Veitch's War and Love

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on February 13, 2007 Sign up now!

by Ian Brill, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 2/13/2007

Rick Veitch’s creator-owned work has been marked by darkly satirical elements as well as a strong sense of humanism. His Brat Pack reflected all of the Wertham-era anxieties of the medium. The One was one of the strangest but also one of the most compassionate takes on the Cold War. Now Veitch again takes the temperature of current society and spins it in his own creative ways to find some kind of sense. Army@Love, a new series due in March from DC/Vertigo, looks at how modern life continues in the midst of war. In the country of Afbaghistan, young people treat war like the wildest vacation ever. The Motivation and Morale Office is formed to raise enlistment numbers by making war as convenient as possible for soldiers. Spouses check up on their loved ones by calling their cellphones, even if their loved ones are right in the middle of battle. Domestic life in the United States and life in Afbaghistan is intertwined by soap operatic stories of forbidden love and secret videos containing recordings of late night debauchery.

PW Comics Week: To reflect the world of today, why did you have to synthesize the romance and war genres?

Rick Veitch: Movies and novels about war have always contained romance, so I'm not really inventing the wheel here. But most war comics have focused on the action. Sgt. Rock only exists on the battlefield; I don't think he ever had a bad breakup with a girlfriend. Similarly, romance comics have usually avoided realistic war violence or any kind of social comment. So I've always wanted to mash and knead these two distinctly comic book genres.

The romance is going to be steamy. Mature Reader comics routinely show sexual coupling nowadays, but it seems to me that a lot of it is presented in a demented way. Army@Love applies the new freedom more naturally, mining it for humor, tenderness, farce and, hopefully, characterization.

PWCW: Was the inspiration for the Motivation and Morale Office the news stories on declining enlistment during wartime?

RV: Yes, that and how war on television is packaged like a football game, complete with catchy battle titles and zooming logos. Watching the news coverage with scenes of civilian carnage bookended by headache and hemorrhoid ads is already beyond surreal. What Army@Love does is apply fantasy to the current situation and imagine, god forbid, the war is still going on five years into the future. How will it be fought? Why will it be fought? How will it be funded? How will it be marketed? That's the backdrop.

PWCW: In Army@Love, it's 2010 and troops are in "Afbaghistan." Why was it important to set the book in a world a little different from the present day?

RV: It allows the topical humor more space to breath. The literary rule of thumb for wars gone wrong is to first write tragedy, then 15 or 20 years later revisit the mess as black comedy. But these are such extraordinary times, I'm skipping the schmaltz and going right to the satire.

PWCW: How do you contrast the combat world with life back in the United States, in this case Edgefield, N.J.?

RV: The culture of Edgefield has been morally eroded by doing business with the war. Everyone in town is making big money from the fighting, much of it under the table. At the same time, the soldiers regularly cycle back home for furlough, and everyone's got modern communication technology, so there's a lot of bleed-through between civilians and combatants. What might seem strange at first is how everyone in the book appears numb to the violence. It's gone on so long, the characters in Army@Love respond the same way soldiers did during the big battles of the world wars, by shutting off all empathy toward death and destruction, essentially taking it for granted. Also, in this book, marketing has become an even bigger part of the business of war. The military has succeeded in revitalizing the brand in the minds of the consumers.

PWCW: Switching to another Vertigo book you did, what has been the reaction you've received from Can't Get No?

RV: Army@Love is immediately accessible and entertaining, but Can't Get No challenges the reader by its very structure. So I was sweating that people wouldn't have patience for it, but to my delight and surprise the reviews have been plentiful and more than excellent. All the literary reviewers got it, and some really got it. Somebody at [State University of New York at] New Paltz is teaching it in a lit class. So critically, I think it succeeded, and I hope it will continue as word-of-mouth spreads.

What's cool is I also self-publish, so I could see the halo effect Can't Get No had on my backlist titles like Abraxas and The Earthman and Brat Pack. I'm hoping to catch a similar bump with Army@Love in March followed by a new King Hell release in April, Shiny Beasts. It's a collection of the short stories that ran in Epic Magazine, including one with Alan Moore and one with Steve Bissette.

But right now I'm really tickled with Army@Love. I've just begun issue 8 and the characters have all come alive in my head. To people used to my Swamp Thing stuff, the art is going to be a revelation, I think. Inker Gary Erskine has brought a maniacally tight level of detail to my pencils, while still breathing life into the faces and figures. And Jose Villarrubia's first-issue coloring job knocked me for a loop. Plus I think we caught just the right satirical tone for the covers. It’s going to be a beautiful and subversive book.