Image Comics' "The Big Lie" Asks Some Big Questions

By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY

The Big Lie Exclusive Preview

It has been nearly 10 years since 9/11, and the tragedy is still on the minds of many Americans. One of those, writer and artist Rick Veitch, is convinced we haven’t been told the complete truth about it.

Veitch structured the story similarly to the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “No Time Like the Past,” in which a man uses a time machine to try to “fix” three events: warning a Hiroshima policeman about the atomic bomb, assassinating Hitler before World War II and stopping the sinking of the Lusitania.

In The Big Lie, the heroine is a woman named Sandra, who lost her husband, Carl, during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, she figures out a practical way to travel back in time, so she ventures from present day to Manhattan an hour before the first plane hits the towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

She rushes to his office at a risk-management consulting agency, but since she has aged 10 years, Carl can’t quite accept that it’s her. And even though she brings evidence on her iPad, neither her spouse nor his co-workers believe her warnings.

“The meat of the story is her trying to convince these ‘experts’ that the terrorist attack is about to happen,” Veitch says. “So it’s essentially a taut emotional drama with the facts and questions surrounding 9/11 sewed into it.”

Editor and cover artist Thomas Yeates came up with the idea of creating a comic about 9/11, and he and Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson asked Veitch and Erskine to come on board after being fans of their Vertigo Comics series Army@Love, which was part military satire, part critique on love in wartime.

It wasn’t until they picked a narrator for The Big Lie— Uncle Sam himself — that everything fell into place, says Yeates, who depicts the American icon on the cover of issue 1 standing alongside the smoking Twin Towers.

“For me, what’s great about the U.S. is our freedom,” Yeates says. “The 9/11 attacks were used to pass the Patriot Act, which took away some of our most important freedoms. So Uncle Sam here, while bloodied, is still trying to fight to get those freedoms back.”

Everybody who lived through 9/11, from Ground Zero survivors to those glued to their TV sets, has a personal connection to the day, Veitch says. “It’s very much a defining moment in the history of our country and the world.”

And this isn’t the first time Veitch has used 9/11 as a theme. In his Vertigo Comics graphic novel Can’t Get No, he used one man’s lost week before, during and after the attacks as a view of it from the microcosm, but with The Big Lie, Veitch says, “we’re trying to present the whole macroscopic landscape of politics, finance and military.”

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