The Four Color Media Monitor

They haven't improved since the days of Liefeld at all. USA Today writes about a comic by Rick Veitch and Thomas Yeates called "The Big Lie" which looks more like an attack on the laws that can help combat terrorism, and the time travel element sounds inappropriate too:

In The Big Lie, the heroine is a woman named Sandra, who lost her husband, Carl, during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, she figures out a practical way to travel back in time, so she ventures from present day to Manhattan an hour before the first plane hits the towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

She rushes to his office at a risk-management consulting agency, but since she has aged 10 years, Carl can't quite accept that it's her. And even though she brings evidence on her iPad, neither her spouse nor his co-workers believe her warnings.

"The meat of the story is her trying to convince these 'experts' that the terrorist attack is about to happen," Veitch says. "So it's essentially a taut emotional drama with the facts and questions surrounding 9/11 sewed into it."

Are those quotation marks supposed to be some kind of an insult or something?!? But here's where they really let it slip what this is meant to be:

Editor and cover artist Thomas Yeates came up with the idea of creating a comic about 9/11, and he and Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson asked Veitch and Erskine to come on board after being fans of their Vertigo Comics series Army@Love, which was part military satire, part critique on love in wartime.

It wasn't until they picked a narrator for The Big Lie— Uncle Sam himself — that everything fell into place, says Yeates, who depicts the American icon on the cover of issue 1 standing alongside the smoking Twin Towers.

"For me, what's great about the U.S. is our freedom," Yeates says. "The 9/11 attacks were used to pass the Patriot Act, which took away some of our most important freedoms. So Uncle Sam here, while bloodied, is still trying to fight to get those freedoms back."

Another example of a story that considers the Patriot Act the problem, not the terrorists themselves. What is wrong with this man? And Veitch, as the leading writer, is just is dreadful:

...this isn't the first time Veitch has used 9/11 as a theme. In his Vertigo Comics graphic novel Can't Get No, he used one man's lost week before, during and after the attacks as a view of it from the microcosm, but with The Big Lie, Veitch says, "we're trying to present the whole macroscopic landscape of politics, finance and military."

Going into this project, he didn't consider himself a "Truther," yet living during the eras of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Iran/Contra and the invasion of Iraq, Veitch admits that he's skeptical about any "official" story provided by the government.

"Reading the 9/11 Commission Report, it's pretty clear that a lot of important evidence about the lead-up to the attacks and the collapse of the towers was ignored or glossed over," he explains. "And I'm pretty angry about the aftermath: how Iraq was invaded based on false intelligence and the occupation mismanaged resulting in over 100,000 civilian deaths."

Oh my god. This is simply terrible. And if this is what DC's Vertigo line amounts to, maybe it would be better off discontinued.

While similar time-travel stories are nothing new in pop culture, not many have tackled 9/11 yet. It's still pretty recent, for sure, but "the modern entertainment industry tends to focus on empty calories," Veitch says. "And there's been a sort of cultural amnesia in the general public concerning 9/11. I think it was so traumatic that most folks want to forget it and get on with their lives.

I think there's a good reason why 9-11 shouldn't be tackled in sci-fi: it's not going to change history and reality in real life. It practically borderlines on offensive. And if there's any amnesia, it's coming from people like Veitch, who seems to forget it was Osama bin Laden's tyrannical clan that masterminded the attacks; exactly what Veitch is trivializing here.

On the site of 9-11 Blogger, one of the people involved with the project, whose screen name is "Nor Cal Truth" said in the comments:

So, I own Truth Be Told. I set up the site. I pay the artists. I write the contracts. (The absolute last thing I thought I would be doing if you asked me 5 months ago, really.)

Apparently, the nut who wrote that was the one bankrolling the project.

Once Image was notorious for building their output on the works of disasters like Rob Liefeld. Now, they're going to be notorious for leftist propaganda. Some "improvement" they've made all these years. Especially if they won't publish any indie books by conservative authors.

Labels: indie publishers, msm propaganda, politics