Book Review: Conversations with Rick Veitch

 Reviewed by Joe Hilliard

Conversations with Rick Veitch, edited by Brannon Costello, University Press of Mississippi, 2025. 226 pages. $25 paperback, $110 hardcover. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Rick-Veitch

Conversations with Rick Veitch is the 34th volume in University Press of Mississippi's “Conversations with Comic Artists” Series. It follows the structure of previous volumes with an introductory overview essay, a chronology of the creator's life and career, and then a collection of interviews in chronological order, starting with the oldest from 1987 to a 2023 interview with the editor, Brannon Costello. Costello frames it all neatly in that introduction: "Veitch is both a shrewd observer of the pitfalls of the marketplace and an eloquent spokesman for the boundless potential of creativity." (x) And that's what makes this book so compelling. Not just Veitch's observations, but the consistency of his opinions over those 35 years. There are several strands that run throughout and intertwine with each other. As Veitch puts it: "[l]ike say you wanted to get a handle on the quantum, you might be able to through dreaming, because on the deepest level, we are made up of quantum bits, so why wouldn't we be able to dream about how we interact in the quantum realm?" (75-76)

And it's best to start with Veitch himself, as both an outsider looking in and insider looking out. His life really encapsulates the comic book world from the early-70s to the present: from underground comix creator to student of the first class at the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning, to mainstream books like Swamp Thing and Aquaman at DC, to his around-the-world of independents with Alan Moore, to self-publishing, to educational comic work, to his newest ebooks. It's interesting to see even as he works on the production side, as detailed in the 1963 interviews and his discussions on self-publishing, he talks of the art, not the business. In 1992, a prescient Veitch is looking forward, seeing what the corporate beast is up to. "People in twentieth-century America live, eat, breather, and defecate superheroes. All the time. Without even thinking about it. But the only problem with that is nearly all the superheroes are owned – lock, stock, and work-for-hire – by a few major companies who have no reason to evolve their characters beyond a certain adolescent level. And if this archetype is as vital and important as I think it is to our culture, then it has to grow. To keep it stifled is in a way to keep our whole culture stifled." (43) His constant concern with the art form, not the business, permeates the interviews, and indeed, his life. "My goal has always been to promote the art form, to explore the art form, to feed the art form, and maybe the collapse or the semicollapse that we're watching now is actually a good thing, because maybe new ways to get comics from creators to readers will develop." (155) This is Veitch in 2021 talking about the covid-caused collapse of Diamond Comics well before its final 2025 implosion. Veitch has consistently had his finger on the pulse of the comic world. "The people who run the business in comics are not thinking about the art form." (155) And the art is preeminent to Veitch.

Intrinsically tied to his view of the art form is Veitch's work in dreams. His dream comics, his most personal work, rolls directly from his early reading of Jung to the present. "It's deeper than that, a unique art statement providing a fifty-year record of the dreams of a modern human being that culminates in a real transformation late in life. For anyone who is searching for the meaning in their interior lives, it provides a model and, more importantly, a reason to keep going. Decades of dreamworking churn through all of the bullshit we have accumulated and open a door to something really beautiful and indelible." (189) It's where the art comes from. His Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends goes deep into that well, exploring not just his dreams, but that of other creators. Indeed, he see dreams as a source, that quantum connection. "If Keith Richards got the base riff for "Satisfaction" in a dream, he's still the author. Now there are a couple of possibilities there. One is, it's something he heard a bazillion years ago and it just sort of surfaced, it came back. The other possibility is that music is a mystic realm, where this stuff all exists. I like to think of it that way." (82) That view is echoed in Jenny Boyd's Musicians in Tune: Seventy-Five Contemporary Musicians Discuss the Creative Process (Fireside, 1992) where she quotes Richards: "I don't sit down and try and write songs, I wake up in the middle of the night, and I've dreamt half of it. … I am not saying I write them all in my dreams – but that's the ideal way." (Boyd, 102) For some artists, dreams are the backbone of self, and creation.

This leads directly into the next major theme of Veitch's conversations. Fundamentally, he sees community as necessary for the continued development of comics, as not just an art form, but in any form. "We want everybody to succeed; we want the art form to grow. We want everybody to have a chance at doing it. Manhattan publishing is much more about straight capitalism, selfishness; everybody's in it for themselves. If you can screw your buddy, you've got to do it." (98) Going back to his time with Joe Kubert, at the beginning of his career, Veitch expands that communal aspect. "We [Kubert and Veitch] would sit, and I’d pitch an idea to him, and the two of us would start playing with it. That's when I first really learned the pleasures of collaboration, where two people kind of surrender their egos to the story itself. It's not about who comes up with the idea that gets used. It's that it's the right idea for that story." (207) It's a mentality he goes back to again and again. Not I. We. As he notes in discussing his 1980s work with Alan Moore, John Totleben, and Stephen Bissette. "It was like, We gotta fix this, this is a beautiful American – worldwide – art from, and it's being strangled by business practices. So that's the difference. We were ambitious for ourselves to a point, but I think we were more ambitious for the art form itself." (119) When Americans used to think bigger about what society could do, should do, as he reflects on his own art education, and getting into the Kubert school. "This is back when our government actually would step in and help people when there was unemployment." (86)

Editor Brannon Costello neatly ties Vietch’s career together with last interview, pulling these disparate thoughts into one beautiful knot. Quoting Vietch's Azoth: "[F]antasies are all about generating wish-fulfillment scenarios for our fears and desires. But imagination tackles reality head on. We use our imaginations to build things, solve problems, make art." (214). Leave it to Veitch for the final word, looking to the future, dreaming the future as he always has.

"I see myself as an artist now who, instead of doing dystopian things, needs to do things to provide solutions to the problems of our world, or at least provide a spiritual direction for people to look toward to find a meaning in their lives." (200)