In the Shadow of No Towers [Board book]

I was deeply moved by Art Spiegelman's "In The Shadow Of No Towers" before I even opened the book. As a Manhattanite, the World Trade Center's twin towers used to be my New York City lodestone. With my lousy sense of direction, I always knew where I was by marking my location in relation to the two buildings, soaring skyward, so visible above everything else. Even now, three years after 9/11, I sometimes forget and look towards the southwest, expecting to see the buildings' lights. For days, weeks, months after September 11, I saw, in my minds eye, almost exactly the same image portrayed on the cover of "In The Shadow Of No Towers" - darkest black shadows of the two landmarks against a night sky - emptiness during the daylight. There is no more eloquent description to mark absence, to recall violence and infamy, than the cover picture of these two shadows.

Mr. Spiegelman is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Maus," where he used the medium of comic strips to portray the Holocaust, his parents' experience as survivors of Auschwitz, and his own experience as a child of Holocaust victims. Ironically, his parents taught him at an early age to "always keep my bags packed." He writes in the book's Introduction, an extraordinary essay, "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 leaves one ill-equipped for coping when the sky actually falls." And the sky literally fell on the author and his family that day. They lived in the towers' shadow, in TriBeca, and their daughter was in school that morning - a school located at Ground Zero - a tizzy producing experience if there ever was one!!

This unusual hybrid book, 42 oversized pages printed on heavy card stock, is a combination of comic book illustrations and prose. It is an extremely personal memoir of the attacks on the WTC, which Spiegelman and his family witnessed at close range. It is a raving rant about the after effects of the violence and its repercussions throughout the world at large, and the smaller interior world of the author's psyche. It is the intimate story of one family trying to cope. It is an editorial about the political exploitation of this terrible event. The book is designed to be read vertically, just like the old comic strip broadsheets that appeared in newspapers. Each strip is a story, ten of them, followed by a comic supplement.

An image, seemingly burned into Spiegelman's eyelids, is the last sight he had of the North Tower just before it fell. He saw the building's skeleton, its very bones, lit up and glowing right before it vaporized. This image reoccurs throughout the book.

The country, the world, has seemingly become inured to the unthinkable, just three years later. The further away one lives from Ground Zero, the more removed the event. Art Spiegelman has given us a strange gift with his book - an honest memory of a devastating tragedy - a memory that depicts humor as well as horror, confusion, terror and heartbreak. All of us must move on, move forward. Oddly enough, Spiegelman's book helps us to do so by chronicling 09/11/01 and its aftermath, allowing us to let its vividness go. "Still time keeps flying and even the New normal gets old." "...though three years later I am still ready to lose it all at the mere drop of a hat or a dirty bomb. I still believe the world is ending, but I concede that it seems to be ending more slowly than I once thought...so I figured I'd write this book."

A beautiful book worth reading, worth keeping.
JANA

Art Spiegelman (of Maus and Raw fame) explores his feelings during and after 9/11. He discusses the way flyover America has taken the destruction of the WTC to heart, often ignoring the feelings of bona fide New Yorkers, and the way the event has been hijacked by a super patriot propaganda machine. He despairs of the way the iraq war has failed to target Al Qaeda and feels a strong rage against the Bush administration.

There's some pretty good stuff here. It's after all, Spiegelman. He plays around with the various conventions of the comic strip, mixing Maus with Little Nemo, redrawing himself into various classic comics ("Bringing Up Father" becomes "Marital Blitz" and describes Spiegelman's household spats) the pages are printed on thick card (it feels like the pages of a pre-school book) and it's all in gorgeous colour.

NOW... the problem is that the book is pretty short, really. Spiegelman accepts this fact and is rather apologetic. He explains that comics take a long time to draw and that expected to die in a future terrorist attack so he didn't get a lot done. His anti bush tone and his questioning of the choreographed patriotism that followed 9/11 meant that his market was very much restricted and so he did not think to draw very much at all. He attempts to finish the book on an upbeat "the way we were" note and reprinting comic pages from the 1900s.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. And his reasoning about the shortness of the book makes perfect sense.

But if I feel like reading Little Nemo or Bringing Up Father, I can buy the appropriate book and don't really need Spiegelman for this. I feel vaguely ripped off. Not because the book is not good, but simply because there's so little of it. Four stars only.

It was hard not to be effected by 9/11. I tried my best to maintain a stiff upper lip, but found myself watching a re-watching an Astaire-Rodgers dance routine from "Top Hat" and the "dancing in the dark" routine with Astaire and Cyd Charisse from "the Band Wagon" (set perhaps not coincidentally in Central Park). Looking back I guess I was looking for innocence and grace, produced in the depth of the Great Depression (the movie "Top Hat") or the height of the Cold War ("the Band Wagon"). In any case I serves as a reminder that NYC is a place of the imagination for billions who have never and will never visit it.

This came through with many comic book artists, who for decades made NYC the site of countless apocalyptic show-downs between superhero good and arch-villianous evil. So much so that 9/11 seemed like an eeire realization of generations of cartoonists nightmares. Many responded by working in themes related to 9/11 into their story lines. Special issues abounded celebrating the first responders as "true heroes." No one can doubt the sincerity of these efforts of so many who lived and worked in NYC and dreamt of "Gotham" or "Metropolis."

Art Spiegelman responded in another way. Going beyound the Silver or Golden ages of comic books to the pre-comic book "platinum age" of the original comic strips founded by the warmongering "yellow journalists" Josef Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (the Rupert Murdochs or their day) "just two blocks away from where the towers stood." Embracing something quintessentially american, yet also incorrigibly subversive, he realizes his loyalty to his adopted home of NYC.

In 10 "strips" an introductory essay and a "Comic supplement" sampling some of the classic strips and an essay explaining their influence on him, Speigelman tries as best he can to sort through his trauma of that day. By turns hysterical, paranoid, narcissistic and self-conscious he brings forth reflections as honest and they are hard won. At first he obsesses compulsively about government complicity until he hears arabs reflexively spin anti-semitic conspriracies. He labors to find a medium to capture the image burned into his eyes, uncaught by any camera of the "bones of the tower" glowing immediately before it goes down. He wears an "peace symbol" upside-down, like a flag signaling distress, suggesting that "pure and simple" pacifism and anti-militarism are insufficient to meet the current crisis.

Yeah it carries an ant-Bush theme that will delight anyone who liked "Fahrenheit 9/11" but it's more than that. This is an intensely personal work for Speigelman who lived just a few blocks away from the towers, in away that Moore's film can't be. It does not have a straightforward narrative like his masterpiece MAUS. The narrative comes in memoirs or dairy entries in a confessional style reminiscent of some of R. Crumb's

recent stuff. But the elements are the images and devices borrowed from those early comic strips. Speigelman as "Happy Hooligan", Speigelman as a mouse-like "Little Nemo" falling out of bed, Spiegelman as Jiggs from "Bringing Up Father." His mastery of these styles, and their disturbing effect, compares with Chris Ware.

Speaking crassly, this book is an "art book" while it's listed as "hardcover" that is misleading. the Cover as well as the "pages" are printed on card-stock. The Strips fold out like one of those double albums which allows for unobstructed viewing. Speigelman has not skimped on anything in terms of printing or color or dimensions. The spine has a tendency to crack and the card stock leaves the book susceptable to warping, Bibliophiles take note! But at $19.95 (not to mention generous discounts at Amazon and chain bookstores because of it's "bestseller" status the book is a steal.

Thanks Art. And congratulations, you just may finally have become an artist "in sync" with the times instead of "seconds ahead of it."

Here's hoping anyway.