Margins to mainstream

Nearly five years after the fact, 9/11 continues to resonate and inspire, only now it's the stuff of a more complex anxiety. The phantasmagorical nature of the contemporary is the subject of Rick Veitch's graphic novel ``Can't Get No" (Vertigo, unpaginated, $19.99). One of a gang of recent entries in this rapidly expanding medium, it conflates 9/11, Enron, the lunatic right, and Katrina in a quasi-allegory that thankfully bites off more than it can chew.

That run-on, multifaceted thought applies to a work in which the art is expansive but the text is dense with ideas; looking at ``Can't Get No" (nice Stones sample there) is easy, but absorbing it as a whole is more difficult. Veitch's ambitious book is full of stimuli and is one of the more provocative attempts to make sense of events that continue to throw the world for a loop. It stars Chad Roe , head of Eter-No-Mark. When his permanent marker company goes belly up, Roe finds himself adrift in an unmoored society. A pair of grotesque but sexy women mark him permanently and set him loose to wander, drugged and aimless, through 9/11, a bizarre funhouse based on Revolutionary themes and an aquatic disaster of Katrina depth. Roe ends up largely where he started; Veitch doesn't draw conclusions or tie things up neatly, so the finale is as disquieting as the beginning.