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41 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pure Catharsis, September 9, 2004
Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers came out yesterday. I've been waiting for this release for over a year, and made it a point to head up to our local Barnes and Noble to buy it straightaway.
Got home with it and put it aside, I had my own strip to pencil, but once I got the pencilling done, I picked up Spiegelman's book and began reading. These pages were originally published in broadsheet format, and that format has been preserved on heavy cardstock. In many ways, for Spiegelman, this work is therapy art, it is his process for dealing with 9/11 and its aftermath. Reading it was, for me, very therapeutic as well. His work encompasses the experience of watching the towers fall, clear through the decision by the GOP to hold its convention in New York. He talks and illustrates at length the degree to which he feels violated and betrayed by the co-option of 9/11 for the current administrations political ends. But this is not Ted Rall's detached political polemicism, but something different, something deeply personal, felt close to the heart and deep in the bones.
The artwork itself showcases Spiegelman's versatility, with him working not only within the traditions of his own Milieu (R. Crumb & Co.) but also consciously including tributes to sources as diverse as Herriman's "Krazy Kat" and McCay's "Little Nemo's Adventures in Slumberland." His own character from Maus appears as both Ignatz and Little Nemo. Indeed, after his work is done, he presents pages from the Hearst strips that affected him, just so you'll be able to appreciate those influences in the work itself. The things he does with Eagles is amazing. In most scenes in which they appear they represent the abuses to which patriotism has been subjected.
This is a work that is, above all, heartfelt. Regardless of what one may think of the politics he advances, or of the theories he espouses, the fact that this is the honest expression of feeling of someone who bore witness to the events is indisputable, and makes the work all the more affecting. This is a work that I will be reading again and again, so richly is it woven.
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54 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Extraordinary Chronicle Of Our TIme, October 2, 2004
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
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48 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"equally terrorized", October 10, 2004
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.
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