Back in 1980, Rick Veitch grew weary of toiling away in the field of corporate comics and decided to try his hand at self-publishing and launched Brat Pack under his own King Hell imprint. At the time this 5-issue comicbook was a revolutionary series that completely deconstructed the classic, corporate superhero myth. Vetch, to his credit, took every dark, whispering secret fear that we in the industry spoke of amongst ourselves as well as all of the dirty nasty things that outsiders thought about us and our heroes, poured them into a blender, then he stripped away the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, and set it to atomize.
What we — the unsuspecting reader — got was an amazing fully fleshed-out set of iconic superheroes that were driven not so much by idealized comicbook purity, but by real-world foibles and vices. No, this wasn’t the rose-colored, Stan Lee “men of valor with feet of clay” superheroes; this was a world of grime, corruption, vice, death and decay. This is a world where the innocent suffer terribly at the hands of those who were supposed to mentor them. In 1970, Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson told us that our heroes were All in Color for a Dime, and our beloved hobby was something to be cherished — in 1990 Veitch served up Brat Pack, the antithesis of all that had come before, and exhorted us to “Live Fast, Love hard, Die with your Mask on.”
Once the series was complete, Veitch collected and refined the story into a graphic novel which initially came out in ’92. Still unsatisfied with it, over the intervening years (like George Lucas constantly tinkering with Star Wars), Veitch has continued to refine and retool the story to make it even sharper and more insightful. Sometime during then and now, Veitch’s pal, Steve Bissette was asked by Veitch to pen an introduction to a planned new volume; only not only did that particular volume never get published, but Bissette’s essay grew into the book Teen Angels and New Mutants (2011, Hollywood Comics) .
What Teen Angels does — in very specific and exacting details — is track and explains how Veitch got from where he started as a youth in Vermont, to become the author of the utterly brilliant Brat Pack Graphic novel. Bissette does this by not only following Veitch’s life and career, but by examining the minutia of the pop culture landscape that influenced Veitch as he was growing into adulthood. What we, the readers, wind up with is an incredibly scholarly tome that isn’t simply an apologist explanation as to why Veitch wrote this dirty, subversive book, but clearly demonstrates that this is where we as a culture were heading anyway, and that Veitch, somehow, simply got there two decades before everyone else,
Bissette, in addition to being a master storyteller himself, is also an excellent teacher, a thorough researcher, and a knowledgeable historian as well, putting him head and shoulders above most folks who attempt to follow a trend then write about it. Bissette leaves nothing out in his pursuit of knowledge and clarity as he thoroughly documents and extensively footnotes his work. Here is where his where his time as storyteller comes into play. For this is no dry, schoolbook text, but is an exciting romp through the pop culture landscape touching on music, comics, movies, plays, literature, TV, and virtually everything that forms the zeitgeist that is the world in which we live.
This book is a fascinating exposé of the soft dark underbelly of what seismic forces went into molding that sound bite part of the Pop Culture experience that bubbled cauldron-like to the visible surface. So, even if you never read Brat Pack you can follow what Bissette is talking about. However, if you have read Brat Pack, reading this tome will simply add to your knowledge and understanding of that book (and probably want to make you go back and read it again). For those folks who haven’t read Veitch’s magnum opus, we highly recommended that you seek it out and do so at your earliest connivance. If you did read it when it first came out or subsequently, in one of the earlier versions of the graphic novel (there have been four), we again urge you to acquire the latest volume to see how Veitch Has refined it since last you saw it.
Brat Pack tells the story of four teenaged sidekicks who are being mentored by dark, twisted, disturbed versions of iconic archetype comicbook characters (think Batman, Wonder Woman, and Green Arrow each of whom was in turn mentored by a Superman-type character that turns all of their respective worlds on end in ways that were not even conceivable by most writers (much less readers) back in the era in which it was written.
The comic series Brat Pack has since gone on to become (along with Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns) one of the seminal graphic novels produced during the modern era. These books — each in their own way — helped transform the state of comics, forever moving it from disposable kiddie fare into the world of adult literature. Bissette’s tome places Veitch and his work squarely into that field, showing how Veitch wasn’t so much following a trend as he was blazing a new trail and leading the pack in a direction that no one had seen prior.
