Can’t Get No
Published by: DC/Vertigo – 2006
Written and Illustrated by: Rick Veitch
Can’t Get No, a lesser known DC/Vertigo graphic novel from 2006—written and illustrated by Rick Veitch—is a silent, straightforward visual-narrative which plays out underneath captions of poetry which run parallel to—but intersect thematically, symbolically, and tonally with—the visual-narrative. The words have no literal relevance to the actions depicted—they are not narration.
While the art is unremarkable—competent but commonplace—and the characters are endearing enough—despite gleaning their personalities from a silent pantomime of actions and facial expressions—and the story is not particularly complex, it is elevated beyond these mediocrities into sublimity by how it tells the story and the story it tells is different for having been told that way.
For the aforementioned reasons, the gestalt is more relevant in Can’t Get No than in an average comic.
The plot, in a nutshell, is that a businessman’s company is on the verge of collapse and, despondent, he sets out to drown his sorrows. While doing so, he meets a pair of women whom—during a debauched evening—draw in indelible ink a pattern over his entire body—including face, hands, genitals, and everything in between—and, unable to remove the ink despite several attempts, he wanders for several days around New York and New Jersey getting into trouble and coping with the ways in which his life is changing, marked by the patterns drawn on every inch of his body. While the visual narrative is set against the backdrop of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, those attacks’ role is to catalyze an emotional shift in the protagonist and the world around him rather than acting as a guiding plot element; Can’t Get No does little to broach the attack’s other social and political ramifications in any literal sense.
The silent narrative is followed and consumed easily while the poetry passes by as if it were an ephemera periodically anchored by the implications and insights it confers upon the visual narrative, but at other times comes untethered into a much more abstract stream-of-consciousness ramble as much about the human condition in general as about any connection to the visual narrative. It is this occasional lack of an obvious referent that sometimes causes the unhinged poetry—and its meaning and relevance—to be difficult to fix in one’s mind for longer than it takes to digest the page on which it appears.
It should be made clear, though, that Can’t Get No is not an “illustrated poem.” The poem is not the point; the poem’s function is to modify the visual narrative. In the absence of the visual narrative, the poetry loses the referents that give it any semblance of a fixed or coherent meaning, yet any number of other hypothetical visuals could apply thereto with equal relevance.
Additionally, the symbolism in Can’t Get No is not limited to the interaction between words and art. The artwork alone also depicts things whose meaning is compounded if one is inclined to search for such meanings; cameos by men in spacesuits, movie monsters, patriots, presidents and first ladies, among others—all of which are eventually burned to the ground—could be inferred as making some statement about modern—and recent-past—American life that is amplified by the juxtaposition with the 9/11 terror attacks.
It should also be noted that Can’t Get No is intended for a mature audience. The full frontal nudity, drug and alcohol use, and modicum of violence might raise the most obvious objections among the gatekeepers of taste.
Recommendations:
If you like Veitch’s work in general, or Can’t Get No specifically, further exploration of his bibliography is warranted. His works range from The Bratpack, Maximortal, and Roarin’ Rick’s Rare Bit Fiends—published by King Hell Press—to The One published by Marvel, and Swamp Thing published by DC, among others.
Named after Winsor McCay’s seminal newspaper comic strip from the early 1900s, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Roarin’ Rick’s Rare Bit Fiends shares some of the dreamlike surreality of Can’t Get No and is, in fact, a compilation of illustrated dreams Veitch recorded in a “dream diary” upon waking for many years. Veitch’s independently published work tends to be more graphic and gruesome than his mainstream work, and, one might argue, is less mature despite being only for “mature” audiences.
Experimentation and exploration of the ways in which words and images can combine and interact within the comics medium—its gestalt—is shared in works like Kabuki: The Alchemy (by David Mack) and Dirty Boxes (by Jacob Weinstein), yet Can’t Get No is still a one-of-a-kind artifact.
Fans of Can’t Get No might also enjoy the silent narratives of Eric Drooker in comics like Flood! A Novel in Pictures and Blood Song: A Silent Ballad or Peter Kuper in The System.
Brian Bigelow
December 27, 2016
