Word: spiegelman
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There's no guesswork in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon; 38 pages), but there isn't much education either. Spiegelman is also a Pulitzer winner, as it happens, for Maus, a bleakly beautiful comic about the Holocaust. In the Shadow of No Towers--the title is a bad poem in one line--is Spiegelman's very personal take on the destruction of the World Trade Center in 10 monumental (14 1/2in. by 19 1/2in.), full-color episodes. The attacks left Spiegelman in a traumatized, neurasthenic state. (MISSING, proclaims a poster, A. SPIEGELMAN...
...actual victims, for example--or in why the attacks occurred. When he describes himself as "equally terrorized" by al-Qaeda and by his own government, he's giving us an equation that just doesn't balance. Yes, there are serious civil rights issues in the U.S. today, but Spiegelman personally has little cause to fear a dirty-bomb attack from Tom Ridge. And if his grasp of the problem is shaky, his groping toward a solution is worse. When Spiegelman compares Osama bin Laden to Ignatz, the cheeky brick-throwing mouse from George Herriman's Krazy Kat, the mind recoils...
...newspaper comic motif also smartly matches the form of No Towers. The German newspaper that originally commissioned the project gave Spiegelman an unheard-of deal in these days of ever-shrinking funnies: an entire full-color page with total editorial freedom. The book nearly replicates their original monumental size on super thick cardstock paper. You read each strip horizontally across two pages but thanks to the clever binding, each strip lies flat, without an annoying gutter in the middle...
...Even though the book is physically big and heavy, it reads fast. The ten original strips have been padded out with a fascinating but limited collection of the old strips that Spiegelman found particularly prescient to the events of a century later. One episode of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland has Nemo and his pals as giants, toppling over the buildings of New York. Only 36 pages, the book amounts to little more content than an average comic. Frustratingly, the author's introduction tantalizes us with synopses of strips he didn't get to. Just do them...
...Though it may be brief, In the Shadow of No Towers synthesizes Art Spiegelman's incomparable talents for personal history and comix theory into a timely and unique work of art. Using the medium's past to explore new kinds of expression, the book captures the visual experimentation of the old strips and updates them to modern times. What a treat to see Spiegelman back in his element. Let us hope it doesn?t take another atrocity to keep him going...