Written by Rick Veitch
Illustrated by Rick Veitch and Gary ErskineA lab tech travels back in time on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 to try and get her husband out of the world trade center before it falls, but will the facts convince him before it’s too late? A riveting tale of 9/11 by award winning master storyteller RICK VEITCH that exposes ‘The Big Lie!’
Next month, just in time for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (or some similar phrasing that perhaps sounds a bit less inappropriate), Image will be releasing the controversial one-shot The Big Lie, which aims to illuminate some of the 9/11 conspiracies, the fact and the fiction, and find out what lies beneath. The question then becomes: is this comic a comic just for controversies sake, or is there something more to it than that?
Find out after the cut.
9/11 is certainly a difficult subject to talk about. It’s not easy to discuss it without opening wounds for someone somewhere, because it was an event that changed the world forever. Now September 11th won’t just be another day on the calendar, but it has become 9/11. You can’t say it without immediate recogntion, whereas dates likes April 9th, June 23rd or November 4th is just as important historically to this country yet mean nothing when said outloud (or even July 21st). That’s how big 9/11 was; it became 9/11.
Naturally with an event as confusing and shocking as this, in today’s day and age of conspiracy theories around every corner there were bound to be a few people looking at the tragedy and trying to make it somewhat worse. Not only was this just an attack on American soil by a religious group, but all of a sudden it became an on purpose assault on Americans by Americans in the mind of a few determined individuals, so convinced that president George Bush and his staff would someday combine like Voltron to become Satan himself. And with that, we have the Big Lie.
The Big Lie is, in many ways, similar to the controversial video Loose Change, which – if you’ve seen it – basically says everything Veitch is trying to say here: Bush, coerced by Cheney, allowed an attack on American soil because we needed a “new Pearl Harbor.” The Big Lie has a bit of a different spin on it, though – instead of just spouting things off with videos and images, it focuses on a bereaved woman who manages to travel back in time (due to her work on the Large Hadron Collider) and attempts to save her husband, who works at a risk management consulting firm in the World Trade Center. Her husband and co-workers live to debunk myths and theories and provide reasonable explanations for how things can or would be done, so when she brings to them this “insane” tale of how terrorists are about to attack the buildings on her weird handheld touch computer device, the discussion leads to how this could never happen and isn’t going to happen; at least, not how she says it will. Except then it happens, and you see the plane approaching the first tower.
The trouble with something like The Big Lie is that it takes itself seriously. This isn’t some fictional sci-fi romp about a husband and wife stranded across time; it’s as much about their relationship as it is about the color of the sky (blue, by the way). This is a comic that uses the personal tragedy to discuss the national one, but it does so as if it were fact. In an entirely fictional story, this book – with absolutely no sourcing to it’s claims – is inherently claiming that everything it tells you is true. No matter where you stand on the 9/11 Truth issue, it stands as notable that this comic seeks to be a new version of Loose Change, except it’s reporting information that has already been debunked, not just by the US Government itself, but by other 9/11 Truthers (see also: Popular Mechanics). You’re essentially reading a fictional comic book that thinks that it’s a factual comic book, and the misinformed nature of the book – especially, and I can’t quite stress this enough, since there is no sourcing – is quite irking.
Continued belowOn top of that, the comic feels like nothing more than Veitch just screaming at the reader that everything they know is wrong. If we assume that myself or any given reader has not looked into the (debunked) myths and theories, this is still Veitch somewhat hopping on a decade old bandwagon and saying, “No, but seriously, you guys! How’d it get burned?” Veitch claimed in an interview with USA Today that he didn’t want any kind of slant, yet the comic is entirely slanted (which is painfully clear in the last panel, if nowhere else). But if this is true, if Veitch did want to simply create a comic that “asks questions”, then the inherent impression of the comic is simply that it is a different form of stunt comic. While Marvel and DC are busy rebooting and killing characters with their “stunts,” Veitch is instead giving a middle finger to the former presidency ten years too late in a stunt that just ends up feeling wildly inappropriate, callous, and tacky. 9/11 is still in everyone’s hearts and minds, and it’s impossible not to meet someone whose life was changed forever because of that day. This comic is just picking at a vicious scab over an America that’s still healing.
To use an analogy to describe the whole book, imagine being at a bar and trying to have a good time. It’s been a long day, and you’re just trying to forget about your worries for ten minutes while you enjoy a game and a brew with your friends. However, there’s one man in the corner of the bar who keeps screaming and ranting at the top of his lungs. The bartender tells him, “Rick, keep it down,” but he just keeps going on and on until suddenly you’re not really enjoying yourself anymore. So now you can either leave the bar, force yourself to pretend you can’t hear this, or just look at the man and say, “Sir. We get it.” If you choose to confront the man, however, he will in turn approach you directly, spewing disgusting beer breath in your face and spitting crumbs of beer nuts at you, to the point where you have to ask yourself if it’s time to “take this outside.” That’s what reading the Big Lie is in a nut-shell: you’ll have a whole stack of comics on September 7th, and if you buy the Big Lie it’ll yell at you for a while to the point where everything just feels awkward.
Comics are a wonderful medium, and one that certainly should be taken advantage of. Here in Boston (where Multiversity HQ is located), local shops have independent comics that retell historical stories with relevance to our town, for example. On top of that, literary classics are being revamped into comic book format quite frequently these days, and some of the most important new literature can be found in a comic book shop and not just Barnes and Noble. I am not opposed to using the comic book medium for personal expression of any kind, and I would never dare to tell anyone to do otherwise. However, in the case of The Big Lie, it’s a bit too much. To release a comic of this nature without any sort of hard factual evidence or sourcing involved (everything is mentioned as “people have said…” with only one example of photographical “evidence”) feels like it’s trying to be controversial for controversies sake, and to release it on the anniversary of September 11th feels like little more than a stunt. I can appreciate Veitch’s initial intent (or what I assume is his intent from reading the USA Today interview), but the execution is highly flawed. I’m no conspiracy theorist (so I’m obviously not the target audience), and this is a “to each his own” type of comic if I’ve ever seen one, but for my money you’re honestly better off grabbing a DC Reboot comic over this.
Final Verdict: No need for numbers. Just skip it.
