Books October 2004
Shorter notices
Stefan Beck on In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman.
Art Spiegelman
In the Shadow of No Towers.
Pantheon Books, 42 pages, $19.95
Art Spiegelman is conversant in large-scale tragedy. His comic book Maus, which earned him a Pulitzer in 1992, painstakingly and painfully recounts his fathers 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,...
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