Casting a Long Shadow: Art Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers"

Artistic response to September 11th has been slow coming, the result of a fear of political reprisal, a lack of distance and mainly because the emotion of the event has simply been too raw up until now. Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman addresses all of these obstacles to reflection in his stunning and heartfelt In the Shadow of No Towers, his first major work since the Aushcwitz survival tale, Maus. Like that earlier work, Spiegelman is unnervingly personal, relaying his own experience of September 11th in a confessional style that is neurotic, insecure and unfiltered. Spiegelman and his family live in downtown Manhattan and his account of trying to reach his daughter and get her out of school as the towers fell around them is one of the most poignant retellings of what has already become a well-worn narrative.

The book is meant to be read on its side, creating long broadsheets that mirror not only the shape of the towers, but also the early twentieth century comics that inspire both the visual style of No Towers and also make up the second half of the book. As the book continues, Spiegelman finds himself increasingly at odds with his government, his family and himself. He finds himself unable to sleep, convinced of conspiracy theories, and gleefully refusing to be a nationalist when he is interviewed on TV. Conservatives are likely to be pissed off by the turn Spiegelman takes his book- his Bush bashing, which may have seemed fresh and provocative when he drew it is now just another voice in an ever larger chorus.

The second half of the book is kind of brilliant. Spiegelman finds solace in the comics of the early twentieth century, inspired by both their immediacy and impermanance. He provides us with a "History of Comics" primer, which seems a little out of place, but is fascinating nonetheless. The rest of the book is filled with selected examples of comics that have inspired Spiegelman, like The Yellow Kid, The Katzenjammer Kids and most evocatively a Little Nemo in Slumberland where Nemo and Morpheus, the King of Dreams , scale the skyscrapers of New York.

The comics that Spiegelman chooses almost universally involve children being caught up in events larger and weirder than they can handle (there is one notable exception). Presumably, this is how Spiegelman feels and while the rest of the world continues to try to convince itself that it has moved on and healed, Spiegelman's admission that he has not moved on is a salve to the rest of who secretly haven't moved on either.

Article Author: Japhy Grant

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