In the Shadow of No Towers

For anyone frustrated by our nation's response to 9/11, this book is a fresh and welcome perspective. Spiegelman captures the confusion and disbelief felt that day by anyone who witnessed the terrible tragedy of the destruction of the World Trade Center. He also includes a history lesson about how comics relate to journalism. From the author of Maus, and Maus II, here is another graphic masterpiece.

I was deeply moved by Art Spiegelman's "In The Shadow Of No Towers" before I even opened the book. As a Manhattanite, the World Trade Center's twin towers used to be my New York City lodestone. With my lousy sense of direction, I always knew where I was by marking my location in relation to the two buildings, soaring skyward, so visible above everything else. Even now, three years after 9/11, I sometimes forget and look towards the southwest, expecting to see the buildings' lights. For days, weeks, months after September 11, I saw, in my minds eye, almost exactly the same image portrayed on the cover of "In The Shadow Of No Towers" - darkest black shadows of the two landmarks against a night sky - emptiness during the daylight. There is no more eloquent description to mark absence, to recall violence and infamy, than the cover picture of these two shadows. Mr. Spiegelman is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Maus," where he used the medium of comic strips to portray the Holocaust, his parents' experience as survivors of Auschwitz, and his own experience as a child of Holocaust victims. Ironically, his parents taught him at an early age to "always keep my bags packed." He writes in the book's Introduction, an extraordinary essay, "I tend to be easily unhinged. Minor mishaps - a clogged drain, running late for an appointment - send me into a sky-is-falling tizzy. It's a trait that leaves one ill-equipped for coping when the sky actually falls." And the sky literally fell on the author and his family that day. They lived in the towers' shadow, in TriBeca, and their daughter was in school that morning - a school located at Ground Zero - a tizzy producing experience if there ever was one!! This unusual hybrid book, 42 oversized pages printed on heavy card stock, is a combination of comic book illustrations and prose. It is an extremely personal memoir of the attacks on the WTC, which Spiegelman and his family witnessed at close range. It is a raving rant about the after effects of the violence and its repercussions throughout the world at large, and the smaller interior world of the author's psyche. It is the intimate story of one family trying to cope. It is an editorial about the political exploitation of this terrible event. The book is designed to be read vertically, just like the old comic strip broadsheets that appeared in newspapers. Each strip is a story, ten of them, followed by a comic supplement. An image, seemingly burned into Spiegelman's eyelids, is the last sight he had of the North Tower just before it fell. He saw the building's skeleton, its very bones, lit up and glowing right before it vaporized. This image reoccurs throughout the book. The country, the world, has seemingly become inured to the unthinkable, just three years later. The further away one lives from Ground Zero, the more removed the event. Art Spiegelman has given us a strange gift with his book - an honest memory of a devastating tragedy - a memory

A couple days ago I had the pleasure of seeing Art Spiegelman at a lecture/signing. Despite the fact that I was exhausted from a long day at work, I was pleased to find that Mr. Spiegelman is a highly entertaining speaker. During the hour he spoke on his new book, In the Shadow of No Towers, I was completely absorbed. Needless to say, the book itself is excellent. It's oversize format mirrors the size of a newspaper as the book unfolds. The first half is a sequence of 10 full-page, multi-panel cartoons that illustrate Mr. Spiegelman's experience in the aftermath of 9/11. Living as he does on Canal Street in NYC with a daughter in a school only blocks from ground zero, Mr. Spiegelman is an eyewitness of incredible feeling--an entire spectrum of feelings he does not hesitate sharing with his readers. The second half of the book are reprints of ancient newspaper cartoon panels from the dawn of comics. Mr. Spiegelman used these old strips as a comfort in the days after 9/11 and as an inspiration for his current work. As someone who has little knowledge of these early days of comics, I found this section to be as interesting as the first half was moving. Mr. Spiegelman is an artist of uncommon skill. His unique style made him a standout among the artists at The New Yorker in the past dozen years. However, he is also a storyteller of uncommon skill. Unfortunately, he has kept this skill under wraps since the achievements of Maus. I am glad he has found his narrative voice again. I just hope that it doesn't take another tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust or 9/11 to make him exercise that skill again.

Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers came out yesterday. I've been waiting for this release for over a year, and made it a point to head up to our local Barnes and Noble to buy it straightaway. Got home with it and put it aside, I had my own strip to pencil, but once I got the pencilling done, I picked up Spiegelman's book and began reading. These pages were originally published in broadsheet format, and that format has been preserved on heavy cardstock. In many ways, for Spiegelman, this work is therapy art, it is his process for dealing with 9/11 and its aftermath. Reading it was, for me, very therapeutic as well. His work encompasses the experience of watching the towers fall, clear through the decision by the GOP to hold its convention in New York. He talks and illustrates at length the degree to which he feels violated and betrayed by the co-option of 9/11 for the current administrations political ends. But this is not Ted Rall's detached political polemicism, but something different, something deeply personal, felt close to the heart and deep in the bones. The artwork itself showcases Spiegelman's versatility, with him working not only within the traditions of his own Milieu (R. Crumb & Co.) but also consciously including tributes to sources as diverse as Herriman's "Krazy Kat" and McCay's "Little Nemo's Adventures in Slumberland." His own character from Maus appears as both Ignatz and Little Nemo. Indeed, after his work is done, he presents pages from the Hearst strips that affected him, just so you'll be able to appreciate those influences in the work itself. The things he does with Eagles is amazing. In most scenes in which they appear they represent the abuses to which patriotism has been subjected. This is a work that is, above all, heartfelt. Regardless of what one may think of the politics he advances, or of the theories he espouses, the fact that this is the honest expression of feeling of someone who bore witness to the events is indisputable, and makes the work all the more affecting. This is a work that I will be reading again and again, so richly is it woven.