Art Spiegelman: In the Shadow of No Towers

20 years on, it is interesting in new ways to engage with In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman’s lesser known second comic masterwork.

There are ways, technically, in which it surpasses his universally praised Maus. But the events depicted in Maus were of course settled history (or so we thought) at the time of its publication. In the ’80s and ’90s most mature, responsible adults agreed that killing millions of innocent people was a bad thing, and what’s more that it had actually happened. When Spiegelman put out In the Shadow (2002-2004), a sizable chunk of the populace was duped into following an unelected President and his administration down dark avenues of misdirected revenge for 9/11. (Everyone wanted Bin Laden’s head on a platter, including me. But wasn’t the way to get him the way Obama eventually did get him — surgically? Why are the deaths of innocents acceptable in the name of revenge? You become worse than the monsters who attacked you in the first place. But that seems to be the way of it.) Anyway, Spiegelman dared to call out the insanity of the American response as well as the original terrorist outrage in his account of September 11 and the days and weeks thereafter, and surely few media outlets were going to exercise independence and courage in praising that. How much worse is it now, when large swaths of the populace don’t know which way is up either historically or in the present tense? At the Yankees game last night, the stadium announcer asked for a minute of silence on behalf of a murdered Nazi. I’m not a fan of murder. By all means, prosecute and condemn the assassin. But you know what? In the world where I was brought up, there was at least enough sanity left in the land where tens of thousands of lemmings didn’t stand to honor the memory of fucking brownshirts.

Anyway, we are where we are and we can’t wish our way out of it. I’m sure that with all that we have going on in the world, few will have time or bandwidth to honor or remember September 11 today. (Not if the indifference to my post on Hurricane Katrina two weeks ago is any measure!) People strenuously avoid my annual September 11 posts — you’d be appalled to know what they prefer to read here, what they flock to, or maybe you wouldn’t. But it’s my personal mission to remember what everyone else has forgotten, and to remind them. Because you know what happens when you “just can’t do the September 11 thing again” and DON’T honor the memory of such events and the people, good and bad, who played a role in them? You descend into savagery. An exaggeration? You tell me — have we descended into savagery? I rest my case.

Anyway, Art Spiegelman is one of those who doesn’t forget, and obsesses, and beats dead horses, and I love him for it. In the Shadow of No Towers is an extraordinary piece of modern art, combining the personal recollections of a man who actually witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11 (he lived nearby and his daughter attended the school that was basically across the street). Spiegelman’s initial artistic response was that famous black-on-black New Yorker cover. He found additional solace in burying himself in old comic strips, many of them from long before he was born. His recounting of his impressions of 9/11 and its aftermath is an interaction between his testimony, and the aesthetics of those comics. With genuine virtuosity he summons the visual and verbal styles of the Katzenjammer Kids, Krazy Kat, the Yellow Kid, Bringing Up Father, Little Nemo and several other classic strips. To my immense appreciation, he launches the whole thing with an “Etymological Vaudeville”. It’s a jumble, like the pile itself, and the papers that flew out of the office buildings and landed all over New York. He is a man alone, isolated, alienated in a culture that always seems to revert to mob-like behavior whenever its underbelly is exposed. It reminds me in a strange way of Dostoevsky or Kafka. The world has gone insane — why am I, in trying to hold to my not-at-all-unusual principles, coming off like the crazy one? he implicitly asks.

The actual body of the work is a scant ten pages, but let me assure you that these are ten extraordinary pages. It’s the entire point. A colossal amount of work goes into something like this — the conception, the writing, the research, and only THEN the drawing, which is painstaking and slow. (I know firsthand. My wife makes this kind of art. It’s a triumph worth celebrating every few days when she ekes out a new page). Spiegelman has filled out the remainder of the book with reprints of several vintage strips that inspired him, and an essay about the strips. One point he misses in his essay (or maybe it’s in there but I missed it) which is very much key to the phenomenon of American war madness is that Pulitzer and Hearst, the same guys who gave us all those great comic strips…also gave us the Spanish American War at around the same time the form was being born. But of course it’s manifested in the work itself. Escapism is the drug that enables the cruelty of this culture. The entire point in remembering a painful past is to forestall future misery. But all anyone wants to do is forget.

For more Travalanche articles and tributes related to September 11, see the dedicated section here and the finding aid here.