For Art Spiegelman the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus the terrorist attacks of
September 11 2001 were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No
Towers his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking Maus is a masterful and moving
account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day. Spiegelman and his family bore
witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started
school directly below the towers days earlier and they had lived in the area for years. But
the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman as his anguish
was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government which shamelessly co-opted the events for
its own preconceived agenda. He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized
two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman
says brought him solace after the attacks) he relates his experience of the national tragedy
in drawings and text that convey-with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation
outrage and wit-the unfathomable enormity of the event itself the obvious and insidious
effects it had on his life and the extraordinary often hidden changes that have been enacted
in the name of post-9 11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation
of American democracy.
