Here’s one of those six degrees of separation moments.  Actually, less than six degrees.  Yesterday I was commenting on DC’s New 52, and in that post I mentioned that one of my favorite new issues was Animal Man.  The 1980s Animal Man, after Grant Morrison handed over the pen, was written for a while by Tom Veitch.  Tom’s brother is Rick Veitch.  Rick has authored several comics related to 9/11 and its ramifications, including Can’t Get No (an interesting graphic novel) and the clever Army@Love. Rick Veitch, along with inker Gary Erskine, has now authored another comic book that I just picked up, the first in a new series that directly addresses 9/11.  The Big Lie has just recently come out from Image, and I have to say that it’s an interesting twist on 9/11 and the conspiracy theories surrounding that event. Whether you buy into the theories or not, you have to admit that Veitch’s new comic does more than just spew out paranoid(?) speculations.  He makes the questions surrounding the tragedy into an intelligent narrative.  In the story, a physicist by the name of Sandra is able to time travel back from 2011 to September 11, 2001.  She does so in order to try to convince her husband, who died in the Twin Towers, that the Towers are about to be attached, that there’s something fishy about the event, and that he needs to help her warn others.  In an added, and perhaps the most intelligent, twist to this time-travel narrative, Sandra’s husband works for a risk management agency who is working or Stephen Spielberg, and the firm is going over all the pros and cons of Sandra’s revelations as if they were merely serving in consultancy.  And the unreal aspect of Spielberg’s movie-making becomes a part of the fantasy that the risk management firm finds itself wrapped up in, to the point that they rationalize or “fantasize” themselves into death through denial.

This first issue is really good, and I’m curious to see where the series goes.  This first issue could easily serve as a stand-alone issue, not needing what comes after to make any sense.  But I wonder where Veitch will go in the next issues, after Sandra’s efforts proved futile.  And how long he can keep up a comic book series devoted to ferreting out the “truths” underlying 9/11.