War Stories: Rick Veitch

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IT'S REALLY ONLY a matter of time before Stephen Colbert calls out Rick Veitch.

The veteran comic book creator, who has worked on everything from "Swamp Thing" to "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," has set his sights on the war in the Middle East in "Army@Love," his new ongoing comic from Vertigo.

"'Army@Love' is related to 'Catch 22' and 'M*A*S*H' and those type of satires that were done 10 or 15 years after the war," Veitch said. "The only thing that I've done that's radical here is I've gone right to the satire rather then give it the natural time frame to allow all the hurt and bad feelings to drain out."

The comic is set five years in the future in a reality where war has escalated. One of the new units of the military is the Motivation & Morale division, which exists to entice people to enlist and stay in the military, kind of like a gung ho marketing department. That doesn't sound all that radical until you realize that it involves special retreats, which is really just a nice way of saying "drunken orgies."

Veitch, who called himself a newspaper junkie, took the natural surrealism of the war in Iraq and turned it into a humor comic that also recalls the war comics and romance comics of the 1960s.

"They've never really been developed like the superhero comics have," Veitch said of war and romance comics. "They still sort of exist back there in Roy Lichtenstein times. I just creatively saw the opening to take the old war comic and the old love comic and mash them together and see what grew out of it."

What grew out of it is a seemingly never-ending conflict where war and entertainment meld.

"When you watch television, war is almost pitched like another form of entertainment," Veitch said. "Even advertising seems built around the war. I guess what I'm doing is saying, 'If we don't watch it, this is where it might evolve,' where the war will have to be branded and sold, much like a consumer project. You could probably say that it is already."

Veitch feels compelled to speak about what's going on right now, which is evident as well in his previous work, a graphic novel called "Cant' Get No," which dealt with September 11.

"There's plenty of great superhero comics being done," he said. "If comics needs anything, it's to broaden its horizons and explore some other territories."

Veitch is also branching out to other genres with reprints of some of his older works, including his upcoming release, "Shiny Beasts," a collection of fully painted science fiction and fantasy stories, one of which is written by "Watchmen" creator Alan Moore.

As for "Army@Love," Veitch will be working on it for the foreseeable future — so don't expect the war to end anytime soon in the book. Which, incidentally, is his fear about the actual war in Iraq.

"What I'm really afraid of in the real world is that even though the discussion is 'When are we going to bring the troops home,' I don't think they're going to be able to," he said. "I think that the mistakes that have been made have kind of stuck over there for decades. I guess that's one of my reasons for doing a book about what that future might mean to us."

Of course, some people just see this is an attack on the troops. Veitch, however, just writes that off as a lack of grasping the nature of the work.

"They don't understand that it is satire," he said.