BUY IT

[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

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