THE FOUR COLOR GRIMOIRE
MEDITATIONS ON COMIC BOOK DAEMONS
This is part of No Gods But My Own, Volume 2. Read this if you’re just joining in.
THE DREAM QUEST OF RICK VEITCH
In Abraxis and the Earthman, a hallucinatory retelling of Moby Dick as an epic space opera, a cetologist named John Isaac is ripped from his mission on a nuclear submarine by the Ahab of the story, Captain Rotwang. Isaac is assigned to look out for Rotwang’s whaling vessel, the Yorrikee, which is more like a well-forested, free-floating ecosystem than a ship. In order to properly do his job Isaac is encased in a chrysalis which strips off his skin, replacing it with a clear membrane that leaves his viscera on full display, and gives him the ability to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. All of this after an upsetting dream quest that leads Isaac’s split mind into unification and a level of enlightenment for which humanity is ill-experienced to fully handle.
I wanted to start with the story of John Isaac because, in the comics of Rick Veitch, we are each him in this vision quest to hunt for unification. His stories are firmly rooted in the mundane but take sharp turns toward the luminous and profound without warning, forcing the reader to reconcile the life lived in the real world and the life lived in his comics. They are a place of dreams and the act of dreaming, the very essence of the land of slumber filtered through Veitch’s particular style and the broad depths of our own subconscious.
Rick Veitch would come closer than just about anyone else if ever there was a human Rosetta Stone for the transition of mainstream comics from tied-down superheroics toward a more mature form of epic storytelling. Starting at the Kubert School of Comic Book Art, where he trained with old masters of the craft, to his time in the self publishing boom of the eighties, all the way to the Vertigo 90's and beyond, Rick Veitch plots a singular but oft copied path through the modern history of comics.
Unlike the other artists I’ve previously highlighted, Rick Veitch doesn’t have signature characters that are pregnant with luminous potential. What Veitch has instead, and he has them in great abundance, are IDEAS. When he and Stephen Bissette were approached to adapt Steven Spielberg’s comedy 1941 they came back with a fever dream crafted out of collage, caricature, and paranoia. When he did a pastiche of Superman, what came out was a veiled history of comics told through a delirious story of a thoroughly flawed alien superbeing and the even more flawed humans it influenced. When Veitch made enough money to begin his self publishing venture he chose an illustrated dream journal as his flagship title.
It goes without saying that his creations were far from the obvious choices for those particular situations but they were all the more interesting for it. Veitch’s art isn’t for everyone and I think he is completely at peace with that. His work is a singular experience that’s incredibly hard to summarize or describe. Like our dreams, every book is layer upon layer of metaphor that one has to decode for themselves.
Veitch was regularly published in Marvel Comics’ Epic Illustrated, their attempt to clone the popular magazine Metal Hurlant, where he utilized techniques absorbed from 70’s underground luminaries like Richard Corben’s airbrush coloring and Moebius’ luscious linework to create a foundation of psychedelic short stories that would echo throughout the rest of his career. Each comic was a morality tale with a hippy era slant and riddled with dream logic. Though the stories could be cynical and brutal, Veitch seemed to want people to find a different way through an America perverted by the rampant capitalism and glorified violence of the early eighties.
Veitch’s work from that period peaked in a series of graphic novels. The first was the aforementioned Abraxis and the Earthman, a collection of a story he had serialized previously in Epic Illustrated. Next came Heartburst, a romantic story of genocide and nuclear horror where a colony of humans treat commercials from the 1950’s as scripture. Finally there was The One, Veitch’s first superhero parable. Originally published as a six issue series, The One is a Jodorowsky-an trip through Cold War tensions and New Age aspirationalism. Each of these works stand as iconoclastic statements of intent from an artist finding his own voice in his chosen medium.
As the single issues of The One were reaching the stands Veitch had also found work at DC Comics, doing various art chores for Swamp Thing with Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette. This book lined up completely with Veitch’s creative vision, with Moore drafting a deeply spiritual story that mined the depths of humanity. It had been such a good match that when Moore decided to move on to other things, Veitch was chosen to take over writing duties as well as the art. His run lasted for twenty one issues and maintained Moore’s more psychedelic and surrealistic motifs. Again Veitch would explore dreams and dreaming, this time focusing on the dream life of plants and the earth itself.
Veitch eventually left the title after crafting a story where Swamp Thing traveled through time and became the wood Jesus was crucified upon while Jesus himself was depicted as a white magician. When the editorial team at Vertigo caught wind of Veitch’s plans they buried the issue under miles of red tape. Veitch quit and that issue of Swamp Thing has been filed away for over twenty years, never to be published in any form.
It didn’t take long for Veitch to find more work. His time on Swamp Thing and his vast catalog of earlier work had made him a hot commodity among independent publishers. He had become well acquainted with Kevin Eastman, one of the original creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and found himself writing and drawing a series of issues for that title.
Two notable results came from Veitch’s issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They had opened the door for him to join up with Kevin Eastman's newest venture, Tundra Publishing. Tundra Publishing prided itself in being a home for creators with independent voices and unusual stories. Eastman didn't care about what was financially viable, caring more for the creatively inventive instead. They were the perfect launching pad for what I feel are Veitch's two most important projects released under his King Hell Press shingle: The King Hell Heroica and Roarin' Ricks' Rarebit Fiends.
Dreams and visions are the backbone of The King Hell Heroica and its two flagship titles, Brat Pack and The Maximortal. Both titles were mature examinations of superhero comics but approached them from very different angles. The books were related, not only by the character of The Maximortal, but also by a cynical worldview and the graphic depictions of trauma.
In Brat Pack Veitch interrogated the idea of teenage sidekicks and the inevitable fascism of superheroes. The story centers around the teen sidekicks of a group of psychopathic heroes that are contractually obligated by their corporate sponsors to partner with the children so that they can maintain an illusion of wholesomeness. When the villain Dr. Blasphemy murders those sidekicks, the heroes of Black October must recruit a new batch of teens so that t-shirt and action figure sales can continue on.
This book is easily Veitch’s most cynical and bleak. The sheer transgressive nature with which he tells the story can be off-putting and brutal. The heroes murder the parents of their prospective sidekicks before torturing the kids to break them down and groom them into their twisted vision of heroism. It’s an indictment of superheroes and the emergence of realistic sidekicks in eighties comics, corporate greed,and blind faith in religion and authority. By the end of the series the teens are broken and corrupt, just as their predecessors had been before them, and their stewards before that.
The story concludes with the return of the archetype and original superbeing of that particular reality, True-man. The four members of Black October had been his students and allies years earlier and they had all adopted twisted versions of True-Man’s code of heroics. Angry with the absolute and utter corruption of his former teammates, he executes them after they murder yet another crop of teenage wards.
In Maximortal, Veitch explores the origins of True-Man with the same transgressive anger that he wielded in Brat Pack. It would do the series no service to call it a pastiche of Superman but that is a large part of its essence. The broad scope of the story envelopes many aspects of the history of the 20th century, starting with the Tunguska explosion in Russia and the development of the atomic bomb, leading all the way to the Red Scare in Hollywood and the creation of superhero comics as we know them today.
Much like Brat Pack, The Maximortal eviscerates the corruption wrought by capitalism and greed while exploring the dark side of superheroes. Much of the series centers around the two men who create True-Man, showing how easily comic creators at the time could be taken advantage of and manipulated by the publishers of their stories. The creators of True-Man and their story was clearly analogous to the men who created Superman with only the slight sheen of fiction over the harsh reality of their treatment.
The story of True-Man continues to this day, with the latest volume coming out nearly thirty years after the first issue hit the stands. Veitch seems to have calmed down a bit over the years, with the transgressive parts giving way to a glimmer of nostalgia and the exploration of the conspiratorial threads of the last fifty years of American History.
From the outside Roarin’ Rick’s Rare Bit Fiends feels like Veitch doing penance for unleashing his darker works into the world. It’s an unexpected follow-up to the grimey superhero parodies Veitch had spent the last couple years working through but they fit together like necessary polar opposites. Named after a comic strip from the early 1900’s, Rare Bit Fiends was the fruition of a practice Veitch had been doing his entire adult life and a novel experiment in graphic storytelling.
There is no plot or premise for Rare Bit Fiends because it has no story. It’s a visual representation of years of dreams, crafted into a loose graphic narrative. Usually each page is a single dream spread across six panels, drafting a comic collage of imagery and ideas. Much of them are self-referential and feature people from Veitch’s life, including other comic creators such as Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, Dave Sim, and many other luminaries from the industry at the time.
Deemed one of the most important developments in dream research by Jeremy Taylor, the previous head of The Association for the Study of Dreams, Rare Bit Fiends provides one of the best possible illustrations of the importance of dreams and the messages they send to us. It shows that some artists live their creative life as much in their dreams as they do in their daily lives.
Though dream comics were nothing new, the truly revolutionary thing Veitch did with the title was that he opened it up for others to share their dreams in the egalitarian world community dream journal through the letters page and accepting submissions from other cartoonists willing to share their own graphical documentations of their unconscious lives, a practice he continues to this day with each subsequent release.
This is Veitch at his most magical and sublime, shown most explicitly in a long form exploration of personal alchemy called The Art of Mercurious in the most recent volumes. The pages of Rare Bit Fiends show an intimate and esoteric portrait that would be impossible to express in any other way. Veitch is honest and vulnerable in ways I admire deeply.
Rick Veitch continued to work on numerous projects throughout the nineties and beyond but none of them held the same visionary mystique as his earlier work. His purview narrowed to far more terrestrial or commercial subjects until recently, when he revived both The King Hell Heroica and Roarin' Ricks' Rarebit Fiends with new volumes produced through print-on-demand. It may be the rose glasses of nostalgia but I feel that it has been some of his strongest and most spiritually potent work in years.
When I look at the work of Rick Veitch I see a man who came up in the promise of the sixties but got buried under the corrupting shadows of the seventies, eighties, and beyond. I don't blame him for the cynicism or the viscera. It's an understandable reaction to what America mutated into after years of being shown what could easily be considered an unattainable dream. It reminds me of a passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson:
We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the 60’s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously… All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody… or at least some force – is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
If you dig down far enough, beneath all of the shit and blood and brutal violence in Veitch's comics, there hides a spirited optimism and reluctant hope.
Even after September 11, 2001, when the comic book industry almost unanimously decided to react to the attacks with blind patriotism and jingoistic revenge fantasy, Rick Veitch instead created a four hundred page epic poem about how America had spiritually lost its way. Can't Get No displays a yearning for community over capital or country. It's an idealistic dream to offset the paranoid, angry nightmare we were all trying to find our way out of.
When I look at Rick Veitch I see a pop art shaman, using his dreams and comics to explore realms that lay far beyond the spiritual lands we've already navigated, passing through a dark place with long shadows and an even longer history of corruption. He has provided us with maps and guides to make our way through but it's up to us to decode them and find our way, too. In the dreams of Veitch we are all of us superheroes waiting for the first step down that path to our inevitable evolution, if only we can stop obscuring our deeper humanity to find unification within.
SUGGESTED READING
Marvel Graphic Novel 10: Heartburst by Rick Veitch (Marvel Comics, 1984)
Abraxis and the Earthman by Rick Veitch (King Hell Press, 2006)
Shiny Beasts by Rick Veitch (King Hell Press, 2007)
The Dream Art of Rick Veitch, Volumes 1-3 by Rick Veitch (King Hell Press, 1996, 2004)
Roarin’ Rick’s Rarebit Fiends, issues 22-24 by Rick Veitch (Sun Comics, 2016-20)
The Maximortal by Rick Veitch (Sun Comics, 2017)
Boy Maximortal, issues 1-3 by Rick Veitch (Sun Comics, 2021)
Brat Pack by Rick Veitch (IDW Comics, 2018)
Can’t Get No by Rick Veitch (Sun Comics, 2021)
The One: The Last Word in Superheroics by Rick Veitch (IDW Comics, 2019)
Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, issues 24-26 and 30 (Mirage Comics, 1990)
Unlike Kirby or Ditko, Rick Veitch is still very much alive and continues to create some of the most interesting work in independent comics these days. Go to his website or his Amazon shop page to pick up some truly interesting art. It’s worth every penny, no matter what you get.
Tune in next week for Could This Be… The End?, the final proper installment of The Four Color Grimoire!
Thanks, as always, for sticking around and reading. Your presence and attention are appreciated.
EJM