In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon Graphic Library) - Hardcover

Spiegelman, Art

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375423079 ISBN 13: 9780375423079

Publisher: Pantheon, 2004

Synopsis

For the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11th were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No Towers is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day.

Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda.

He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey—with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit—the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.

About this title

About the Author

Art Spiegelman is cofounder/editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. From 1992 to 2002, he was a staff artist and writer for The New Yorker, which published his powerful black-on-black 9/11 cover a few days after the event. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the world. Maus received the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Spiegelman lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and their two children.

From the Back Cover

For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were both highly personal and intensely political. "In the Shadow of No Towers, his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking "Maus, is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day.
Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda.
He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey--with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit--the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.

From the Inside Flap

For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No Towers, his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking Maus, is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day.

Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda.

He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey--with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit--the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.

Reviews

Grade 10 Up–Spiegelman summons his considerable talent to express exactly what the horrendous events of 9/11 meant to him and his family, both at the time and since that fateful day. The author lives and works in the immediate vicinity of ground zero, and his daughter was attending high school in the shadow of the towers. With wry insight he depicts the anxious efforts of his family to reach one another as the towers were burning. Spiegelman employs a multitude of narrative devices and graphic styles, numerous political and cultural references, and inspired motifs from late-19th- and early-20th-century comic strips. Through them he conveys his sense of hopelessness and doom, but also conveys his arduous cry against the Bush administration, those "brigands suffering from war fever." Some readers may take issue with his political viewpoint. No one could challenge, however, the genuineness of the book's primary visual motif. At the moment of the collapse of the north tower, an image was forever burned into the author's memory: the "tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized." Spiegelman's artistry and technical mastery are matched equally by his depth of feeling and intelligence of expression. Although the book is oversized and unusual in format (the pages are heavy cardboard stock), most libraries will want to find a place for this powerful work.–Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA

After the Fall

The appearance of Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon, $19.95) should be a real event. It's Spiegelman's first extended work in comics form since he finished Maus, well over a decade ago; his subject this time is the fall of the World Trade Center and his own post-Sept. 11 trauma, presented in something like the format of early-20th-century comic strips.

In practice, though, it's a colossal wet firecracker, a trifle blown up to enormous size and heft (it's printed on heavy card stock). In the Shadow of No Towers is a series of 10 tabloid-sized strips. They were initially planned as a weekly series, which it took Spiegelman the better part of two years to complete. He complains in the introduction that he had difficulty finding American newspapers "outside the left-leaning alternative press" that would run oversized, full-color pages whenever he got around to finishing them -- has any other cartoonist ever gotten that kind of carte blanche?

The No Towers strips are formally audacious juxtapositions of styles and perspectives: computer graphics, bold Maus-style pen-and-ink renderings, and approximations of a dozen century-old strips, overlapping each other in half-panicked chaos. But they don't have anything like the force of Spiegelman's famous black-on-black New Yorker cover illustration of the towers. He's venting in all directions rather than making a point, and his jokes are pure lead. Directed by a Homeland Security "Red, White and Blue Alert," for instance, Spiegelman buries his head under a flag. "I should feel safer under here, but -- damn it! -- I can't see a thing!" he exclaims.

To fill out the book, we also get examples of some of the vintage newspaper strips that inspired No Towers: a grandly witty 1907 "Little Nemo in Slumberland" page by Winsor McKay that involves some buildings in Lower Manhattan being knocked over, a 1921 specimen of George McManus's "Bringing Up Father" in which the Leaning Tower of Pisa is propped up so it won't collapse, and so on. It's too bad the main attraction doesn't have these old strips' verve, or their bite.

Tiger and the Tank

The initial concept of Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso's earthy crime series 100 Bullets wasn't too promising: A mysterious man presents down-and-out people with a briefcase containing incontrovertible evidence of who's wronged them, a gun and a hundred bullets that the law won't hold them responsible for using.

Over the past four years, though, it's deepened into a broader and more coherent story about violence and its spiraling consequences. The untraceable ammo, as it turns out, is a test: a pathway into an enormous conspiracy, a war between America's secret rulers and their former servants. And the people who hold the guns find their lives splintered further by their license to kill.

100 Bullets: Samurai (Vertigo; paperback, $12.95) collects two storylines about imprisoning bars and bestial natures. In the first, "Chill in the Oven," we revisit Loop Hughes, a promising, smartmouthed young tough from earlier in the series, now in a brutal prison, losing hope and caught between three factions who want him dead. The second, "In Stinked" (Azzarello has a regrettable penchant for ungainly puns), involves a pair of junkies, a crooked zookeeper in league with an even more crooked cop, some Mafiosi in the mood for a hunt, and a hungry 500-pound tiger with one of the special guns in his cage.

Azzarello is willing to force his audience to re-read his stories a few times to make sense of them: At first, they're a mess of slurred slang and constant violence, as vulgar as a half-dried bloodstain and so hard-boiled they're almost inedible. But careful examination makes all the pieces fall into place in the greater mosaic of the series, where justice and retribution are nothing but ephemeral fantasies for the pawns in a game of power. Risso and colorist Patricia Mulvihill make Samurai seem even bleaker and more jagged: Their artwork is all wiry pen-lines, chiaroscuro and the dirty palette of dim electric-bulb light, and the faces and bodies Risso draws are contorted by stress and weight.

One mystery: Why is this volume called Samurai, since that word appears nowhere within the comics themselves? Perhaps because it's the series's seventh collection, and hence an allusion to "The Seven Samurai," or because honor and loyalty are at the core of these stories -- or, rather, the mystery of who will be loyal to whom, and what honor may consist of, under the warping, burning lens of a gun's sight.

Sketches of Spain (and More)

Having won a heap of awards for his mammoth autobiographical graphic novel Blankets, the young cartoonist Craig Thompson went on a 10-week tour of Europe and Morocco earlier this year to research his next book, and just happened to keep a sketchbook/travel diary. He describes Carnet de Voyage (Top Shelf, $14.95) as "a little snack -- à la airline pretzels" for his readers.

Some snack. Carnet is more than 200 pages of exquisitely observed drawings, flush with the sheer joy of making pictures. Thompson draws crowds, tiles, young women, old men, buildings; he caricatures himself with rubbery limbs and a pointy nose; he diagrams a dinner of raclette in the Alps, the changes in scenery on the way out of Marrakech, and the anatomy of the camel he rides through the Sahara. He provides extensive handwritten captions for everything, analyzing his own changing perceptions of himself as a traveler and giving the book the casual, digressive narrative of a letter home.

Thompson is a compulsive artist -- he can't restrain himself from drawing everything interesting he sees, and he transforms everything with his pen and brush into a whirling rush of splintery lines and uneven curves. Throughout the second half of Carnet de Voyage, he complains frequently about crippling pain in his drawing hand, which doesn't stop him from turning out three or four glorious pages a day. (Neither does his fling with a gorgeous Swedish woman in Barcelona.) He might want to think about conserving his hand, though: At one point, he and a friend watch a movie of the aged Renoir, his hands mangled by arthritis and wrapped in bandages. The prospect of the same thing happening to this 28-year-old wonder is frightening.

Love Affair

The first volume of the Japanese manga series Princess Ai (Tokyopop; paperback, $9.99) was written and drawn by Misaho Kujiradou and D.J. Milky, but the selling point of the series is its co-creator, Courtney Love. The infamous singer is also, more or less, the book's star: Princess Ai's name means "love" in Japanese, and, fittingly, sounds like "I" in English. The alien princess lands on Earth in the middle of Tokyo, carrying a mysterious heart-shaped box (any resemblance to a Nirvana song title is entirely intentional), and gets involved with an adorable but troubled blond singer-guitarist named Kurt -- no, excuse me, Kent.

By the end of the book, Ai has grown a pair of wings (evidently not through plastic surgery) and taken to wearing ripped-up dresses. She's also working in a strip club, but not stripping: "My body is sacred, so it's a no-go," she explains in the translation's dented English. Instead she's singing hard rock, with a repertoire that includes Love's own "Hold On to Me." (Every time she sings, all the other characters comment on how talented she is, like courtiers surrounding the Sun King.) There's also a subplot involving evil creatures who are trying to destroy the princess and her family so that the "second revolution" will fail, but that's just a formality.

Princess Ai is very much of its genre -- shojo, Japanese comics aimed specifically at teenage girls. It's got all the stock shojo characters and situations: cute-as-a-button women with eyes half the size of their heads, willowy young men, accidents that make them fall on top of each other, wardrobe malfunctions, bitchy rivals, scheming corporations and a hefty helping of cheesecake.

Milky and Kujiradou do what they can under the circumstances. The artwork pulls off a certain campy glamour -- for instance, Princess Ai carries a heart-shaped umbrella. But most cartoonists don't have to suck up to their lead characters.

By Douglas Wolk
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Spiegelman's new work is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction. It's an artful rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by a world-class pessimist ("after all, disaster is my muse"). The artist, who lives in downtown Manhattan, believes the world really ended on Sept. 11, 2001—it's merely a technicality that some people continue to go about their daily lives. He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his trademark sense of existential doom. "I'm not even sure I'll live long enough," says a chain-smoking, post-9/11 cartoon-mouse Spiegelman, "for cigarettes to kill me." The book is a visceral tirade against the Bush administration ("brigands suffering from war fever") and, when least expected, an erudite meditation on the history of the American newspaper comic strip, born during the fierce circulation wars of the 1890s right near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. This beautifully designed, oversized book (each page is heavy board stock) opens vertically to offer large, colorful pages with Spiegelman's contemporary lamentations along with wonderful reproductions of 19th-century broadsheet comic strips like Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley and Rudolf Dirk's Katzenjammer Kids. Old comics, Spiegelman (Maus) writes, saved his sanity. "Unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century... they were just right for an end-of-the world moment." This is a powerful and quirky work of visual storytelling by a master comics artist.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* With Maus, Spiegelman proved that the comics medium was capable of tackling even so delicate and contentious a subject as the Holocaust. Now, in his most ambitious project since that 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, he shows that comics are equally up to the challenge of addressing the horror of 9/11. Spiegelman lives and works in lower Manhattan, and he witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center. He uses an array of drawing styles and narrative devices to convey his outrage and helplessness following the attacks, and he depicts himself as the ultimate urban neurotic, railing against the events and their exploitation by the Bush administration to pursue its war in Iraq. Working in full color on cardboard pages big enough to suggest newspaper broadsheets, Spiegelman incorporates characters and motifs from the turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century strips to which he resorted for solace after the attacks. Although the book shows off Spiegelman's unmatched command of the comics medium even better than the highly acclaimed Maus, his technical mastery doesn't get in the way of his ardor. While it's impossible for any single work to come to grips fully with the atrocity of 9/11, Spiegelman presents a strikingly vivid response that is at once heartfelt and thoughtful. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Please note: The following is a section from the introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers. You may view spreads from book at: http://www.pantheonbooks.com/graphicnovels/towers.html.

The Sky Is Falling!
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 can leave one ill-equipped for coping with the sky when it actually falls. Before 9/11 my traumas were all more or less self-inflicted, but outrunning the toxic cloud that had moments before been the north tower of the World Trade Center left me reeling on that faultline where World History and Personal History collide–the intersection my parents, Auschwitz survivors, had warned me about when they taught me to always keep my bags packed.

It took a long time to put the burning towers behind me. Personal history aside, zip codes seemed to have something to do with the intensity of response. Long after uptown New Yorkers resumed their daily jogging in Central Park, those of us living in Lower Manhattan found our neighborhood transformed into one of those suburban gated communities as we flashed IDs at the police barriers on 14th Street before being allowed to walk home. Only when I traveled to a university in the Midwest in early October 2001 did I realize that all New Yorkers were out of their minds compared to those for whom the attack was an abstraction. The assault on the Pentagon confirmed that the carnage in New York City was indeed an attack on America, not one more skirmish on foreign soil. Still, the small town I visited in Indiana–draped in flags that reminded me of the garlic one might put on a door to ward off vampires–was at least as worked up over a frat house’s zoning violations as with threats from "raghead terrorists." It was as if I’d wandered into an inverted version of Saul Steinberg’s famous map of America seen from Ninth Avenue, where the known world ends at the Hudson; in Indiana everything east of the Alleghenies was very, very far away.

One of my near-death realizations as the dust first settled on Canal Street was the depth of my affection for the chaotic neighborhood that I can honestly call home. Allegiance to this unmelted nugget in the melting pot is as close as I comfortably get to patriotism. I wasn’t able to imagine myself leaving my city for safety in, say, the south of France, then opening my Herald Tribune at some café to read that New York City had been turned into radioactive rubble. The realization that I’m actually a "rooted" cosmopolitan is referred to in the fourth of the No Towers comix pages that follow, but the unstated epiphany that underlies all the pages is only implied: I made a vow that morning to return to making comix full-time despite the fact that comix can be so damn labor intensive that one has to assume that one will live forever to make them.

In those first few days after 9/11 I got lost constructing conspiracy theories about my government’s complicity in what had happened that would have done a Frenchman proud. (My susceptibility for conspiracy goes back a long ways but had reached its previous peak after the 2000 elections.) Only when I heard paranoid Arab Americans blaming it all on the Jews did I reel myself back in, deciding it wasn’t essential to know precisely how much my "leaders" knew about the hijackings in advance–it was sufficient that they immediately instrumentalized the attack for their own agenda. While I was going off the deep end in my studio, my wife, Françoise, was out impersonating Joan of Arc–finding temporary shelter for Tribeca friends who’d been rendered homeless, sneaking into the cordoned-off areas to bring water to rescue workers and even, as art editor of The New Yorker, managing to wrest a cover image from me, a black-on-black afterimage of the towers published six days after the attack.

I’d spent much of the decade before the millennium trying to avoid making comix, but from some time in 2002 till September 2003 I devoted myself to what became a series of ten large-scale pages about September 11 and its aftermath. It was originally going to be a weekly series, but many of the pages took me at least five weeks to complete, so I missed even my monthly deadlines. (How did the newspaper cartoonists of the early twentieth century manage it? Was there amphetamine in Hearst’s water coolers?) I’d gotten used to channeling my modest skills into writing essays and drawing covers for The New Yorker. Like some farmer being paid to not grow wheat, I reaped the greater rewards that came from letting my aptitude for combining the two disciplines lie fallow.

A restlessness with The New Yorker that predated 9/11 grew as the magazine settled back down long before I could. I wanted to make comix–after all, disaster is my muse!–but the magazine’s complacent tone didn’t seem conducive to communicating hysterical fear and panic. At the beginning of 2002, while I was still taking notes toward a strip, I got a fortuitous offer to do a series of pages on any topic I liked from my friend Michael Naumann, who had recently become the editor and publisher of Germany’s weekly broadsheet newspaper, Die Zeit. It allowed me to retain my rights in other languages and came complete with a promise of no editorial interference–an offer no cartoonist in his right mind could refuse. Even one in his wrong mind.

The giant scale of the color newsprint pages seemed perfect for oversized skyscrapers and outsized events, and the idea of working in single page units corresponded to my existential conviction that I might not live long enough to see them published. I wanted to sort out the fragments of what I’d experienced from the media images that threatened to engulf what I actually saw, and the collagelike nature of a newspaper page encouraged my impulse to juxtapose my fragmentary thoughts in different styles.

--Art Spiegelman, NYC, February 16, 2004

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375423079
• ISBN 13: 9780375423079
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 42