The Big Lie: Bullshit

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. But if you were alive on September 11, 2001 and / or you know what the Truther Movement is, you already know how the fucking thing ends.

I’ve started this review about seven times with a variety of screeching hate frenzies about Rick Veitch, who is a creator I have always deeply respected. I have all his 1980’s Swamp Thing stuff. Brat Pack disturbed the hell out of me when I was 19 – in a good way. And Veitch’s live birth issue of Miracleman was one of two comics I went on eBay to get my hands on, after hunting fruitlessly through about a dozen comic stores, because I couldn’t wait any longer to read it.

And while, on the anniversary of September 11, it would be satisfying to blast The Big Lie – Veitch’s new book from Image Comics – for it’s weird politics and Truther point of view, this is a comics Web site – one of the only comics Web sites that is comfortable using the word “cumguzzler”, but a comics site nonetheless. Which means that I feel I need to review the book on its own merits.

Which is a dicey proposition; after all, this IS a comic that distinctly and pointedly implies that the Bush Administration ginned up the September 11th attacks in order to justify attacking Iraq. To review such a book ON September 11th merely on the merits of the story and the art could be uncomfortable on a good day and incendiary on a bad one… with September 11th itself most decidedly being a BAD ONE.

Thankfully, that won’t be an issue here, because this book sucks.

Let’s start with the story: Sandra Stratton, a physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider in 2011, uses the collider to create a Tachyon flux field to travel back in time to Septemer 11, 2001 and warn her husband, who works in the upper floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center, to evacuate the upper floors of the center and save his own life in the meantime.

Let’s do Veitch a solid and ignore my pet peeve about time travel stories – that traveling through time without also traveling through space means you’d materialize choking with the bends in deep space, watching Earth serenely float away from you. Let’s do him one better and accept his theory that standing in a particle stream from the Large Hadron Collider would send someone anywhere further than the chemotherapy ward.

Let’s FURTHER ignore that, if time travel DID exist anywhere in the future, we’d be living in a world where Hitler died “unexpectedly” in his crib and Mohammed Atta was found gangraped to death behind a flight school on September 4, 2001, because if there WAS a time machine, KILLING HITLER AND STOPPING 9/11 WOULD BE THE FIRST FUCKING THING EVERYONE DID, AND NO ONE WOULD STOP TRYING UNTIL THEY GOT IT RIGHT. The SECOND thing they would do is up the count of nerdy tachyon physicists Marilyn Monroe fucked before she was famous to upwards of 1,500, but I digress.

Okay, with those caveats accepted, let’s say you ARE from the future, and you have less than an hour to convince somehwere around 15,000 people to quickly evacuate the buildings. Do you:

1. Enter the North Tower, go to one of the top floors and, while weeping copiously and shivering, start shrieking, “I’m from the FUTURE! TACHYONS! HADRON! PLANES A-COMIN’! THE GUBMINT PUT BOMBS IN! IT’S A CONSPIRACY!”, just like the thirty screeching winos they ignored on the subway that morning, or:
2. “Hello, NYPD? I’m with Al-Queda. I put big bombs in the upper floors of each tower of the World Trade Center. They’ll go off in an hour. Yeah, yeah, death to America. Admiral Ackbar. Fucking Taco.” Click.

So the general story premise lost me out of the gate, and the dialogue didn’t help matters.

As I like to remind you all on an hourly basis, I trained on F15s, so I’ve got firsthand knowledge of how our air defenses work. And I’m here to tell you, they are awesome…

I’m delighted to hear my tax dollars are going to something other than welfare!”

Jesus wept. It’s like I bought a comic book comprised entirely of chain emails my dad sent me.

And let’s not forget this little gem of repartee that comes at the end of two pages of painful Truther exposition about the attacks leading to a war, and then another war, and then the complete destruction of the American economy, and then the WORLD economy:

We deal with cascading disasters all the time.

What? That, my friends, is a non-sequiter, a verbal turd. It’s like responding to the news that Cthuhlu is menacing the eastern seaboard with, “Really? I LIKE octopus.”

I’ll switch focus for a second to the artwork, which is solid, classic Rick Veitch. The problem is that Veitch cut his teeth on the grotesqueries of Swamp Thing, to which his style was perfectly matched. For a talking heads book that takes place in a fucking yuppie office building? Look at these faces…

…and tell me that part of you wouldn’t be RELIEVED to see them obliterated by burning jet fuel?

Look, the bottom line on The Big Lie is that Veitch seems to have an agenda that he thinly wrapped in a story to get it across. Entire pages of this book are filled with boring exposition that seem like they were cut and pasted from an Alex Jones Web site, which you can get for free with ten seconds on Google. The art’s pretty enough if you’re a Rick Veitch fan, but you can get good Veitch art in much better books.

If you Google around about this book, you might hear that it’s worth picking up for the “shocking ending” that “raises important questions.” Well, the shocking ending shows a bunch of explosives wired to a load-bearing girder that was exposed after the plane hit the tower. And if you judge the book on it’s own merits, the only important question it raises is: how did the government peel through all the interior drywall and fixtures to wire those bombs without ANYONE ANYWHERE NOTICING? If you wrote the same story with Doctor Doom as the villian you’d chuck it in the wastebasket as too stupid to believe, and he can do fucking MAGIC.

Look: I’ve pissed away a lot of time and too many words on this review. In my opinion, this was a horrible read, and you should save your four bucks. Send it to the Red Cross or something.