Rick,
I just finished the book.

Wow. That was amazing. Congrats on putting together an astounding read.

Rain Taxi reviews CAN'T GET NO and a couple of my other titles:

The Many Sides of Rick Veitch
as seen through the prism of

Can’t Get No (Vertigo/DC Comics, $19.99)

Crypto-Zoo (King Hell Press, $17.95)

The Maximortal (King Hell Press, $17.95)

by Eric Lorberer

As the medium of comics earns a greater place in the American reading imagination, it’s worth recognizing the plethora of remarkable creators who have shaped its contemporary contours. Superstar writers like Neil Gaiman, Harvey Pekar, and Warren Ellis have pushed the boundaries of storytelling, as have artists such as Neal Adams, Frank Quitely, and Alex Ross, to name just a few. And then, god bless ‘em, there are the auteurs who manage to excel at both words and pictures: in the underground a golden road stretches from R. Crumb to Chris Ware; groundbreaking work has been done overseas by people as disparate as Osama Tezuka and Marjane Satrapi; and the mainstream has made a place for mavericks such as Frank Miller and Rick Veitch. Although that last name may not be as familiar to many readers as some of the previous ones, it signals an accomplished and diverse body of work well worth investigating.

Veitch’s latest graphic novel, in fact, is one of his most challenging, because unlike most comics—indeed, contradicting what many hold to be the very essence of comics—the words and the pictures of Can’t Get No have only the most tenuous of relationships. The image sequence, a tour de force of graphic storytelling recalling the wordless, socially engaged woodcut novels of Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel, presents a dark portrait of man’s fate. Veitch’s hapless hero, Chad Roe (a name rife with connotations), is an executive at “Eter-No-Mark,” a permanent marker company that goes belly up when a graffiti-stricken New York City retaliates with a lawsuit. Chad’s luck goes from bad to worse when two underground cartoonists—they’re working on a comic called “The Adventures of Mi$ter Moneybag$”—draw all over his body with his own indelible product after he’s drowned his sorrows in booze. And from there, things really get weird, not the least because at this point two planes hit the World Trade Center, a sight our tattooed protagonist witnesses from the Jersey side of the Hudson River.

As strange as it gets, however, the narrative remains clear. Veitch excels at presenting information without dialogue or exposition; we learn necessary background from ads, billboards, signs, posters, newspaper clippings, etc., and his palette of facial expressions and gestures is large and varied, communicating worlds. But here’s the kicker: Veitch has placed captions over the picture narrative that offer a measured essay on contemporary life—a poetic, occasionally abstruse, and above all relentless dissection of the world Chad Roe inhabits. “Professional mourners line the shores. Snake charmers plant kisses on the crowning heads of cobras. And dowsers divine hot springs just beneath our feet,” is as emblematic a passage as any. The only time the diatribe is interrupted is when the towers fall on September 11; for this sequence, a similarly toned passage from Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer (whose dark, symbolic engravings feel like a precursor to this work) takes over.

Veitch’s layering of an existential treatise over a rather zany visual narrative is a calculated risk, and is likely to earn the book as many detractors as fans. The text and imagery are parallel more than complimentary discourses, and the reader’s inevitable struggle to make them fit together isn’t always pleasurable or rewarding; on top of that, Veitch’s monologue can wear dangerously thin, and the post-9/11 action of Chad Roe’s journey feels purposely bizarre at times (a scene set in a presidential theme park, in which Chad romps with a Jackie O. impersonator inside John F. Kennedy’s head, comes to mind). But the large ambition of Can’t Get No outweighs its small failures, as the book pushes the boundaries of the word-image art form, and while doing so takes up some profound questions: “What does it mean to be alive?… Why are we suspended in this vacuum / Of empty comfort and false contentment /Denied authentic grace / Or any real experience / of satisfaction?” The whole book has the feel of a fevered hallucination, drawn by a tortured soul who can’t get the classic Rolling Stones song which gives the book its title—itself a stellar evisceration of America’s consumer culture—out of his head.
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The chorus from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” actually appears in a panel from Veitch’s Crypto-Zoo, his third volume of “The Collected Rare Bit Fiends”—comics that relate his own rather developed and intense dreamscape (the series title pays homage to pioneering cartoonist Winsor McCay’s “Dreams of the Rare Bit Fiend”). Here, generally using a simple, six-panel grid, Veitch marries the clarity of graphic storytelling to the nonlinear, heavily iconic narratives of the oneiric mindset—a winning combination, since the grammar of comics is uniquely suited to the recounting of dreams. It’s a better medium than just words, just images, or even the word-image art form of film, because comics allows for the simultaneous presentation of dialogue, thought, and exposition.


For example, in dreams we often know who someone “really is” despite appearances; here the cast of crazy characters can be efficiently labeled with a pointer arrow (Veitch often seems to interact with “Playmate of the Year”). Likewise, we often inexplicably realize what another person in our dream is thinking or intending, and comics similarly convey such third-person information unobtrusively yet energetically. And of course the controlled flattening of visual imagery in comics lets the “special effects” the unconscious can conjure feel as real as the more realistic elements they counterpoint—which as any dreamer knows is essential to the coherence of the dream and the subsequent memory or telling of it. Finally, the fact that certain people and places (e.g. “Childhood Home”), as well as events and themes, recur in one’s ongoing oneiric record lends a dream diary an eerie narrative stability amidst the symbolism-strewn strangeness, one that a consistently drawn set of comics can enhance.

Veitch deploys all these strengths in Crypto Zoo, and the result is an unusual and intriguing graphic novel. This partly, of course, derives from his particular skills and inclinations as an artist—without question the surrealistic impulses and penchant for nonlinear narrative we’ve found in Can’t Get No find a natural home in dream telling—but the comics here are also well informed by Veitch’s reading in archetypal psychology, which seems to have offered an enabling theoretical background for his thinking about the framework of relating dreams; in the book’s introduction he talks, for example, about deciding how to render the “sacred landscape” in which his dreaming self seems to exist. Whatever the cause, the effect is an art full of sharp and interesting edges—perhaps more fascinating for its formal delight than for the personal mythology it excavates, but fascinating nonetheless. More comics practitioners would do well to experiment with converting their dream diaries into full-blown comics.

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If the above examples make it sound like Veitch is strictly a psychedelic wanderer or constraint-based formalist, it’s worth pointing out that he works quite often in mainstream comics, whether directly (he’s provided art and/or scripts for existing corporate-owned characters from Aquaman to Swamp Thing) or in spirit, as is the case with a substantial portion of his independent output. Veitch has penned three full-length graphic novels—The One, Bratpack, and The Maximortal—that attempt to deconstruct the superhero archetype. This output, though perhaps not as well known as key books by Frank Miller, Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore, is nevertheless contoured with penetrating ideas about the superhero, and deserves to be regarded in the same study.


Take The Maximortal, which like Crypto Zoo is published by Veitch’s own King Hell Press. A Nietzschean fable about the dark societal impetus of the Superman (here named “True-Man”), the book deftly weaves together the splitting of the atom, the early history of superhero comics, and a vision of what would have happened if a super-powered being actually appeared on this earth. In the second of those threads, it plumbs territory similar to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (though it was published, in serial form, first), exploring the creation of a fantastic hero by Jewish teenagers and how the corporation that made millions off the property took them to the cleaners. Yet it’s the final narrative thread that is most vicious: rather than beginning life as a human with the kindly old Kents, this super baby from a strange land unleashes a violence that becomes harnessed by the military; whether or not that’s the best choice in an impossible situation is part of Veitch’s probing, glaring look at our country’s most innate values.

Unlike Can’t Get No and Crypto Zoo, The Maximortal showcases Veitch’s ability to pastiche recognizable tropes, just as his Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset engages pulp literature or Swamp Thing transforms horror conventions (which are not entirely absent from The Maximortal: at one point the super baby goes on a spree decapitating the townspeople and throws their heads in a silo, saying “I’m workin’. Doin’ my farmin’.”). Veitch’s writing and art may not have the formal elegance and postmodern savvy of his sometime collaborator Alan Moore’s, but his rougher, edgier style generally serves his story—this is an urgent warning communicated in thick yet kinetic strokes, as if by the love child of R. Crumb and Jack Kirby. Veitch’s pacing of the complex story is masterful (with one caveat: I would have liked the occasional pause of chapter breaks, conventionally offered through blank pages or the issues’ original covers, rather than having the story rush headlong from one scene to the next), and his panel composition is nicely conceived, engaging and variable without being flashy or overwrought. There are plenty of grace notes in the language, too: one interlude imagines Sherlock Holmes playing a role in the proceedings, and is pitch-perfectly narrated by Watson; another, about the actor who played True-Man on the silver screen, is told from the point of view of fellow actor David Niven.
Whether one reads The Maximortal, Crypto Zoo, Can’t Get No, or any of Rick Veitch’s other noteworthy works, one hears and sees the hallmarks of his style on every page, the personal stake he has placed in setting pen to paper. If some of his books seem extreme, cynical, or difficult, well, they are. But they are also shaded by a fervent belief that the medium of comics can and should grapple with such states. In the end, this creator seems to have eschewed a single voice in favor of chasing down as many ideas as possible through his comics—and in this, his comics smartly reflect more about the absurd complexities of life than most.

RAIN TAXI full review

This one from Morphizm.com

Can't Get No

[by Stacy Borah]

As a child, my love affair with comic books was brief. Yet I still have vivid memories of reading and sharing the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and Spider-Man with my friends. In
between sandlot games and bicycle wars, we sat in a makeshift treehouse, spread our latest acquisitions over the loose boards and read them until our parents began yelling for us.

But when I started high school, I made new friends and discovered Salinger, Twain, Faulkner, and Pynchon. Symbolism and metaphor that Spidey could never give me.

Which brings me to Can't Get No by Rick Veitch, a groundbreaking graphic novel that interrogates the effects of September 11 on businessman Chad Roe, contemporary American
Everyman. He has an elegant suburban home, a beautiful wife, and a successful business selling the Eter-No-Mark, an “ultra-permanent” magic marker that cannot be taken off of
any material or skin. And as darkness rapidly encroaches upon Chad's idyllic lifestyle, Can't Get No's typical tale of suburban ennui and dislocation evolves into a contemporary
American story of soullessness and artificial gratification.

But Veitch tells Chad's story entirely through poem; there is no dialogue whatsoever in Can't Get No, a groundbreaking aspect of the novel. Better yet, the poetry rarely gets in the
way of the story. It is impressive enough itself, starting off with great lines and rarely deviating from them:

“Even as it opens the eye might recoil. Fearing the temptation of all that low-hanging fruit on the Tree of Knowledge. Better to stare straight ahead and affect the chiseled grimace that
goes with one's prescribed position on the totem pole of life. Better to crouch in an origami darkness hypnotized by the endlessly replicating features of your own amoebic face. A
multitude of tentacles curling and uncurling in suffocating self-embrace.”

As Chad drives to work in Manhattan traffic, Veitch illuminates more of his “prescribed position on the totem pole of life”:

“Look down at your hands. They're gripping a weapon. You and all the other conscripts advancing shoulder-to-shoulder across the front. Lockstep. Goosestep. Double time.
Throwing yourselves against a stubborn entrenched enemy sworn to capture their Virgin Queen or die trying. The soul is a cageling here, stripped and hobbled, perp-walked through
a crush of preprogrammed obscenities. Scourged and blindfolded, checked for disease, then put up on the auction block with all the other good ideas.”

And that's just the opening thirteen pages: Veitch's graphical eloquence is as solid as that of many a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist or poet. And as graffiti artists use Chad's
Eter-No-Marks to tag buildings across town, prompting New York to sue him for six billion dollars, his financial bankruptcy becomes a physical one, driving him headlong into
debauchery.

After two bar pick-ups take him back to their apartment and tattoo his naked body with the Eter-No-Marks, the people of New York shun him. Even his wife thinks he's a stranger
come to rape her. This fallout occurs right as the first World Trade Center catches fire, and Chad's anxiety kicks into overdrive as New York catches fire. Fleeing, like the rest, he
hitches a ride with an Islamic couple all the way to Nevada and a spiral of self-discovery.

Throughout this ambitious novel, Veitch references various literary, historical, occul and popcultural events and figures, including Albrecht Durer, H.P. Lovecraft, American history,
the atomic bomb and more, melting it all into an alchemical dissertation on the nature of human interaction and prejudice against a backdrop of fear and paranoia. His examinations of
racism, mysticism, casual sex, fluid identity, and the effects of mass marketing are precise and rich. 

In other words, Can't Get No may not be the only novel of its kind, but it should definitely kick start its own counterrevolution in comic storytelling. If it doesn't, then Veitch's novel
will stand as one of the most poetic records of possibly the most disastrous and polarizing event in American history.

July 8, 2006

Okay, I'm convinced. If the idea of how this project was tackled didn't sound interesting enough, those reviews paint a really great picture. I think the quote from Publisher's Weekly really struck me most:

"The words and pictures move in and out of synch with each other, sometimes exemplifying the power and possibilities of comics. When they seem to be telling two different stories, it goes even further to show how several ideas can be communicated at once."

Just dropped this onto my Amazon wish list and will likely add it to my next order. Looking forward to it.

From City Link Magazine

Can't Get No
Written and illustrated by Rick Veitch
(Vertigo; Dccomics.com/vertigo)

Five Stars

Chad Roe begins his workday as usual: downing pills, leaving home all but ignored by his Internet-obsessed wife and taking the ferry into Manhattan. The head of a company that
manufactures ultrapermanent markers, his world crumbles as he faces a $6 billion lawsuit to clean up graffiti made with his seemingly irremovable product. After he drinks himself into a stupor at a bar, two women take him home and proceed to "decorate" every inch of his unconscious body with the markers. That's when the tale really gets interesting.

Rick Veitch's Can't Get No provides a trenchant allegory about the fragility of identity, set against the backdrop of 9/11. Rather than providing narration or dialogue, Veitch tells his
story solely through his illustrations, tying everything together with prose that reads like beatnik poetry. "The soul is a cageling here," he writes as Roe makes his way through the
graffiti-strewn city. "Stripped and hobbled, perp-walked through a crush of programmed obscenities, scourged and blindfolded, checked for disease, then put up on the auction block with all the other good ideas."

Once the veneer of respectability is removed -- Roe is no longer welcome in restaurants, let alone the halls of industry -- the illustrated man can begin to get down to the real business of living. The free-spirited female artists who marked him up in the first place help him on his way, as do a kindly Arabic couple and a blithe performance artist who engages in a kind of guerrilla theater.

An excellent cartoonist, Veitch imaginatively weaves a tale of self-discovery into the fabric of 9/11, the twin towers a constant presence in the skyline that are echoed by the two
markers Roe keeps in his shirt pocket and other visual clues. The imagery becomes even more surreal when Roe stumbles on an abandoned U.S.-bicentennial theme park filled with enormous heads of historical figures and inhabited by squatters. Here, at a rave, he meets the performance artist, who's dressed like Jackie Kennedy and lives in the hollowed head of -- who else? -- JFK.

Roe gains perspective from his experience and the events of that horrible day in 2001. It ultimately comes down to this, Veitch writes: "Every lover's note, every bathroom scrawl,
every novel on Amazon.com is trying to find the answer. What does it mean to be alive? … Why are we suspended in this vacuum of empty comfort and false contentment, denied
authentic grace or any real experience of satisfaction?"

For a couple of hours, readers can find some real pleasure and plenty to think about while getting lost in this absorbing tale. Can't Get No provides a stellar example of the graphic
novel's potential for transcendent storytelling.

From Richard Gehr at Newsday.

July 16, 2006
CAN'T GET NO, by Rick Veitch. Vertigo, 352pp., $19.95 paper.

Rick Veitch's ambitious "Can't Get No" is not only a landmark graphic novel or, more accurately, a graphic epic poem; it's also one of the more thoughtful and even satisfying artistic responses to Sept. 11 to date.

Taking advantage of comics' unique ability to suspend and bend time, Veitch envisions an all-American cross-country odyssey with roots in Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer's hard-core Christian allegories.

Graffiti-inspired lawsuits bankrupt Chad Roe, the New York manufacturer of the "ultra-permanent" marker Eter-No-Mark. Roe drowns his failure, passes out and enjoys a full-body tribal makeover with his own product courtesy of a couple of wild art girls who let him join their road trip. The journey stops short at a New Jersey rest stop, where the trio witnesses the destruction of the Twin Towers. Roe proceeds to Atlantic City's condemned "Bicentennial Land" and, finally, to a version of Burning Man, where he discovers his unique markings have inspired a cult following.

There's no dialogue, per se, only the ongoing Gnostic ruminations of an anonymous narrator who strikes a tone somewhere between poet John Ashbery and the cynical bullet points of "The Colbert Report." As we ponder a giant bust of John F. Kennedy over several panels, Veitch's narrator invokes "The Eternal Flame ... It comes complete with an intelligence agency. The black-ops kind that runs things out of a secret headquarters ... and stands behind every successful man." Heady stuff indeed, and all the more so thanks to Veitch's propulsive black-and-white imagery. With icons like the Twin Towers to deploy, "Can't Get No" may represent his own Eter-No-Mark.

From the AV Club.

Can't Get No
(Vertigo)
Reviewed by Tasha Robinson
July 19th, 2006

Tracking how the specter of 9/11 has fallen over the comics industry for the past five years has been much like watching the grieving process after a death: From DC's quickie, gushy 9-11 collections to Art Spiegelman's sophisticated elegy In The Shadow Of No Towers, comics have digested the attacks by gradually taking them less literally, processing personal experiences into metaphorical resonance.

Case in point: Rick Veitch's Can't Get No, which draws heavily on the New York attacks for mood, but ultimately reduces them to a mere backdrop, with the Twin Towers' collapse as an easily packaged metaphor for one man's personal collapse. Veitch's protagonist, overstressed executive Chad Roe, loses his tentative grip on normalcy when his "ultra-permanent marker" company is sued into oblivion over the indelible graffiti blanketing Manhattan. In a haze of booze and anxiety meds, he winds up unconscious in the
merciless hands of artists who cover him in ultra-permanent-marker patterns from scalp to sole. With his inner alienation suddenly transformed into a visible mark of Cain, he's
rejected at home, at work, and in public, and he flees into a picaresque journey full of societal dropouts, taking kindness and joy wherever he finds it. When the hijackers' planes descend, it's just one more blow—but one that mostly stuns the people around him into the sense of dissolution and devastation he already feels.

Remarkably, Veitch accomplishes all this without word balloons; Can't Get No is almost entirely textless, apart from a dreamlike prose poem that parallels the action. It's the hardest
part of the book to swallow, thanks to pretentious language and ellipses-packed stream-of-consciousness nattering like, "Under a pale radioactive moon… Tender young wings are breaking through the ovum… and unfolding. The milk of human kindness runs white… and virgin sweet. We're playing for all the marbles. Or none at all." Trying to suss out any possible meaning for such gibberish is a constant distraction, but the text controls the pace, encouraging a leisurely stroll through the black-and-white art rather than the headlong race implied by the propulsive narrative. And by forcing readers to slow down and breathe, Veitch gives them time to absorb his fetish for grotesque detail, from the scraggly hairs on a policeman's upper lip to the saliva dripping from a set of fake teeth. For someone operating on such a small scale, the enormity of 9/11 is an appropriately monstrous and distant
calamity.

From today's Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

COMICS : Metaphors drawn from Can’t Get No
BY VAN JENSEN

Since I brought up the coming reign of graphic novels over single comic book issues a few columns back, a few interesting ones have crossed my desk recently. These three very different books illustrate the dexterity of graphic novels as an art form. And there’s no — OK, very little — spandex in sight.

CAN’T GET NO At its most basic, Can’t Get No by Rick Veitch (Vertigo, $ 19. 99 ) is about a man going to New Jersey after a traumatic event and challenging his easy, medication-fueled existence. That’s where similarities to the film Garden State end. Can’t Get No shares little with other graphic novels. It comes in a strange format, contains a single image of a superhero (good luck spotting it ), and the text is looseform poetry that’s often more dizzying than educational.

The plot follows Chad Roe, who works for a New York company that has created the world’s first truly permanent marker. A massive lawsuit against the company (they should’ve used the tag line “Great for graffiti !” ) sends his life into tailspin, as his existence seems dependent upon professional success.

Drunken Chad is taken home by two female artists who proceed to draw elaborate designs with his markers on every part of his body. Every part. The final touch is a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

Because of his newfound tattoos, Chad misses a meeting at the World Trade Center only to witness the towers explode as planes smash into them.

The moment of impact is typical of Veitch’s understated work. If you’re looking, you’ll see a small plane on the horizon as a sidelight. The actual crash is reflected on the stunned faces of his characters.

What follows is Chad’s journey through a strange America that has been disfigured as badly, if not more, than he has.

With understated black and white art, courtesy of Veitch as well, the book visually resembles many indie titles, the most notable of which are the work of R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar.

What sets this book apart — aside from the poems — is the depth and nature of the story. A lot of indie books can be impressively boring, sort of like film school movies: colorless, abstract and dull.

Can’t Get No drips meaning on every page, from every word. Beyond the overarching metaphor — that Sept. 11, 2001, changed the way Americans live — there are smaller meanings tucked away constantly that give the book a depth that begs for repeated readings.

Imagery such as a benevolent Lebanese couple mourning the Sept. 11 victims and a woman dressed as Jackie Kennedy who lives in a giant reconstruction of JFK’s head are par for the course.

Now, those poems.

“Trapped in the lard. Is the Light of Perpetual Fire. To possess it. Heat the blubber over a low flame until it sweats a glistening grape of mercury.”

That’s a typical example, and it appears on two pages that contain none of the imagery written. At times, it’s easy to glaze over the words, which run a tad nonsensical. But when they click, they really click.

Like all great literature, Can’t Get No ends with ambiguous malaise, leaving the reader to wonder, after an event that supposedly rocked us to our core, where are the marks to prove it ?

Full Review

From Las Vegas Weekly

Can't Get No
DC/Vertigo

We're nearing the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; is it still too soon for comic books about them?

I'd say so, at least based on writer/artist Rick Veitch's epic graphic novel Can't Get No. Comics started responding to the attacks almost immediately, of course, but the first round of
works, from the many benefits books to Art Spiegelman's strange In the Shadows of No Towers, were mere gut reactions—short, sad, angry, confused.

Veitch's graphic novel—and it's earned that title more than many of the books that bear it—is the opposite in every way. He's had the time and distance to think about the event,
develop a point of view and draw more than 350 pages about it.

Veitch explores the effects the shock of the attack had, the psychic sinkhole it made in the American collective conscious, but he uses it as an event within an entirely fictional story
about a fictional everyman, and the tactic occasionally seems a little cheap, even crass. If you want to evoke an immediate emotional reaction in your audience, all you need to do is
draw a plane heading for a building.

But Can't Get No is not an easy work to write off—or to digest—and not simply because of its 9/11 connections. The story, told entirely in silent pictures, is of the odyssey of one
Chad Roe, a wealthy suit-and-tie type in the permanent-marker business.

When his company, Eter-No Mark, is sued for billions because of the product's use in graffiti, a devastated Roe spends a night mixing anxiety medicine and booze. Two art girls use
his own markers to decorate his unconscious body in a head-to-toe tattoo.

Literally a marked man, he's all but laughed out of his old life in New York, then the planes hit and he and the reader are plunged into a powerfully charged road trip from the beaches
of New Jersey to a strange theme park rave to a Burning Man-like desert party. Roe seems to be searching for a new life, and Vietch for the meaning of life, but what follows is
mostly a lot of drugs, sex and some violent encounters with Roe's fellow Americans—it's like a vision quest for a white, modern businessman. searching for the meaning of life.

Veitch's incredible black-and-white art tells the story perfectly well without traditional dialogue or narration. But Veitch includes narration boxes filled with stream-of-conscious prose
that doesn't pertain to the action and is so vague it's hard to tell what it's about at all. Comics by definition are words and pictures working together, but here they're at
cross-purposes. It's a shame, because the story the art seems to tell is a highly emotional mythologizing of today's headlines, and the prose functions more as white noise, interfering
with the signal. If you can manage to tune out the latter, the former stands on its own just fine.

Mission Accomplished.

I had to trim back a bit to stay within budget, so I dropped Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 5 in order to keep Can't Get No on the order.