October 05, 2004
artbomb review: in the shadow of no towers by art spiegelman
“What does it take to publish the follow-up to your two-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning magnum opus that put both you, and ‘serious comics,’ on the mainstream map? Two fucking buildings falling down on your head, apparently.
“art spiegelman, the pioneer auteur behind the holocaust memoir Maus (and longtime resident of lower Manhattan), returned to comics by literally running away from the collapse of the World Trade Center. A lifelong paranoid leaning more than a little to the left, spiegelman is forced by 9/11 and everything after both behind the drawing board, and into the daily comics pages of the past, to try and make sense of the ultimate inexplicable.
“This collection of spiegelman’s 10 strips are printed on cardboard-thick pages that approximate the massive galleys of the funnies page circa their invention; after spiegelman’s run, he treats us to a look at the comics pages of antiquity that mean so much to him, each strip echoing some aspect of the iconography of the WTC attacks…”
