From Cincinnati City Beat:

All Lit Up
RICK VEITCH -- CAN'T GET NO (VERTIGO)

Chad Roe is a man who loses his business, his wife and his life as he knows it. Can't Get No takes place days before and two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. It sounds like your typical pre- and post-terrorist attack story, but Can't Get No transitions into a tale of a man stripped of his mundane life and thrust into an exploration of modern America. During the crumbling of Roe's life, he is imaginatively assaulted by two artists with a custom permanent marker. His tattooing is visually striking. As the proverbial sore thumb, he is alienated from his middle-upper-class life. Roe's story is told in wordless panel-to-panel work. Veitch's art is brilliant and haunting. He skillfully uses body language and expressions to tell this lush story. Running parallel to the graphic storytelling is a narrative of prose, quotes and poetry relating to the story, God and man's place in the universe. Roe's bearing witness to the jets hitting the two towers is an incredible section. The impromptu crowd formed around him is molded from tragedy. Veitch perfectly captures the crowds' expressions and reactions. From there, Roe's "On The Road" journey explores immediate reactions to 9/11 from the diverse people of America's melting pot. From a Middle-Eastern barber to gung-ho teenagers to a visually stunning romp through a presidential theme park, Roe finds humor, violence and kindness in an America in shock. Veitch's past work includes Swamp Thing and Miracleman. He evolves graphic storytelling both in art and in prose. Can't Get No is a perfect addition to one's graphic novel library. (Jay Kalagayan) Grade: B-

From SilverBullet.com.

Can't Get No GN Review

Bryan Sandala
Aug. 2, 2006

Allow me to preempt this review with a statement: this is going to be a most glowing review. But I haven’t been receiving kickbacks from Rick Veitch for this one. Every compliment is well-earned and deserved. Can’t Get No isn’t just a good story with the words to match; this book is (hopefully) the first of a new generation of graphic storytelling where the work transcends plot or characterization to become a cultural statement, a fresh perspective on humanity in a time of confusion, deceit and the constant erosion of personal liberties.

The story begins easily enough: Chad Roe is a successful entrepreneur and CEO of a permanent-marker company. This thing is better than Sharpie, so much so that the city of New York has blamed graffiti on the company. Stocks plummet, Roe loses his sanity and sets out on a wacky all-night bender where he meets two women who turn his product against him: they illustrate him into a walking permanent marker tattoo.

It that wasn’t bad enough, Roe’s wife is disinterested in him, he’s self-medicating, and then September 11, 2001 happens. He witness the horrific events, which begin act two of his journey, where Roe meets up with a cavalcade of strangers, some who help (the Muslim couple who offer him wound care in their RV), some who hurt (a gang of jingoistic, xenophobic military goons), and some who are all-out strange (the family living in a rundown patriotic theme park outside of Atlantic City, NJ).

Can’t Get No takes odd turns, usually where you’d never expect it, but these narrative gambles are always interesting and provocative. Roe rolls with each turn of his journey and generally is playing reactionary to the events around him, many of which are spurned by the nation’s bruising. By far, the most unexpected element of the story is the total lack of dialogue. Nobody in this book speaks, and nobody has to. Veitch creates words through gesture and reaction. The characters wear their words on their faces. In place of speech bubbles, Veitch adopts the form of a long poem, one without beginning or end, which continues through each panel in small turns of phrase. While the words sometimes enhance or articulate the images, they usually run parallel to the black and white artwork, creating another story which traverses the thoughts of a disembodied narrator reacting to and anticipating Roe’s adventure.

It’s a challenging book, but one that is replete with rewards to the reader. (I’ll need to read this one many times to really believe I “get” it.) The images Veitch creates (most memorably and horribly an over-the wing shot of a plane just before slamming into the World Trade Center; the reader can see office workers toiling moments before their lives would end) are haunting and will be burned into the long-term memory. Chad Roe’s journey is wholly unconventional, but any reader will understand his reactions to what the world is throwing at him. He’s the personification of a culture thrown into uncertainty.

Matter-of-factly: miss this book and you’ll be missing out.

I’m going to avoid posting the full scope of my thoughts, because honestly I’d like to save them for a review on the HOT PANTS section of DVD In My Pants , but certainly after this reading experience I’d like to share some impressions.

First and foremost, and I suppose the hardest thing to avoid when talking about Can’t Get No, is the presentation. Not as much the sizing of the pages (which made for some attractive layouts), but rather the mix of image-driven storytelling overlaid with a twisting, druggy poem of epic length. I really enjoyed this device. While from time to time the two would drift a bit too far apart, when they two came together they really impacted one another in a big way, the verse adding weight and heft to the story, and vice versa. Very effective technique. It moves along at such a smooth and rapid clip that the moments when the text gets jarring or clunky (and there are a few) are put behind you swiftly. And far from being a gimmick, it’s truly an essential part of the experience.

One thing I noticed was that early on in the story, when our main character was still grounded in a reality we could sort of relate to, the overarching verse and the image-driven narrative were locked into one another. Constant bang, bang, bang. One commenting on the other; clearly, focused, in synch. Yet the further along he gets in his journey of self-discovery, loss, humanity, and self-examination, the more fractured it all seems to be, coming together less and less infrequently as the graphic novel moves along. As a reader, trying to make sense of how it all links together becomes an exercise in leaps of confusion – which is totally story appropriate, I might add. By the end, though, it comes back full circle (for story-related reasons, I presume – but I won’t spoil it). I’m not sure how purposeful this was, if it was truly planned this way, but it really managed to bring the whole thing home for me. The end especially, which tied the whole piece together nicely.

Loved the art and storytelling. I think others have mentioned that you could easily strip away the words and still have a crisp, clear narrative. This is true. Reading this just after reading through the second half of Alan Moore’s Supreme run, in which Rick Veitch did some art, helped bring home the fact that stylistically it’s all about what best serves the story; you’d be hard-pressed to notice these two works were from the same guy, because the work is so different. Excellent.

And finally, the narrative. Despite a hefty 350 pages or so, it’s pretty tight. Few are the times it drifts or meanders to the point of distraction. Oh, it does from time to time, taking little side paths here and there, but most of the time when you feel as if you’ve gotten off the path it snaps back in place pretty quickly. That, or there is something there worth reading for, even if it does seem to be a left turn in the narrative. I’m thinking of the Presidents’ heads. Not sure how much I enjoyed that as part of our main character’s journey - in fact, I know how much; not a ton - but the visual commentary was so rich here I was willing to take the ride. The JFK/Jackie O segments were great.

Overall, really strong stuff. That Rick managed to make me like those two awful women who did the markering job surprised me. That he managed to tie 9/11 into the story in a tasteful way that was essential to the story without being the story – despite what you may have read, this is not “a 9/11 graphic novel” (at least, it wasn’t to me) – deserves props. And the fact that he tried something with the medium that felt fresh and creative and unlike anything I had read before was a breath of fresh air. It has its flaws (the Erik Henriksen review posted above isn't unfair), but in many ways those 'flaws' are Can't Get No's strengths. As Matthewwave points out, it doesn't meet you halfway; it challenges you; it asks you to take a chance with it, and rewards you for doing so. I really appreciated that.

Check this thing out. It’s only about $12 from Amazon.com. Money well spent and a comic experience you’re not likely to forget.

...

(Errrrrr ... I think I may have just written my review. Hah!)

Shoe wrote a flattering review of this book that nonetheless just encouraged me to skip it. These were the phrases that cried out to me, "Run!"

I'm still trying to wade through Chris Ware's massive JIMMY CORRIGAN without slitting my wrists. 50-page chapters of bald, homely Jimmy staring wordlessly at a glass of milk while snow falls outside, with the conclusion being Jimmy thinking, "I want to die."

Can't Get No is far more life-affirming than it is depressing. If you took my comments to indicate that it's dreary or tiring or otherwise bleak, I did a bad job.

In the GN, the main character loses a major part of his life and has something done to him that essentially makes him an outcast. Through that he discovers a sense of life he never had before. A zest for experience that makes him a new person. While it does go through darker passages and bleak moments, the journey is always up, not down.

Mind you, it's not life-affirming in the same wistful, meditative way that, say, Concrete is. From what I know of your tastes, it still might be on the ponderous side for you. But honest to god, an exercise trudging through depression it ain't. The main character is a guy you want to root for, not hate.

Even if it's not as depressing as JIMMY CORRIGAN (and it almost couldn't be), it does sound mostly impenetrable.

And that's not just your description of the book as a 350-page twisting, druggy poem that fractures and confuses and challenges the reader as it pulls away from any reality we could relate to.

There's also lines like "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.”

And "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."

It takes me back to college, where I endured countlesss Goth-and-acid themed poetry nights in the neighborhood coffeehouse in order to hook up with the hippie chicks I so loved. I could sit through stuff like "Tender young wings are breaking through the ovum. and unfolding" when I was 18, and the person uttering it was a perky, buxom girl in Birkenstocks with a ponytail. I'm not 18 anymore. And Rick — well, I've not seen a photo, but I'm guessing he ain't a perky, buxom girl, etc.

From Sunday's Boston Globe.

Margins to mainstream
Recent novels bring the outsider experience in
By Carlo Wolff  |  August 13, 2006


Nearly five years after the fact, 9/11 continues to resonate and inspire, only now it's the stuff of a more complex anxiety. The phantasmagorical nature of the contemporary is the subject of Rick Veitch's graphic novel ``Can't Get No" (Vertigo, unpaginated, $19.99). One of a gang of recent entries in this rapidly expanding medium, it conflates 9/11, Enron, the lunatic right, and Katrina in a quasi-allegory that thankfully bites off more than it can chew.


That run-on, multifaceted thought applies to a work in which the art is expansive but the text is dense with ideas; looking at ``Can't Get No" (nice Stones sample there) is easy, but absorbing it as a whole is more difficult. Veitch's ambitious book is full of stimuli and is one of the more provocative attempts to make sense of events that continue to throw the world for a loop. It stars Chad Roe , head of Eter-No-Mark. When his permanent marker company goes belly up, Roe finds himself adrift in an unmoored society. A pair of grotesque but sexy women mark him permanently and set him loose to wander, drugged and aimless, through 9/11, a bizarre funhouse based on Revolutionary themes and an aquatic disaster of Katrina depth. Roe ends up largely where he started; Veitch doesn't draw conclusions or tie things up neatly, so the finale is as disquieting as the beginning.


The language is portentous and freighted, the allusions rich (how many people do you know who quote Albrecht Durer?), the black-and-white art vivid. Veitch varies his pages, splitting a single image into pieces or filling his laterally designed graphics with numerous ``windows." Read ``Can't Get No" wide and long, rather than up and down; it's designed like those little flip-through comic books of the 1950s, forcing the reader to slip into its rhythm.


Graphic literature often draws on society's margins; outsider art celebrating those challenged to join the mainstream, it is among the most democratizing literary forms.

From the Columbus Dispatch

BOOK REVIEW CAN’T GET NO
Road trip presents questions to readers
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Ken Howell
FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH


In one of their best-known songs, the Rolling Stones document the itchy malaise that comes with being young, affluent and smarter than your elders.

Satisfaction is one of those rare songs that becomes a sort of anthem or anti-anthem: a rhythm-and-blues paean to nothing in particular.

The rhythms and especially the blues of contemporary life are the concerns of writerartist Rick Veitch, whose graphic novel Can’t Get No is quietly extraordinary — a hugely original work that details the anxieties of 21 st-century America with a pop poetry that recalls the Stones’ song both literally and in attitude.

Can’t Get No tells, without dialogue, the story of Chad Roe, a New York City businessman whose life and country are headed for dark days. His business fails just before Sept. 11,
2001, and, with the rug pulled from under him, he does what any fictional American in search of answers does: He hits the road.

His travels through almost every stratum of society, as imagined by the underground sensibilities of Veitch, take on a surreal air: Roe meets immigrants, hippies, Jackie O lookalikes, a blind guide dog and a bevy of everyday Americans.

Even his eyewitness account of the World Trade Center tragedy takes a back seat to his interaction with the other characters — interactions made palpable by Veitch’s skill at
rendering facial nuance and body language.

In the book’s most bizarre artistic conceit, the protagonist wakes from an all-night bender covered head to toe in a permanent-marker tattoo. It turns yuppie Roe into a sideshow freak
and marks him as indelibly as the destruction of the towers marked New York.

Veitch’s story is a free-form prose treatise that touches on philosophy, politics, physics, music and spirituality in a way that not only comments on the story but speaks directly to
readers, asking of them some of what Chad Roe might be asking of himself.

And that’s what makes Can’t Get No different from the didacticism of Hollywood movies and the jingoism of Top 40 popular music: a willingness to ask questions, to demand
something of its audience.

A new review on Playback.

Can't Get No (DC/Vertigo)
Written by Byron Kerman   
Friday, 25 August 2006
Comics don't get more philosophical - or more dense.

(DC/Vertigo; 352 pgs. B&W; $19.99)

(W/A: Rick Veitch)

Rick Veitch's new graphic novel Can't Get No is ambitious. Epic. Huge. Like Robert Crumb's most disturbing tale of self-loathing or Will Eisner's most intimate beseeching to an unjust god, Veitch's 352-page monster asks the big questions: Why are we here? What does it all mean? What's the point of connecting with one's fellow man? And what does Salma Hayek look like naked, anyway? (Give or take that last one).

Can't Get No is the story of a common businessman who wakes up one day the victim of a prank - he's covered in crazy freak-show tattoos (technically, they're lines drawn by an "indelible" marker) from head-to-toe. He wanders the country in a dazed state, made even more so by the events of September 11, 2001.

A strange plot, even for Veitch, made entirely trippy by the writing, which is one, very long extended poem. The abstract poem matches up with the panels only after some studied contemplation - it's portentous, heavy stuff, like T.S. Eliot's Wasteland got the Vertigo treatment. Comics don't get more philosophical - or more dense. This one's an acquired taste.

Dirk chimes in over on TCJ.com:

Can't Get No
Written by Dirk Deppey   
Monday, 04 September 2006
Can't Get No
Rick Veitch
DC/Vertigo
352 pages, $19.99
ISBN: 1401210597
Chadwick wanders amidst the symbolism in Can't Get No (©2006 Rick Veitch)

There's no polite way to say this: Rick Veitch's new graphic novel, Can't Get No, is a pretentious, semi-comprehensible mess.

A seemingly endless parade of ham-fisted allegory and unreadable prose, this book traces the downfall of a New York City marketing executive named Chadwick Roe against the backdrop of the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. Chadwick's business prospects have seemingly been shattered by lawsuits over a super-permanent marker manufactured by his company. A night of drinking and drugs leaves him unconscious in the hands of mischievious, artsy pranksters, who strip him naked and cover his body head-to-toe with pseudo-tribal linework drawn with the very markers that brought about his despair. From there -- and after witnessing the 9/11 attacks -- Chadwick embarks upon a soul-seeking journey through an endless, mindnumbing forest of iconography, symbolic situations and clichés, his new markings branding him in the eyes of everyone he meets, his travels ultimately culminating in a life-changing reversal at a thinly-disguised Burning Man.

The action takes place in pantomine, the dialogue replaced by ponderous, purple free-verse poetry. I tried to follow the text for more than five pages at a time -- really, I did -- but it just drove me out of the story and made me set the book down with each attempt. Ultimately, I was able to make it to the end by ignoring the words and reading the visual storytelling, which cut down on the embarrassingly bad metaphors but not by nearly enough. The lowest point occurs when Chadwick stumbles upon an abandoned theme park originally built for the American Bicentennial, a weed-infested, open-air funhouse littered with giant busts of former Presidents and people inexplicably wandering around. (Look, a couple dressed like Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio! And Marilyn's holding up a can of beer! Ain't that America?) He eventually ends up inside the bust of John F. Kennedy -- a bullet-wound sized hole rotted out in the back of his head, naturally -- which serves as the home of a woman dressed as Jackie who looks great nude in silhouette, but up close and in the light is revealed to possess a mangled upper lip and bad teeth. Chadwick kisses her anyway, seemingly for no other reason than because that's the symbolic thing to do in such a situation. The make-up then falls away, revealing a perfect mouth that laughs as him as she departs. Can't Get No never stops presenting scenes like this to the reader.