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)

Graphic Novel Review: The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation by Gareth Brookes

Reviewed by Deborah Tomaras

 Gareth Brookes. The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation. SelfMadeHero, 2025. US $19.99. ISBN: 9781914224270. https://selfmadehero.com/books/the-compleat-angler-a-graphic-adaptation

        

    English comics creator Gareth Brookes is known for art comics using experimental techniques, such as the crayon-rendered A Thousand Coloured Castles, as well as The Dancing Plague, which examines the 1518 historical phenomenon through pyrography and embroidered panels. In The Compleat Angler, Brookes creatively revisits the past in comics form, this time via linocut prints and ink on bamboo paper.

     As a work of art, the comic is stunning. The weaving together of sharp linocut and dreamy ink-on-bamboo mimics the undulations of a river and the movement of the text. More meditative sections of Walton's work—poetry, philosophy, musings—are illustrated using ink on wrinkled and borderless bamboo pages. Delicate smudging, and wordless panels, highlight the slower-paced and contemplative nature of the passages.

    The comic flows between these contemplative sections and more straightforward descriptive passages discussing fish and angling, where animals move sinuously across and between crisp three-color linocut panels, the traversing of gutters emphasizing their dynamism. A curious compression of human figures within the panels creates a rough size equivalence between people and animals depicted, highlighting the interconnectedness between human beings and the environment that Brookes foregrounds in his Preface to the comic.

     In all, the art style and pacing of the comic ably convey the artist's vision of The Compleat Angler as pacifist contemplation, a calming salve in turbulent political times. Brookes also emphasizes Walton's environmental argument against those who damage nature in service of profit—another timely contemporary issue. The artist turns Walton's ecological statement into direct environmental activism, donating ten percent of the book's profits to the British charity River Action.

    As a "remix, a celebration of Walton's book, or an elaborate fanzine," per Brookes' Preface, the comic works. As a literary adaptation, however, the reader is left with questions. Brookes never specifies which edition of Walton's work is being adapted. Certain sections, like an observation that Romans consider the eel "the Helena of their feasts," seem to point to later versions, as that phrase doesn't appear in the first edition. But it's difficult to pin down, particularly because the adaptation is similarly opaque as to where and why historical language has been retained. The artist specifies in the Preface that "some of [the] original, unusual spelling" (but presumably not all) was kept: why daintie, but not eele? Brookes also "abridged the book comprehensively and altered its structure entirely;" as with the Ship of Theseus, it's uncertain whether the text is still The Compleat Angler after all the alterations, or a different book entirely.

    Conversely, the retention of Walton's original pronouns for animals is perhaps too historical—and problematic—for the contemporary reader. Brookes keeps Walton's masculine pronouns for most animals, purportedly to highlight both the antiquated feel of the text and "the sense of respectful harmony" between people and animals, per the Preface. However, that harmony is decidedly and only masculine. Animals receiving feminine pronouns uniformly conform to moralizing stereotypes of womanhood held during the seventeenth century. The otter is a gluttonous and unnatural despoiler of nature. The raven callously abandons her hatchlings in a later section that again couples women with the unnatural. The female carp "put[s] on a seeming coyness" before breeding with multiple male carp at once; her behavior is contrasted to the courtly male carp guarding and assisting her at the end of their encounter. The sole virtuous feminine animal, the lark, ascends to the heavens while singing, presumably due to her piety and purity. In an adaptation where the artist freely acknowledges taking "great liberties with the original text" in the Preface, one wonders why this potentially beneficial textual change was overlooked.

     Despite questions about the comic as an adaptation, however, it is, in its own right, an enjoyable, beautiful and meditative work. Don't expect it to be the complete Compleat Angler; as Brookes writes in the Preface, the comics adaptation "is in no way intended as a substitute for the original." Read it instead for the peacefulness, the prints, and the pike.

A version of this review will appear in either IJOCA 27-1 or 27-2. 

Graphic Novel Review: Cat Mask Boy by Linus Liu

 Reviewed by Joe Hilliard

Cat Mask Boy by Linus Liu, Nakama Press, 2025. 192 pages. $10.99 paperback. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Cat-Mask-Boy/Linus-Liu/9781545821732

"For every superhero, there's a monster. For every lazy student, there's homework." (13) So begins the journey of Tiger in Linus Liu's Cat Mask Boy. Set in early-70s Hong Kong, Tiger is a lackadaisical student, preferring to dream of a life of superhero than concentrate on his grades or working hard for the future. Well, that's not exactly true, Tiger is working hard for a future of fighting crime. Liu never shows us Tiger's "human" face. The preface shows Tiger from the back tossing a paper airplane off a building. Going forward, we only see him wearing his cat mask. Tiger is Cat Mask Boy!

Tiger just doesn't just fight for justice though. He fights a society that only cares for performance, for results. For grades. Even in second grade, Tiger's world is obsessed with the best in class, getting good grades, and how this defines life. Moms beat children for poor grades. His friends constantly worry about the future, what their grades are going to be. Perhaps this is early-70s Hong Kong, or perhaps it speaks to the constant struggle we see:  performance versus being real. Being true to yourself. The struggle we see today.  Every day. "I promise I'll still be a decent person even if my grades are poor." (133) The push and pull of Tiger versus Cat Mask Boy.

It all comes to a head for Tiger on report card day. Through a series of events that would only happen in a comic book world, Tiger loses his report card, which needs to be signed by his mom and returned to school. A lost report card which sends Tiger on a quest into the walled Kowloon City. From this juncture, a traditional hero’s journey quest does permeate the top level of the book, as Tiger moves through dangerous situations rife with gangsters, violence, loss, as he searches for the elusive report card. It's here. It's gone. It's there. It's here again. It's found and discarded, lost and not needed. All at once. Beyond this physical journey though, Tiger fundamentally chases the meaning of life as well. What it means to live well. To live meaningfully.

Liu cleverly uses the cultural touchstone of the Japanese tokusatsu television show Kamen Rider throughout, which proves an interesting counterpoint to Tiger. For those who came in late, as Lee Falk would put it, the original Kamen Rider ran from 1971-1973 and featured the namesake character, a cyborg man-grasshopper hybrid created by the villainous organization Shocker to be their agent, but who has escaped their brainwashing and now fights against them. While none of this background is dropped into Tiger's story, this context adds another layer. Who has created Cat Mask Boy? What has created Cat Mask Boy? Is he escaping societal brainwashing? Tiger needs to find what makes a hero. The true goal. "School teaches us to be a good person, but never teaches us how to protect ourselves from bad people." (154) Initially, the image of the Kamen Rider is used as a foil, as Tiger's schoolmates berate him for not being a real hero like the Rider, leading to trouble in school.

When he meets Dragon, a fellow masked boy in Kowloon, they mimic the arm motions of the Rider to each other, signifying first their bond as fellow superheroes. Later, as they work together, and Tiger sees Dragon as an embodiment of heroism, they repeat the action, this second time as friends. It's a neat piece understanding how pop culture helps create friendships. How we bond over the simplest things. As an 80s teen, buying Justice League International off the shelves, my friend and I would call ourselves Blue Butthead and Buster Gold. And mimic Giant Robot's hand signs. It's simple. It's real. And Liu taps into that.

Beyond that simple pop artifice though, Liu delves deeper with Dragon. "Even if I have tons of toys, would I be happy if there's no one to play with?" (103) Dragon understands something that Tiger does not yet. That Cat Mask Boy does not yet. This is the journey that Tiger must travel through Kowloon, and then ultimately out of the walled city. Out of his walled self. The acceptance of true friendship, true relationship. Dragon's selflessness counterpoints Tiger's selfishness.

Artistically, Liu has a beautiful clean line style more reminiscent of Los Bros Hernandez or Adrian Tomine than of manhua. It works perfectly to express the stylized Kowloon of the book – where kids wear animal masks with no question. The use of only a three color palette over the panels, accentuating the action, gives the book the feel of a 70s comic book, where the colors are perhaps bolder and off-kilter, and yet still modernized to give counterpoint to the panel work and dialogue. It reminds of J. Gonzo's use of color and paper effects in La Mano del Destino. Down to the texture of the paper. Even in eBook form, Lu captures the rag texture of paper, real paper, on each page. Manifesting as a book, an artefact, a journey. And neatly complementing the 70s feel of the story. The only ruining effect is the font used by Book Buddy Media for the English translation caption boxes and dialogue. Darker black and baldly nondescript, it gives the impression of having been typed in later on a copy and not really integrated into the book. It's a strange, and distracting, look.

"The report card reflects only schoolwork. Personal growth is based on life experience." (147) Tiger earns his life experience. He learns his freedom. He completes his hero’s journey. More than that, he affirms that life is more than simply school, work, more than the expectations and demands of society.

"My mom told me getting good grades means a can earn a lot of money from work." – "Just some comic book dialogue, which I don't think you've read." (125)  To which, always read the comic book dialogue. And always read between the lines. Read Cat Mask Boy.

 A version of this review will appear in IJOCA 27-2. 

Book Review: On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power

 reviewed by John A. Lent, International Journal of Comic Art

Michelle Bumatay. On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power. Columbus:  The Ohio State University Press, 2025. 155 pp. US $36.95 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-0-8142-5937-5. https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215821.html

 Any time a new book appears that concentrates on a large segment of Africa and its comics art, celebration is in order, for the pickings have been slim. Anthologies of a particular cartoonist’s work, such as that of Zapiro, Barly Baruti, Marguerite Abouet, Gado, and other masters, are more readily available, as are biographical treatises and analytical monographs on specific characters. However, few continental or regional overviews exist.

So, a hearty welcome to Michelle Bumatay’s On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power, that consists of four chapters that analyze the works of Francophile West and West Central African cartoonists, from the Congo, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon.

The author sets the parameters of her study as being built around “key moments, artists and authors, themes, and publications” of Black bandes dessinées, which include, “political and editorial cartoons, serial publications and self-published magazines, anthologies, mainstream and independent albums, blogs, digital comics, and mobile apps” (15). Though the methodology of the work is missing, it seems to be a qualitative textual analysis with a small mixture of biographical analysis. Bumatay emphasizes the key role that the Franco-Belgian colonial heritage and ongoing imperialism have played on the development of Black bandes dessinées, as well as their effects on the artists, cautioning that the artist’s work varies from “individual to individual and from one project to another” (130), and that attention must be paid to context.

Notions about important West/West-Central African traits and issues are systematically analyzed/argued by Bumatay--that self-fashioning is a “crucial component” of Black cultures, exemplified in her case study of Kinshasa from the late 1960s to the 1990s; how Abouet markets her comics through the postcolonial exotic, and how she pushes for a “new inclusive understanding of universalism that demands a reworking of notions of gender, race, and power” (130); how Black bandes dessinées, for decades, have decried borderization’s (Northern migration) ruinous impacts, raising levels of brutalization, suffering, and indifference, and how these cartoonists have fashioned their styles to become “symbolic forms of restitution” of the world’s environment.

What Bumatay has achieved here is praiseworthy--giving her interpretations of the works of some African bandes dessinées cartoonists, supported by close readings of their works and backed up by similar notions and ideas of a host of researchers from different fields. That was her intention, well and good.

But, let me go off on a tangent--in no way, to devalue the merits of the author’s work--, and ask, are these interpretations aligned with what the artists intended? We don’t know unless journalists and researchers ask them, and, in this book, there does not appear to be evidence that any interviews that may have been done with the artists were used. It would not have been an onerous task for Bumatay to search for interviews in this high-tech age, and, if none is available, which is very unlikely, she could have conducted the interviews herself. Granted that interviewing was not a part of her research plan, so, maybe it can be a major part of her next research project.

The four artists discussed at length in On Black Bandes Dessinées… are still alive, active, and likely accessible. Barly Baruti (born 1959, in the Congo) has lived in Belgium since 1992; Marguerite Abouet (b. 1971, in Ivory Coast) resides in Romainville, France; Papa Mfumu’Eto 1^er (b. 1963) is still in Kinshasa, Congo, and Japhet Miagotar most probably is still around, having been interviewed as recent as 2019. To make matters even easier should Bumatay choose to pursue a topic of this nature, much of the original art of Mfumu is being archived at the University of Florida, not far from where she is an assistant professor, Florida State University.

A suggestion for a future research project for an author whose book is being reviewed may seem to be out of place, and, it may be, but it was made with good intentions, one of which was to get my point across any way I could, that interviewing cartoonists while they are still with us is extremely important for comics scholarship. Okay, point made. Sorry, Ms. Bumatay, for the interruption.

To wrap up, On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power is a valuable contribution to comics scholarship, because it enlightens about cartooning in a part of the world where comics art research is sadly scarce; hones in on a few distinguished cartoonists, allowing for in-depth analysis; for the most part, soundly makes and defends its many arguing points, and employs a rich mixture of secondary sources.