In the Shadow of No Towers

Chaos is always with us, suggests In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman's first graphic novel in the 12 years since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus books. Chaos, however, has never been branded as has Sept. 11, 2001. The very unruliness of In the Shadow, a book that ennobles but hardly prettifies the Ground Zero created by the destruction of the World Trade Center, is an attempt to beat back that branding, to decommercialize a day Spiegelman refuses to reduce to a military recruitment poster.

The book opens with a computerized "image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized," stamped onto the middle of the front page of The World, a legendary New York newspaper. The date of that hoary broadsheet is Sept. 11, 2001. The World trumpets news of the assassination of then President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, an associate of "Anarchist Queen" Emma Goldman, herself accused of plotting to kill the president. This busy front page lends Spiegelman's work the immediacy of a daily newspaper.

The power and heft of In the Shadow transcend and upend convention. This is no mere book — it is an artifact, a slab, a monument. Unpaginated, ungainly and heavy, it seems to demand its own space. A coffee table wouldn't seem right for a statement so thick and unsettling. It might even collapse a bookshelf.

This garish, rumpled cartoon edifice is a cry that would outshout chaos, an attempt to grasp an event that seems to defy history. In melding humor and anger, In the Shadow wields a merciless magic. Comics have always been able to do that. But this is a comic book from, and about, hell.

Unlike a work that's all text, you can "get through" this book quickly. Taking it all in takes more time. Patiently created, with great emotional trepidation, this book seems to signal the author's fresh commitment to a world he's just beginning to trust again. Published two months before the presidential election, it suggests that free speech is at least temporarily back in vogue.

Approach this book as you would the Trade Center if it still stood. Like a building, In the Shadow has a front door: The glossy black outlines of the two towers dominate this somber, fitful creation, as they did the darker, more subtly textured and singularly disturbing cover — Spiegelman calls it an "afterimage" — that he produced for the New Yorker the week after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Article Author: Carlo Wolff

Carlo Wolff is the author of Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories and a long-time book and music critic. He works full-time as a business writer at Penton Media, specializing in articles about the hotel industry.

Visit Carlo Wolff's author page — Carlo Wolff's Blog