Damn! I’ve been putting off this review of In The Shadow of No Towers for so long, it’s become a form of writer’s block. You see, I was so impressed by Spiegelman’s work, so absolutely blown away by it and on so many levels, that I felt that any review I had to write had better fucking do it justice. Finally, I have come to the conclusion that there is no way I am able to acheive this, so I should just go ahead and write the damn thing anyway.
The first thing you notice about Shadow is the book itself. It is hard not to notice it, as the book is roughly twice the size of a regular graphic novel. The cover is a black-on-black illustration of the towers, with a bit of colour in the middle and the book is made from boards, like those ones you get for babies. This is a particularly good choice, since you wouldn’t want the large pages to be too flimsy as you flipped through them (though the originals were printed in broadsheet newspapers), and also because, all told, the book amounts to just 19 (oversized) sheets. I’m not complaining, though.
In The Shadow Of No Towers is Art Spiegelman’s response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Spiegelman and his family live in Manhattan, and so the attacks were very close, and very personal (in fact, his daughter was attending high school at the foot of the towers when they were hit). In the aftermath, Spigelman decided to exorcise the demons of paranoia and fear through his art, and this led him, paradoxically though completely logically, back to his love of comics. As he says about his “near-death realization:”
“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.”
Spiegelman was given space in the German paper Die Ziet to do whatever he wanted, with no editorial control over him. What he did was to create a large-format editorial comic covering his response to the 9/11 attacks. It starts out as a fairly personal account, his version of Maus as he says, but morphs pretty quickly into commentary on the Bush administration’s co-opting of the attacks to justify the invasion of Iraq. He invokes the cartoons of New York Past to tell his tale, and the effect is quite stunning and, well, effective. And this is just the first half of the book.
The last part is support material, but this really sells the piece, in my opinion. Reprinted are a handful of the old comics, a Gasoline Alley, a Little Nemo, a Bringing Up Father, and so on. They play out all the fears of the day, which are the fears of today. They remind us that we have been through this wringer before, and that comics have always been political, even when they are the mainstream. You just have to keep your mind open to what they are saying.
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