In the Shadow of No Towers
Art Spiegelman probably knows "comix" better than any living person on earth. Having been the only creator in the genre to win a Pulitzer Prize (that I’m aware of, anyway), he’s also the best qualified to push the medium into achieving something well beyond its perceived boundaries. That lowered expectation often allows him to do his best work.
But although In the Shadow of No Towers approaches something unique, it falls short of being truly great only because there’s too much allegorical fuzziness floating around. Gone are the easy metaphors of victimized Jews portrayed as mice and Nazi Germans portrayed as cats, as in Maus. I get the feeling that the settling of history made that story easier to tell. Unimaginable terrorist events and an uncaptured Osama bin Laden seem to make this comic a much more difficult paradigm to portray. But he should get points for trying.
In a chapter consisting of a historical account of New York comics called The Comic Supplement, Spiegelman ends his panel-by-panel interpretation of a 1936 Krazy Kat strip with an afterthought that suggests uncertainty.
This is deep stuff, and after the attack it hit me like a ton of bricks: it proposed that since every Eden has its snake, one must somehow learn to live in harmony with that snake! I’m still working on it.
I almost get the feeling that the events warped him into see things in old comic strips that simply weren’t there. But shortly after 9/11, most of us probably did get prone to some over interpretation—albeit not with comix. I know I did.
At least he’s being as honest.
And that’s the part of the piece that makes this book so powerful. Like his publishing namesake, Spiegelman has a superbly raw talent for getting to the core of our collectively anxious psyche. While his worst moments are often long, disconnected, and unsure, his best moments are short, wondering, and certain. I personally identified with the pain and panic as it was happening to his family in the strip, almost as if he were telling my story from 9/11. For this reason, the book is a genuine accomplishment. I haven’t seen much that made me feel those complex emotions with as much immediacy, but that’s the stuff only a comic narrative can produce. Spiegalman is still a master, despite some unexplainable wanderings that even he’s probably apt to be left guessing about in this book.
