In the Shadow of No Towers

AUTHOR: Spiegelman, Art

ARTIST: Art Spiegelman (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Pantheon Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2002-2004

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2004

Publication History

Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers began as a series of comic strips, published by the German weekly broadsheet newspaper Die Zeit, that ran from 2002 to 2004. The strip was later picked up by such publications as Courrier International, The London Review of Books, and Internazionale. Because of the work’s sensitive subject matter, major publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, to which Spiegelman was a regular contributor, shied away from publishing the strips. Spiegelman eventually found willing American publishing outlets for his nonfiction political comics in the Jewish weekly broadsheet newspaper The Forward, The LA Weekly, The Chicago Weekly, and the semiannual political “comix” magazine World War Three Illustrated.

In 2004, Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, published a collection of the ten strips, combined with a supplement of early twentieth-century Sunday comics such as The Katzenjammer Kids and Happy Hooligan, which had given Spiegelman comfort in the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), and which he integrated into his strips. The early comics employed within the twenty-first-century pages of Spiegelman’s work serve to reconnect the modern reader with America’s cultural and artistic past through the medium of comics.

All of the artistic works contained in the book are the products of Spiegelman, with the exception of the early twentieth-century plates that compose “The Comic Supplement” and the latter half of the book. These images are from The Kin-der-Kids Abroad (1906), illustrated by Lyonel Feininger; The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley (1896), illustrated by Richard Felton Outcault; The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo (1904), illustrated by Gustave Verbeck; The Glorious Fourth of July! (1902), illustrated by Gene Carr, Rudolph Dirks, Frederick Burr Opper, and Carl Edward Schultze; Happy Hooligan (1911), illustrated by Opper; Little Nemo in Slumberland (1907), illustrated by Winsor McCay; and Bringing Up Father, illustrated by Geo McManus.

Plot

A postmodern version of one man’s struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, In the Shadow of No Towers is Spiegelman’s sardonic analysis of the culpability for and the nation’s reactions to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, illustrated through the panicked portrayal of his own personal experience. Once a self-declared “rootless cosmopolitan,” Spiegelman narrates the events of 9/11 in a way that causes his own perception of himself and his home city to change. In struggling to maintain his own sanity while grappling with the grim realities and causalities of the attacks, Spiegelman renounces his transient status in favor of that of a “rooted cosmopolitan.” The traumatic alteration of the New York City skyline and the vast confusion and disarray of the lower Manhattan landscape, the author’s home, sets Spiegelman’s artistic wheels spinning as he seeks a way to cope with the devastation that engulfed his city in particular and the country as a whole.

Both Spiegelman’s narrative and the strip panels are fragmented, as paranoia takes hold of him and conspiracy theories abound. Following the 2000 election, which the author refers to as a “coup d’état,” he is distrustful of the U.S. government, principally the Republican Party and the George W. Bush presidential administration. Spiegelman is highly suspicious of President Bush and his motivations for declaring war on Iraq, claiming that the tragic events of 9/11 were used as a catalyst to declare war not for justice, but for Middle Eastern oil. In numerous panels throughout In the Shadow of No Towers, the author depicts Bush as a villain and a threat to the very country he was elected to lead and protect.

After the Twin Towers collapsed upon themselves, and apparently before the dust even had a chance to settle, the sales of American flags and other such patriotic paraphernalia skyrocketed. To Spiegelman, this does not signal patriotism so much as the mass disillusion of Americans, who pushed the vision of the falling towers to the back of their minds as they moved forward in the myriad lines of stores and street vendors peddling “I Love NY” kitsch.

Spiegelman’s varied, almost schizophrenic panels are the means by which the author seeks to know himself as an American and as a New Yorker. Searching for solace and a sense of grounding, he turns to the founding fathers of his profession, resulting in his constant references to the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic-strip characters that abound throughout his ten strips and make up “The Comic Supplement” and the latter half of the novel.

Characters

•Art Spiegelman, the protagonist, is the author and illustrator of the work. He is a chain-smoker and conspiracy theorist whose paranoia is often justified and heightened by his obsession with the news. In a reference to his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986), which chronicles his father’s survival of the Holocaust, Spiegelman depicts himself as a mouse when he notes parallels between the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks and as he struggles with the task of translating his emotions into the comic form.

•Françoise Mouly is Spiegelman’s wife and the mother of his children, Nadja and Dashiell. The art editor of The New Yorker, Mouly commissioned the black-on-black afterimage of the Twin Towers that would later become the front cover of In the Shadow of No Towers.

•Nadja Spiegelman is Spiegelman’s teenage daughter and the focus of several panels. She had just started high school at the foot of the Twin Towers three days prior to the attacks, and Spiegelman recounts his and his wife’s hysterical search for their daughter.

•George W. Bush, the antagonist, is the president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. As Spiegelman is angry about the suspicious circumstances surrounding Bush’s election to the presidency and distrustful of his position as both a politician and a businessman, Bush is the source of much of Spiegelman’s anxiety and the target for his blame and cynicism.

•The Katzenjammer Kids are two comic pranksters named Hans and Fritz who were created by Dirks in 1897. They serve as personifications of the Twin Towers throughout the graphic novel.

•Happy Hooligan is a loveable but unlucky cartoon character created by Opper in 1899. Having looked to old comics for solace following the 9/11 attacks, Spiegelman posits himself as the bumbling Hooligan in the collection’s final strip.

Artistic Style

With the exception of the haunting black-on-black book cover featuring the afterimage of the towers, almost every part of every panel is filled with color. The book’s central image is one created from Spiegelman’s memory: “the image of the looming north tower’s glowing bones just before it vaporized.” In several instances, the glowing orange of the tower’s skeletal remains is contrasted with surrounding panels painted red, white, and blue, intentionally evoking simultaneous feelings of patriotism and destruction.

The individual panels within each strip often appear erratically positioned, so as to physically mirror Spiegelman’s mentally and emotionally frantic state. Panels overlap other panels throughout the pages, lending a chaotic scheme to the overall design without hindering readability. Often, the reader may jump from one set of panels to another because the eyes become distracted, but again, this is symbolic of the author’s disjointed experience.

The character designs and the lettering are not complex; rather, they are simplified because the message of the work is what most concerns the author. Although the characters are more cartoonlike than realistic, every page contains a mixture of characters and mediums, from different types of self-portraits of the author and the inclusion of multiple late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic characters to the addition of photographs, Topps cards, and billboards. Unlike the traditional 6.75 x 10-inch comic book, the 17 x 22-inch broadsheet newspaper allows for greater experimentation regarding layout and the amount of media that can be placed on a single page.

Themes

In the Shadow of No Towers focuses on a dreaded anticipation, or as Spiegelman puts it, “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” The fear and paranoia that the author expresses is not fabricated but is a very real part of his trauma following 9/11. This anxiety is the result of familial crisis and the traumatic memory that is inextricably linked to it. Just as Spiegelman struggles to narrate his father’s Holocaust experiences in Maus, he wrestles with his own fears of loss and historic devastation in In the Shadow of No Towers. In an attempt to foresee the next catastrophe and protect his family, Spiegelman becomes increasingly suspicious of the rhetoric of mainstream media and politicians.

Spiegelman’s distrust of the U.S. government and President Bush weighs heavily on his mind. His conspiracy theorizing results in the creation of several disturbing images that posit the president as a traitor, warmonger, and murderer. Spiegelman also notes the presence of a giant billboard for the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Collateral Damage in the foreground of his view of the burning Twin Towers, hinting that those who die and suffer as a result of the attacks are merely anticipated losses in an oil war waged under the guise of justice and retribution. As history has shown, in times of war, people seek comfort in simpler eras and past pleasures; Spiegelman initially delves into antique comics for this very reason. In integrating these apparently delightful reminders of the comic’s past into Modern Age “comix,” the author pays tribute to the tragedy of 9/11 while reinforcing the importance of the genre and its ability to serve as a unique means of social and political critique.

Impact

In a narrative fashion similar to that of his groundbreaking work Maus, Spiegelman again constructs a family’s firsthand account of epic acts of terrorism and the effects of living in and coping with the aftermath. Spiegelman must continually relive the trauma of 9/11 in order to capture the realism of that day and translate it onto the comic book page. The more the author dwells on the terrorist attacks, the more he begins to view the U.S. government as a part of the terrorist cell responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. For Spiegelman, 9/11 was not only a day that altered American history and consciousness but also one on which “the world ended.”

There is no shortage of material to analyze on each page. Therefore, the book requires several readings, without which the reader is certain to miss a large portion of the nuanced information Spiegelman meticulously places in every panel sequence. Spiegelman’s requirement of a certain amount of effort from his readers is in line with his own close examination of the happenings during and after the 9/11 attacks. As he focuses on the minutiae of every speech, newscast, advertisement, and public-service announcement, so too does he wish his reader to take in and seriously consider the meanings behind and the overall effect of the media presented on each page.

To some readers, the oversized pages, overly dramatic conspiracy theory-driven images, and overtly sweating characters may seem over-the-top and, thus, lacking in depth. However, many critics view the book as a painfully honest and unmitigated biographical production that not only serves as a kind of follow-up to Maus but also continues Spiegelman’s personal journey in which he is forced to deal with familial grief and traumatic memory. With In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman revolutionizes the way readers see comics and comix, seamlessly incorporating vintage and contemporary illustrations and the themes within them into his biographical account of living through tragedy. The media through which Spiegelman expresses himself constantly offer new aspects to analyze, from their artistic and aesthetic value to their cultural and sociopolitical significance. In the Shadow of No Towers is a unique and artistic rendering of one man’s battle with terror, authority, grief, and memory.

Further Reading

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994).

Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis (2006).

Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese (2006).

Bibliography

Chute, Hillary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.” Twentieth Century Literature 52, no. 2 (Summer, 2006): 199-230.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage.” PLA 119, no. 5 (October, 2004): 1209-1215.

Orbán, Katalin. “Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.” Representations 97 (Winter, 2007): 57-89.