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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
This must-have collection of hard-hitting, self-deprecating strips on life during wartime was ignored during its creation by the very publications that made Spiegelman a big name in New York literary and artistic circles: the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker (which has both commissioned Spiegelman for cover art and employed his wife, Françoise Mouly, as an art editor). As he admits in the foreword, "Outside of the left-leaning alternative press, mainstream publications that have actively solicited work from me ... fled when I offered these pages or excerpts from the series." In fact, the only mainstream homes for his controversial work were found in the countries -- Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands -- that were lambasted by Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush as "old Europe" and derided by the American media.
In a sense, this neglect helped push the work further. "The feelings of dislocation reflected in these 'No Towers' pages," Spiegelman writes, "arose in part from the lack of outcry against the outrages [of the Bush administration] while they were being committed." Now, in the most heated political season of recent generations, those who once spurned Spiegelman's work have recovered their cojones, and "No Towers" is something of a hot commodity.
New Yorkers like rapper El-P, quoted above, are justifiably sick and tired of facile 9/11 sympathies that turn out to be marketing gimmicks. But no one's going to accuse Spiegelman of cashing in on the tragedy's third anniversary, and not just because he is a New York lifer who has consistently raged against the machines of oppression and manipulation since his days editing the seminal '80s graphic mag Raw. The Pantheon press kit is now packed with fawning headlines from the publications that showed him the door two years ago, but Spiegelman can only control what ends up on the spectacular colored pages that set "In the Shadow of No Towers" apart from every other 9/11 interrogation.
As Spiegelman notes in "No Towers" while fleeing the crumbling World Trade Center and encountering a giant billboard for Arnold Schwarzenegger's fireman-revenge drama "Collateral Damage," irony is not dead. Neither is the idea that art can sometimes transcend the pleasure, pain and callous commerce of the world that generates it. Spiegelman's highly personal exploration of the horrors of 9/11 and how they nearly destroyed him (even as they were being perverted by the "Architects of Armageddon," as he calls Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, into a blank check for imperial aggression) offers a more powerful criticism of postmodern America's state of affairs than most of those found in this season's Bush-bashing titles. Even better, this lavishly produced, eye-popping collection costs only $20 -- a bargain for a work of comics art this sophisticated (and likely to become a collector's item).
If anything, the fact that the American intelligentsia finally seems ready to admit that Spiegelman was speaking truth to power in the dark years of 2002 and 2003 ought to make us sleep a little better at night -- at least until, as Spiegelman explains in "No Towers," the sky starts falling again and the duct tape market catches fire.
