Comics Worth Reading — Never looked at the site or even opened the headers on UseNet, because I find declaring which comics are "worth reading" (presumably those not mentioned are not worth reading) to be pretentious and, well, stupid.

From an overview of graphic novels by Amy Mendenhall in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel (can't get the link to work).

A strange, dark look at one man’s journey after September 11 is Rick Veitch’s “Can’t Get No.”
Chad Roe’s business is dying after the permanent permanent markers he makes are being used for graffiti, and Chad isn’t dealing well with it. After a drunken and drugged binge, he wakes up with a full-body marker tattoo and then witnesses September 11. Chad goes off on a voyage of self-discovery in the wake of the tragedy and just may find a way back to life.

Told in art and lyrical poetry, “Can’t Get No” is a graphic novel beyond compare. It is worthy of a read or two.

“Can’t Get No” is a Vertigo comic, published by DC Comics. It is $19.99 and is suggested for mature readers.

Update: We've finished post production on the podcast of me reading the text from CAN'T GET NO. My son, Ezra, did the engineering and created a ghostly soundscape to run behind me. The effect is terrific and I think will allow interested readers new insights into the meaning of the poetry. DC has the stuff now and there will be a round of meetings to figure out how best to use it. More info when I have it.

Also, the Comics Journal #279 reviews CAN'T GET NO. Its not on-line yet, but as soon as I can link to it I'll put it up here.

From Eurotard.

Not Exactly Satisfaction
Can't Get No - Rick Veitch
2006, DC/Vertigo

My god if I don't adore the Roaring One. On an aesthetic level, he's divine. Knows his nibs, loves his brushes. Has an ungodly knack for dimension. Creates amazing backgrounds. Looks best in black & white.

Anatomically, he's a nightmare. He's had some peak moments, when it comes to rendering believable faces & hands-- parts of The Maximortal come to mind, and the first two volumes of Rare Bit Fiends --but mostly his people look awful. The eyes are never quite right (I think demonic is the word), and those mouths! The lips the snivel and blubber, the teeth that snag and glare! Admittedly, you can always identify a person in Veitch's work. The designs are always carefully adhered-to. But they're always so ugly.

His writing's a weird creature. It has a tendency to snake around inside itself, doing rifle drills with well-worn metaphors; sometimes it hacks them, creating interesting bastards, other times it rolls them down the slope to see what they'll accrue. The best thing I can say is that sometimes I like it better than others.

Can't Get No has all these attributes and more. I can't give it a rating, because the book doesn't work like that. None of Veitch's stories do. You have to read them some ten, twenty times before you understand exactly everything that's gone in, and even then you might not like them. I think that's where I am with this one. It's got everything that Veitch is capable of (in spades!) but I don't know how I feel about it.

It's certainly innovative, as far as the Graphic Novel goes. Rigorous, non-conformist format. Page layout is one of Veitch's strengths, and this book showcases it. The narrative is two-tiered, visual and verbal, and the twain DO NOT MEET except with the assist of the reader. It reads like a mime show covered in post-it notes. This gives me some trouble, occasionally-- I wish it were wholly silent, no narrator at all --but Veitch gets marks for doing something that you only see every once in a while, like when the writer on a monthly title gets burned-out and feels the need to do something tricky. Unlike the burnout writer scenario, this is not a stunt-- this is a whole book, something labored over.

I very nearly have some issues with the subject matter (it's a IX-XI story), but Veitch gets around me by doing the obvious, by making the whole figurative political landscape concrete. You want to compare & contrast the current rhetoric with the progressive stance of the founding fathers, take things out of context and bend words? Fine, we'll take a traipse through a dilapidated theme park dedicated to Americana. The story takes several direct steps off a ledge and lands in J.G. Ballard's backyard every time. The visual narrative is perversely pleasurable where the story is most off-balance. I'm not even sure balance is the right word, given the amount of detail-- think the grotesque amount of visual information contained in the temples of Angkor Wat and you're close --but balance is what keeps coming out because the story careens like a drunk in a wiiiide alleyway.

It's a Walk. That much is certain. It's well worth owning, if only to puzzle over. I found my copy by accident. I don't imagine it's stocked in every bookstore. You might have to order it.

POST-SCRIPT:
If you think you might want to hit Can't Get No, I recommend investigating Vetich's other works first. Start with the Rare Bit Fiends books; they're the most personal (also, suprisingly accessible). Then do Maximortal and Bratpack. Heartburst is a laugh.

The One and GreyShirt: Indigo Sunset are strictly for completists.

You have to put a pullquote from Eurotard on the back of you next book... just for the name.

I'd have to agree that you don't draw stylized good looking people. Your characters often seem more normal because they are not drawn to look beautiful. They're just fat, skinny, old, wrinkled, people. Instead of characters beautiful carved out of stone and polished, they are people made of clay, all lumpy and fugly like regular people.

I can't tell if Kubert's comment is a compliment or an insult.

Now, THAT should be an edorsement on the back of any new book!

From Pop Image.

REVIEW: CAN'T GET NO
Dan Coyle
***1/2
Writer/Artist: Rick Veitch
Letterer: Nick Napolitano
Publisher: Vertigo/DC Comics
Plot: Marker magnate Chad Roe is swimming in the despair of his business’ failure when a wild night lands him covered in his own product- a full body permanent marker tattoo. This sparks a journey of debauchery that is interrupted when the events of September 11, 2001 harsh his buzz. Roe then decides to get lost in America for a while.

Critique: In January 2002, DC Comics published 9-11 Vol. 2, a collection of stories about the fateful day that “Changed Everything”, and the book featured a creator who had been apart from the company for many years: Rick Veitch. Veitch was a contributor to Alan Moore’s legendary Swamp Thing run in the eighties, and eventually took over the book when Moore departed as writer/artist, having already proved his skill at both with graphic novels such as Heartburst and The One: The Last Word in Superheroics. An infamous dispute over an issue of Swamp Thing in which the time traveling title character met Jesus- the issue was approved and finished, then abruptly canceled by DC top brass- led to Veitch’s departure from the title and the company. However, in recent years Veitch has mended fences with DC, and has cited the events of September 11 as one of the reasons he decided to do so.

The reunion between DC and Veitch has, up to this point, yielded decidedly mixed results: a yearlong run on Aquaman had interesting ideas but was a huge disappointment creatively. Can’t Get No is a far more interesting prospect than the one thousandth attempt to make readers care about Arthur Curry. It’s also not like the usual DC OGN: 352 black-and-white pages, and published in manga-size landscape format. Aside from that, in an interesting artistic choice, there is not a single line of dialogue: the events of the story are abetted by a sort of tone poem related to, if not exactly describing, the events in the story. Sound like a risky proposition? You bet; I believe it was originally announced as a miniseries (you can still detect the cliffhangers Veitch built into the narrative for the issue breaks), but DC has decided to take the plunge and release it all as one volume. Can’t Get No is a fascinating work, and quite unlike anything out there right now.

As Can’t Get No starts out, Chad Roe is the typical upper middle class man’s man who is successful, has a beautiful if distracted wife, and crams Xanax into his mouth several times a day. He’s swimming in dough thanks to Eter-No-Mark- the marker that one really can’t erase. However, this is creating a graffiti epidemic throughout New York City, leading city hall to sue the pants of Roe’s company, driving its stock into the toilet and leaving Roe destitute. He tries to drown his sorrows with alcohol, and that leads to an encounter with a pair of female artists- they draw a comic strip making fun of him, and they respond to his insulting them by taken his drunken self back to their apartment, and covering him with the first Eter-No-Mark body tattoo. Understandably, looking like a Maori tribesman causes massive interference with Roe’s attempt to save his company. A reunion with the artists leads not to revenge but understanding- after a shaky start, Roe joins the two girls for a road trip to the very heart of darkness- New Jersey. It’s there, at a rest stop, that “it” finally happens- the planes. The twin towers. It’s a mesmerizing scene, as Roe and everyone around him are transfixed, with the same this can’t REALLY be happening, can it? Look on their faces, as I and I’m sure many other people did on that fateful day. The events of 9/11 almost seem like a rude interruption to Chad’s story at first, but then, everyone’s “journey”, whether it was a drunken run with two artists or simply going to work that day, was rudely interrupted by 9/11. Everyone, to some degree, made it a part of who they were at the time in my opinion. I remember the first few days afterwards, wandering around, looking at people, and feeling a strange sense of “unity”- because we all “knew” what was going on. And were terrified of what was going to happen next.

Can’t Get No isn’t overtly political like The One, which was a master work of the paranoia of détente. Veitch is more interested in the emotional effects of 9/11 on Roe more than anything else. That doesn’t mean Veitch doesn’t get his digs in, however. Roe falls in with a kindly Lebanese couple after his artist friends are arrested- this leads to an encounter with a group of white beachgoers in New Jersey that ends predictable, albeit not without a twist on the proceedings. The book’s middle- and least successful- section is Roe encountering a dreamlike, is-it-real-or-isn’t-it rave amid an abandoned theme park, whose theme was, natch, patriotism. Need I even tell you there’s a scene where Roe finds himself climbing through a giant paper mache JFK head that has a big, BIG hole in the back? Yet, just when the sequence wears out its welcome, Veitch moves on. Roe’s journey is compelling because he finds himself in a perpetual state of motion, and the poem helps propel the reader along in a way that simple narration and dialogue- or even no words at all- would not.

It’s a risky stylistic choice, but for the most part Veitch pulls off the “script” well. There’s a real stream of consciousness feeling to the omniscient narrator/poet’s take on the event. Letterer Nick Napolitano’s gray toned captions dance across the pages, creating a nice flow for the readers’ eye. At times- particularly the aforementioned rave scene- the narration tends to get overly pretentious and tiresome, but it pulls itself back for the conclusion. I’ve not really read anything quite like Can’t Get No in comics for a very long time. Veitch has always been on the cutting edge of storytelling, whether it be the side and enraged meta-commentary of Brat Pack and Maximortal or the puzzle box tales of Indigo Sunset. While I’m not aware of how well Can’t Get No is selling, I’d like to think it would start a bit of a trend.

Veitch’s artwork looks fine in color, but in my opinion, his art is always better served by being in black and white. Chad Roe’s pre-and-post-9/11 world is filled with colorful, memorable characters surrounded by a stark, strange world that’s rich in detail and not nearly as black and white as the illustrations would have one believe. Veitch even manages to do a good job of keeping Roe’s marker tattoo straight, something a lesser artist might have cheated on. Yet although it takes place in a world of grey, Veitch isn’t exactly shunning away from a Manichean viewpoint. A recurring image is a shot of Roe’s Xanax, represented by a black and white capsule. It represents the “with us or against us” dichotomy that Roe, and perhaps the country at large, faces- does one retreat into the black, closing oneself off and retreating, or does one head into the light like Roe does, traveling across the east coast and trying to find some meaning in not the flag, but other people? Roe’s flight is driven by despair, but he meets and makes connections he might otherwise never would have done, had things gone right for him.

Given the surreal flights of fancy Chad Roe goes through, it’s interesting that Can’t Get No concludes on such a quiet, conventional note. The book isn’t perfect; the third act fling Chad has with a flighty performance artist suffers from her not being as fully developed as the other characters (probably because it takes a while to figure out that she isn’t a figment of his imagination). And readers may be stymied by where Roe ultimately ends up. Does Chad Roe change as a result of his ordeal? Has keeping an open mind worked out for him, made him a better person? Or perhaps that’s the question Veitch wants to ask of readers- 9/11 “changed everything”, but did it? More importantly, if there were changes, did we change for the better? Maybe if one just keeps an open mind, keeps progressing, things will work out. In any case, keep and open mind and read Can’t Get No, one of the must read graphic novels of the year.

From goombah Steve Bissette on Panel to Panel.

CAN'T GET NO
Written & Illustrated by Rick Veitch
Published by DC Comics/Vertigo 2006
Review by Stephen R. Bissette
Since Rick Veitch’s latest solo original graphic novel
is receiving (richly deserved) praise from all corners
in and out of the comics arena, I’ll avoid
redundancies. The one fresh perspective I can offer
CAN’T GET NO readers and prospective buyers/readers is
that of a privileged insider who has seen Veitch’s
work mature over three decades. This newest work is
the current culmination of key aspects of his creative
life in a way that is most likely invisible to all but
the truly devoted, diehard Veitch aficionados and
collectors.

CAN’T GET NO is the tale of an upper-class Manhattan
ad executive whose life is derailed by a catastrophic
business upset, a subsequent drunken one-night stand
with lesbian guerilla artists who indelibly ‘tattoo’
his face and body with the very “ultra-permanent”
markers his firm promotes, and the September 11th,
2001 strike on the World Trade Center. Unmoored by the
lethal combo of his personal apocalypse and that
striking the heart of Manhattan and the US, Veitch’s
protagonist is not so much cast adrift as he is thrown
to the dogs and thrust into a purgatory road quest.
This is the meat of the novel, as evocative of Jack
Kerouac and EASY RIDER as it is of both Dantes --
Alighieri, of INFERNO fame, and filmmaker Joe, with
whom Veitch shares a potent grasp of and impudent
irreverence for national landmarks and trademarks, and
their subversive potential (note his perfect union of
Jackie Kennedy, Mount Rushmore, the Universal Monsters
and Amusement-Park-America-in-ruins in one of the
novel’s most deft, breathless sequences). Unlike EASY
RIDER’s biker antiheroes Wyatt and Billy, Veitch’s
tattooed everyman doesn’t go looking for America, but
he finds it everywhere.

Like all Veitch graphic novels since ABRAXAS AND THE EARTHMAN, it’s an arduous transformative quest, for his put-upon hero and the reader, and Veitch
skillfully drives his philosophical points home with
deceptively playful surgical precision. Significantly,
unlike Veitch’s idiosyncratic (in mainstream terms)
earlier works, this one is utterly attuned to the
collective zeitgeist of NOW -- the post-9/11 world we
live in today. Thus, it is absolutely contemporary,
urgent, and a heartfelt dissection of shared traumas
both private and public, making this the most
accessible of all Veitch’s creations. It’s also a
much-needed antidote to the jingoistic post-9/11
patriotic garbage the mainstream comics publishers (DC
included) have been cautiously but shamelessly
grinding out for five years; kudos to Veitch for
countering such shallow, patronizing exploitation with
such an expansive, explorative and introspective
creation.

Though the creator of this magnificent work might
resent my saying so, CAN’T GET NO can be read two
ways. It can be read comprehensively as the synthesis
of poetry and sequential narrative Veitch consciously
forged. Or it can be read as a ‘silent’ graphic
narrative, of a piece with Franz Masereel and Lynd
Ward’s early 20th Century metaphoric woodcut graphic
novels, in which Veitch’s staccato beat poetry
(echoing Don Van Vliet/Captain Beefheart as much as
Allen Ginsberg) becomes a sort of background cacophony
to be engaged with or ignored at whim, as one chooses.

In this, CAN’T GET NO stands as the summit, summation
and a coherent one-stop totality of everything Veitch
has created to date. It’s a marvelous tapestry
composed of threads I clearly recognize as individual
fabrics and weaves he has labored over throughout his
career.

Many colors and patterns of this tapestry may be
obvious to the casual comics reader with a passing
knowledge of Veitch’s most mainstream work -- the
transformative quest is characteristic of all his
Marvel/Epic serializations and graphic novels, as well
as his SWAMP THING years (working from Alan Moore’s
scripts, and as writer/penciler until the abrupt
termination point that was SWAMP THING #88), redolent
with pop culture touchstones, political and religious
thematics and icons, and a flamboyant fusion of high
melodrama and sometimes brutal violence. Those aware
of his Tundra years and self-publishing ventures under
the King Hell moniker will recognize more: the
affinity of his fictional protagonist’s plight and
apparently goalless quest, and the mercurial
landscapes he explores, with Veitch’s own dream
persona (in all its incarnations) in RAREBIT FIENDS;
the disorienting speed with which the arena shifts
from the microscopic to the cosmic, a’la RAREBIT and
the entirety of the King Hell universe (THE ONE,
MAXIMORTAL, BRATPACK, etc.); the predilection for
grotesque caricature (when it suits his purposes) in
jarring contrast to subtler observations of character
and nuances of body language; etc.
But how many of you have ever heard of, much less
seen, Rick’s mini-comics? Does anyone recall their
mini-eruption onto the newsstand via the
text-column-filler strips entitled “L’il Tiny Comics”
that appeared in HEAVY METAL for a short time around
1980? Ah, I thought not.
If memory serves, Rick once told me “L’il Tiny Comics”
were introduced long before he and I met at the Joe
Kubert School in September of ‘76 (relevant to CAN’T
GET NO, the American Bicentennial year). The first
sample I saw was a hand-drawn, one-of-a-kind
mini-comic Rick drew as a birthday gift for a friend.
These were unique items, not meant or designed for
publication.

Over the years, these never-published “Li’l Tiny
Comics” would sporadically appear as needed, lovingly
drawn, glued and stapled together most often as unique
gifts or commemorative souvenirs. Together, we did a
completely silly “L’il Tiny Comic” as a regional
giveaway item for a friend of Rick’s, featuring
“Rivits the Stinkiest Dog in the World” -- this was
the closest “L’il Tiny” came to mass production,
happily relegated to limbo of instant obscurity.
When I became the first Kubie (our affectionate term
for Kubert School students; alumni are Ex-Kubies) to
land a sale to HEAVY METAL magazine back in ‘77, Rick
was quick to submit his own work to art director John
Workman, and one of the first sales Rick scored there
was a full-color short serialized variation on “L’il
Tiny Comics” fusing Rick’s off-the-cuff poetry with
crazy-quilt visuals. The loose narrative drive and
frame was deliberate: while still living in Dover, NJ
in a shared house, Rick and I once pinned up all the
material we had sold to HEAVY METAL on the wall
alongside the roughs for concepts HM had rejected, and
arrived at the revelation that the magazine tended to
purchase only the non-narrative, nonlinear work --
comics that made no sense! Thus, we both plunged into
completing full-color non-narrative experiments,
almost all of which John Workman was delighted with
and purchased (most were published, too).

The
incarnation of “L’il Tiny Comics” that appeared in
HEAVY METAL was among these (as I noted, as
“text-column-filler” strips, as HM was at that time
seeking something Workman could plug into the text
pages), and its fusion of beat poetry, rock’n’roll
licks and visionary art always defined for me Veitch
at his most freeform and adventurous.
The format also yielded Rick’s breakthrough RAREBIT
FIENDS series, first drawn as his inventive
permutation of the Scott McCloud “24 Hour Comics”
challenge. Instead of addressing the challenge head-on
as a marathon run as Scott and I had -- an unnecessary
component for Rick since he always made (or beat)
deadlines -- Rick dedicated one hour each morning over
24 days to delineating his dreams in landscape-format
pages, and photocopy-published the complete
24-days-of-single-hours harvest as a “L’il Tiny
Comics” variation, mailing it to Scott, myself, and
others in that first month or two of “24 Hour Comics”
exchanges. These remain to my mind some of Rick’s
all-time best work. The art was spare and elegant,
never overworked or clumsy, effortlessly embodying a
grace and immediacy his pro work too often subsumed in
labor-intensive elaborations. That dancer’s touch was
occasionally muffled in the “real” dream comics he
eventually began publishing in 1994, but it still lent
his art some rarified “breathing room.” Thus, Rick
launched the dream comic that became his ambitious
self-published Jungian autobiographical series RAREBIT
FIENDS, elevating what had been “L’il Tiny Comics” to
a whole new platform. The rest is history.
Thus, it is with great satisfaction that I hold his
newest “L’il Tiny Comic” -- which, format-wise, is
what CAN’T GET NO is in the context of contemporary
trade hardcover and paperback graphic novels in
general, and the template formats of DC/Vertigo
graphic novels in particular. This is the richest,
densest incarnation of Veitch’s venerable “Li’l
Tinies.” There, the secret is out.

Some (including Veitch) have complained about the
paper stock and printing (one friend emailed me,
bemoaning the lack of color), but I celebrate that
aspect of CAN’T GET NO; it is somehow apropos, an echo of the conundrum of preciousness (only one copy!) and disposability (mini-comics!) inherent in the “L’il
Tiny Comics” of yore. It’s the WAR AND PEACE of “L’il Tiny Comics,” thick as a brick, concrete yet
ephemeral, substantial yet elusive and wonderfully
ethereal, despite its physical heft. That such an
ideosyncratic and personal work emerged from the
DC/Vertigo stable is further cause for celebration. I
get a chuckle from the final page’s l’il tiny typeset
masthead of DC/Vertigo credits; it perversely sweetens
the package, echoing the fake comics companies Rick
and his brother Mike competitively mounted as
grade-school children and brothers vying to dominate
their illusory one-household, small-town-America
market. Ya beat him, Rick -- this is the Big Time!

But maybe that’s just me. Hell, I don’t care -- I hold
this book in my hands after re-reading it for the
umpteenth time, and I feel a circle coming together,
an axis shifting, and I unapologetically love it like
no other graphic novel.
As in CAN’T GET NO’s slippery-as-black-ice narrative,
nothing -- NOTHING -- is permanent, much less
“ultra-permanent.” That, Veitch reminds us, is the
heart and deceptive beauty of art, illusion, love,
hate, God and Empire and country and death and life
itself. Like the wellspring of its title, CAN’T GET NO
is a song, a grand song -- in pages and panels. Let
your eyes dance, and sing.

Rich Watson's GLYPHS blog has named CAN'T GET NO one of the Top 10 Books of 2006 over at PopCultureShock.com.

Can’t Get No (DC/Vertigo). A businessman’s abrupt series of changes in his fortune culminates in the events of September 11, which prompt him to journey across America searching for a renewed sense of purpose. Perhaps the most challenging comic I’ve ever read, Rick Veitch tells the story of the businessman exclusively with images, accompanying them with a stream-of-consciousness poetic narrative that seems to reflect the plot at times, depending on your interpretation. It’s a worthy effort towards pushing the boundaries of what comics can be; a book that demands your attention by its very nature and forces you to think carefully about what you see and read.