|
"Art Spiegelman... to the comics
world is a Michelangelo and a Medici both, an influential
artist who is also an impresario and an enabler of others."
—
The New York Times Magazine.
For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were both
highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow
of No Towers, his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking
Maus, is a masterful and moving account of the events and
aftermath of that tragic day.
Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in
their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter
had started school directly below the towers days earlier,
and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors
they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman,
as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S.
government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its
own preconceived agenda.
He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized,
two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest
newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace
after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national
tragedy in drawings and text that convey—with his singular
artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and
wit—the unfathomable enormity of the event itself,
the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and
the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted
in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have
begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.
|
