Can’t Get No
by Rick Veitch
Vertigo, 352 pages
words Can’t Get No, the latest graphic novel from writer and artist Rick Veitch, chronicles a fictional man’s experiences in the aftermath of 9/11. Like the Rolling Stones song from which the book gets its name, Can’t Get No expresses disillusionment with materialism and mainstream thinking. Oh yeah—there’s also drugs, sex, and one hell of a tattoo job.
The story focuses on Chadwick Roe, a Wall Street executive with a company that makes ultrapermanent markers. Chad soon finds the company’s stock taking a nosedive after a massive lawsuit, so he heads to the nearest bar to drown his sorrows. At the bar, he gets drunk, earns the malice of two women and passes out. When he awakens the next morning, he finds his entire body permanently tattooed in tribal spirals, applied (with his company’s own nonremovable product, of course) by the harridans from the night before.
With intricate lines and patterns covering every inch of skin, Chad is soon reviled and shunned by people in the street. But, before he can even get a real grasp on his situation, a pair of airplanes crash into the World Trade Center. Thus is the backdrop for Veitch’s narrative, which addresses what it means to be human in the light of terrible and terrifying circumstances, meticulously drawn.
Serving this message is Veitch’s writing style, which delivers freestyle poetry in carefully crafted bits: image by image, page by page. While Veitch’s verse borders, at times, on the overbearing (he’s the kind of writer who’s not afraid to use the phrase “poor cabbage-head sliced and diced in the Veg-O-Matic of life”), the book is saved by its powerful images and its surreal-yet-captivating story. Yes, the $19.99 cover price may be a bit steep for a paperback that takes only an hour to read, it’s still worth the investment—it’ll seem like a bargain once you finish lending it to all of your friends.—David T. Roisen
The Movies: Stunts and Effects
PC
Lionhead/Activision
Rated: Teen
games Imagine Godzilla without the gargantuan green monster, or X-Men: The Last Stand without blasts of energy blazing across the screen. In a sense, that’s what Peter Molyneux asked fans of the moviemaking PC sim The Movies to do when he deliberately left the big-budget effects feature on the cutting-room floor. Clearly, Lionhead was holding back the bang and fizzle for an expansion pack.
Not that fans noticed or minded. In fact, an entire community of would-be virtual filmmakers went way beyond the game’s let’s-be-Samuel-Goldwyn mode, using “Starmaker,” the game’s deep movie-making tool set, to create a ridiculous number of, um, unusual visual opuses of their own. (If you’re feeling adventurous, check some of ’em out at www.movies.lionhead.com. You’ll particularly enjoy it if, like me, you’ve ever wondered what cows wrestling might look like.)
Those same cinemaphiles have already gone totally Speilberg over Stunts and Effects, an add-on that finally lets you put the bang—and the flame, and the lasers, and the blue-screen effects—in your would-be summer-movie blockbuster. Plan 9 from Outer Space sequel, anyone?
As the title suggests, the biggest new addition here is stuntmen (and women)—stand-ins who are there to do the dangerous jobs that your star prima donnas won’t. (You know, things like immolating themselves and taking a third-storey dive through a plate-glass window.) But here’s the catch: You have to hire, pay, train and babysit your stunt crew as much as you do your front-line stars. In fact, you even have to dump ‘em in the new hospital building for recuperative stays when they get banged up in stunts gone wrong. Yes, it’s realistic, but it also adds yet another layer to a game that was already brutally heavy on the micromanagement.
If you’re playing the regular game, the new toys don’t become available until 1960—40 game years after you’ve opened your studio—so your best bet is to opt for the QuickStart mode to get at ‘em immediately. The addition of blue screens is also a huge plus: Now you can really confound your actors into wooden-dialogue dysphasia, and fully unleash your inner George Lucas.
My rule of gamer’s thumb for judging an expansion pack hinges on whether the content transforms the overall experience, or simply feels like cash-grab rehash. Stunts and Effects flickers into the former category: If you’ve been using The Movies as the modern equivalent of a Super-8 camera, you’re never going to keep up with the wannabe Wachowskis online without it.—Aaron Conklin