Dealing with as politically charged a review subject as Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon), I feel the need to open with the following: I accept much of Spiegelman's political take on 9-11 and its aftermath even if I don't agree with all of the specifics. I suspect that many readers less in tune with the cartoonist's shared assumptions will have a difficult time with this book. Unfortunate, but inevitable.

Spiegelman's book collects a series of ten Sunday Funnies-sized pages describing the artist's reactions to the attack on the World Trade Center. Completing the first strip in February 2002, the artist continued to produce his "weekly" strip on a monthly schedule, even though he was unable find a mainstream outlet in this country for the work. As Spiegelman himself notes in his intro, the only publisher outside of a more sympathetic European market was a small-circulation Jewish paper called Forward. By airing his own free-floating pissedness and paranoia so openly and unconcerned with nuance, the onetime Arts Comix darling has suddenly reverted into an underground cartoonist. Disconcerting for those who first came to the cartoonist through his Pulitzer winning Maus volumes or his New Yorker covers, perhaps, but bracing to those like me who first grew to love the man's work through his strips in funkier comix titles like Arcade or Funny Aminals. Sure, this hardback's coming out under a big American book publisher, but it still feels as immediate as the undergrounds where Spiegelman first cut his teeth. Last page of story even references the recent Republican Convention in New York.

Spiegelman's style in No Towers owes much to the deconstructive underground comix he produced in the 70's and 80's. The book, which is comprised of heavy cardboard pages, is designed to be read sideways to accommodate single page compositions that'll fit on two 10"-by-14½" pages. Each page is a compositional statement in itself - more than one strip frequently commenting on different aspects of the same topic as they frequently reflect the visual motif of each page. First page of the series, for instance, opens with a three-panel sequence showing a family's shocked reactions to viewing the events of 9-11 on television, with a two-tiered strip immediately below dramatizing the joke origins of the phrase "waiting for the other shoe to drop;" below this is a three-panel strip showing the television screen from the viewer's perspective, as Spiegelman ruminates on how diminished these images appear ("the towers aren't much bigger, say, than Dan Rather's head.") On the right side of the page is a vertical strip showing a pixeled version of a skeletal tower collapsing in flames, which is taken up on the lower left side, too. Planted in the bottom middle is a large circular panicky New Yorkers as a giant shoe ("Jihad brand footware," an advertising blurb notes) drops from the sky.

The approach hearkens back to Spiegelman's pre-Maus collage style of strip composition - where he comically deconstructed newspaper strips like "Rex Morgan, M.D." or "Dick Tracy" by placing their panels in absurdist situations - only here he utilizes early 20th Century comic characters as both a source of personal comfort and satire. "While waiting for the other terrorist shoe to drop," the cartoonist notes in his final page, "many found comfort in poetry. Others found solace in old newspaper strips." (A dubious declaration, but never mind.) Thus, he anthropomorphizes the two towers by recasting them as the Kin-der-Kids, a decision that at first seems dubious until the fifth page when he uses them in an eight panel parody to slash against the Iraq War.