Conversations with Rick Veitch

From his roots in underground comics to his high-profile runs on mainstream characters, Rick Veitch (b. 1951) has carved out a career unlike anyone else’s. Collecting thirteen interviews--including three published here for the first time--Conversations with Rick Veitch offers a wealth of insight not only into the development of Veitch’s graphic innovations and metaphysical explorations, but also into the upheavals and transformations of American comics from the 1970s to today.

In acclaimed comics such as The Maximortal, Army@Love, and Can’t Get No, Veitch employs a style that synthesizes Jack Kirby at his most cosmic, the mind-bending graphic sensibility of European innovators such as Jean (Moebius) Giraud and Philippe Druillet, and the brass-tacks realism of classic war cartoonists such as John Severin and Russ Heath. His comics defamiliarize popular genres--especially superheroes, war stories, and science fiction--with his philosophical musings and pointedly satirical political perspective. Yet Veitch’s capacious mind reaches beyond these familiar genres, too, as his long-running autobiographical dream comic Roarin’ Rick’s Rare Bit Fiends attests.

Ranging across topics such as his early days at the Joe Kubert School, the controversial end of his Swamp Thing run, his muckraking work as a comics journalist, and his educational comics publishing venture, Eureka Comics, the interviews collected here reveal Veitch to be both a shrewd observer of the pitfalls of the marketplace and an eloquent spokesman for the boundless potential of creativity. A comics maker since childhood and a fierce advocate of creator’s rights and the possibilities of self-publishing, Veitch knows all too well the many persistent obstacles to creating comics that challenge readers instead of condescending to them. Yet Veitch remains optimistic about the potential of comics. According to Veitch, comics ＂might be the form of the future.＂ If that’s the case, then his work is a map to that future.

Brannon Costello is the Barbara Womack Alumni Professor of English at Louisiana State University, editor of Conversations with Michael Chabon and Howard Chaykin: Conversations, and coeditor of Comics and the U.S. South, all published by University Press of Mississippi.