But what marks Can’t Get No as innovative and unique (even within the experimental Vertigo imprint) is that there actually isn’t a straightforward story—at least not in a traditional narrative sense. Veitch draws a sequence of illustrations which guide the story of Chad Roe, but the book contains no descriptive captions and no dialogue—nothing that explains what is happening in each illustrated panel. We discover background plot only from snippets of newspaper stories and headlines, and even those are sparsely scattered throughout the book. Instead, Veitch pulls the panels forward with word captions consisting of poetic verse—an extended, almost unbroken rhythmic chant that taps into the Beat poetry of the 1950s and 60s. There are times when William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (channeling Walt Whitman via Ezra Pound) seem to be narrating the story. The captions reflect a widely confused, uncertain spirit of America—a time of aimless hope and impending despair—in the time immediately before and after September 11th: “The war is over. We join the wounded, limping home from the battlefield…Disillusioned with our own propaganda…That once promised us ‘Peace in our Time.’ We turn the last corner of home…Only to arrive at a crossroads…And a separation so vast…No familiarity can ever fill it.” In a sense, the language reflects a spirit not only out of place, but out of time. Just as Whitman conveyed the despair beneath the lingering hopes of the Enlightenment—as well as the urgent need to adjust the traditional, unrealistic portrait of America—the prose of Can’t Get No conveys a perplexity that perhaps can’t be expressed in a conscious, linear way. The rhythm of the language—and the intricate rhythm established between word and image in each panel—creates a surreal, otherworldly effect I’ve never experienced in a comics narrative.

Actually, there isn’t much about Can’t Get No that I’ve experienced before. The language is poetic and the story is deeply allegorical, but even the design of the text marks a departure from just about every other book (comic or otherwise) currently on shelves. The book is 7” x 5.5” and lain out in a structure that adheres more to comic strips than conventional comic book layouts. Veitch varies the panel compositions nearly every page, though—an effect that further keeps the reader off-balance and invokes the type of vertigo that Chad experiences on his journey. The art, which subtly alternates between realistic and cartoonish, is some of the most polished and accomplished Veitch has ever produced. For a comics text this long (352 pages), the sustained consistency is surprising and impressive. The one major complaint I have about the book comes from a frustration I’ve had with almost every major comics company for the last 20 years. I’d love to be able to quote more of the book’s captions in this review, but it wouldn’t be terribly useful without page numbers. If Vertigo is going to continue publishing novels and trade collections worthy of serious discussion, then it should start printing its books with page numbers so that readers can have meaningful, productive conversations among themselves. It would be terribly hard for a group of people to gather (either in a book discussion group or a classroom) and talk about this book—or almost any other Vertigo graphic novel—whenthere is no easy way to reference a specific page or image. This doesn’t diminish the aesthetic effectiveness of Veitch’s book, but it does make the resulting discussion difficult.

Ultimately, Can’t Get No is a high point not just in Veitch’s career (which includes such notable works as Swamp Thing, Brat Pack, and Rare Bit Fiend), but also in public discourse about September 11th, 2001. Veitch merges language and image in a way that is jarring even for readers familiar with the comics form, but this initial unfamiliarity is effective given the subject matter. The novel forces us to think about how we make sense of lived experience and how we process that experience both in visual and linguistic terms. It invites a new method of processing trauma and disillusionment—one that pushes boundaries even further than Art Spiegelman’s landmark Maus. Can’t Get No is a book that needs to be read. And maybe it can help us find new ways to think and talk about that which has become so difficult for Americans to express.

—Alex Boney

Johanna Draper of Comics Worth Reading commenting on CAN'T GET NO being included in PW's Best of 2006:


Can’t Get No — Flipped through this a while back, and for all the hoopla about it saying important things about life post-9-11, I found it pretentious and, well, stupid.