Rick Veitch was not a particularly cheery guy. He burst into comics as a small artist full of fury, seemingly unhappy with the direction in which the comics industry had been headed. His work on the Swamp Thing saga furthered the dark and mystical themes, and his solo work did the same. His most well-known work was called The Brat Pack. It featured a team of sidekicks in a dystopian future, meant to mirror specifically, the public’s views on Jason Todd.
The boy wonder was Batman’s second Robin, after Dick Grayson grew up. Fans sent in death threats to the writers, threatening even their young daughters and their wives unless they got rid of Todd. DC put a poll in the back of a comic and let the fans decided his fate, and the overwhelming response called for his death. The sentence was carried out with smiles from both the executioner, and the masses.
To many, this was just the elimination of a less than desired character. To Veitch, it was millions of people threatening people in real life unless a fictional child be brutalized for their amusement. It is no surprise then, that his progenitive solo project stars a Robin-esque sidekick, frequently molested by his adult male counterpart in a skin tight animal suit. The other sidekicks include the Rawhide Kid, who constantly takes steroids, and a nymphomaniac minor who has been pressured into over sexualization bythe ever watchful public eye.
The villain of the story is Captain Blasphemy, who takes to the radio to ask how the public wants him to eliminate the sidekicks live! The response is a car bomb, almost unanimously, but the Robin parallel somehow survives. It is later revealed that the heros who are responsible for the sidekicks all have brand deals, a commentary on comic companies with tendencies to sell-out. These brand deals would change when a sidekick reached 18, as they were then entitled to a cut. Through that revelation, it can be pieced together that the crude, Bizarro-like “heros” are the whole reason Captain Blasphemy killed anyone in the first place, and therefore are actually no better than the villain.
The Brat Pack was one of the first books to deconstruct comic books as an industry. It was brutal and gruesome to the point of being uncomfortable, and yet its sheer artistry is top notch in terms of symbolism and storytelling. Veitch influenced a lot of my favorite stories, and while I personally haven’t read a whole lot of his work other than Constantine and his bit of Swamp Thing, I felt the need to honor him here with a post, since he facotrs in to deconstruction as a heavy hitter.
