One of my most striking memories of Sept. 11 is listening to a radio interview with a poet who had witnessed the World Trade Center attacks firsthand. It was late afternoon by then and the trickle of information coming from "ground zero" had long since dried up. The radio station, in a moment of dead-air desperation, had turned to the poet to explain it all. "The towers are gone," he said, "but it's as if their shadows still remain. It's really a striking image."
Whether graphic-novelist Art Spiegelman was listening to the same broadcast or not we can't be sure, but his black on black drawing of the north and south towers of the World Trade Center for the cover of "The New Yorker" was the perfect visualization of those disembodied shadows.
Spiegelman's drawing finds its way onto the cover (and into the title) of his latest graphic novel, "In the Shadow of No Towers." His first book since the Pulitzer-winning "Maus II" (1992), "No Towers" documents the years following the collapse of the twin towers: from the artist's harried attempt to rescue his daughter from a school near the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11 to the color-coded war on terror.
Unlike "Maus," which told the story of Spiegelman's father at Auschwitz, "No Towers" doesn't so much present a coherent narrative as it does a collage of the author's paranoia and desperation after Sept.11. In huge, 20-by-14 inch pages swarming with surreal caricatures of terrorists, politicians, and innocent bystanders, Spiegelman attempts to unravel the chaos following the collapse of the twin towers.
"The only cultural artifacts that could get past my defenses to flood my eyes and brain with something other than images of burning towers were old comic strips," Spiegelman writes in an afterword to "No Towers."
The comic strips that he speaks so fondly of, and goes on to recreate in his own book, are the broadsheet cartoons that appeared in Joseph Pulitzer's and William Randolph Hearst's newspapers at the turn of the century: comics like Rudolph Dirks' "Katzenjammer Kids," George Harriman's "Krazy Kat," and Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland," to name a few.
Spiegelman turns the comforting images on their heads for "No Towers." The Katzenjammer Kids are recast as "the Tower Twins," a pair of terrified looking toddlers with burning effigies of the two towers balanced atop their heads. Krazy Kat becomes a protest singer, while Little Nemo has nightmares about plummeting from a skyscraper.
Meanwhile, Spiegelman transforms himself into a muckraking yellow journalist from his favored period, drawing crude, allegorical illustrations of Uncle Sam trouncing Saddam Hussein, or George Bush and Dick Cheney hijacking an American eagle.
Amidst all the clamor of long-forgotten comic characters parading alongside people and events all too fresh in our memories, the one image that keeps reasserting itself in "No Towers" is that of a gutted Tower 1 as Spiegelman last witnessed it.
"The pivotal image from my Sept. 11 morning," Spiegelman writes, "one that didn't get photographed or videotaped into public memory but still remains burned onto the inside of my eyelids several years later was the image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized."
This icon, which appears on literally every page of the book, isn't just a incendiary memento mori to the tragedy, but a reminder that "In the Shadow of No Towers" is a work dedicated to representation and, ultimately, reconstruction.
Just how to accurately capture the tragedy of Sept. 11, and the images of towers that are both present and missing is a problem that plagues Spiegelman. During his flight from ground zero, the author sees tourists getting their pictures taken in front of the collapsing skyscrapers and a street artist painting the fiery structures. Yet, Spiegelman's personal portrayal of the World Trade Center remains elusive. The half-there, half-not image of the north tower's burning infrastructure haunts "No Towers" unfinished until the final page, where the two towers are finally reconstituted.
As it turns out, Spiegelman's rebuilding of the World Trade Center isn't accomplished through some coming to grips with the chaos surrounding him - if anything he remains more paranoid and unhinged than ever - but through the creation of the comic. Again, the comics of the past serve as a blueprint for Spiegelman.
He writes: "Comics pages are architectural structures - the narrative rows of panels are like stories of a building - and while an eccentric artist like Verbeck could turn that structure on its head, Winsor McCay, the towering genius of the first decade of comics, drew monumental structures designed to last."
"In the Shadow of No Towers" is itself a work designed to last and, through its craftsmanship, to right a world flipped on its head.
