Art Spiegelman is conversant in large-scale tragedy. His comic book Maus, which earned him a Pulitzer in 1992, painstakingly and painfully recounts his father’s years in Auschwitz. Recently Spiegelman reacted to a fresher nightmare (he says: “disaster is my muse!”) in a garishly colorful, large-format graphic novel called In the Shadow of No Towers. He experienced the collapse of the WTC at close range. The book is undeniably a valuable record of that day, a cri de coeur drawn out by one of the worst days our country has seen.
The book is lovingly modeled on old Sunday pages, like Little Nemo in Slumberland and The Yellow Kid. Its “lessons,” however, are woefully ugly. It is not a hopeful work. It is clogged with left-wing banalities: We have, for instance, “squandered chances to bring the community of nations together.” Embarrassing visual gags—Dick Cheney slitting a bald eagle’s throat with a box-cutter, cowboy boots raining down on Ground Zero (the RNC, you see)—are the dominant iconography. What little that is really personal and affecting about No Towers is drowned out by an unmodulated onslaught of Bush-bashing slogans and imagery.
One hoped that anyone who felt the evil at work on 9/11 would turn his anger more forcefully on the monsters who made it. But No Towers, like so much talk about the destruction of the WTC, reserves its ire for Us, not Them. Spiegelman may be smart enough to know that Cheney and his “cabal” didn’t remote-control those planes into our Twin Towers, but one would never guess it to read his comics. When even an intelligent man, who once showed us so skillfully what evil wrought on his own family, can’t point to the real villains—well, these may be the funny papers, but it’s no laughing matter for the future of our country.