In the Shadow of No Towers by SPIEGELMAN ART

'I'm not even sure I'll live long enough,' says a chain-smoking, post-9/11 cartoon-mouse Spiegelman, 'for cigarettes to kill me.' The book is a visceral tirade against the Bush administration ('brigands suffering from war fever') and, when least expected, an erudite meditation on the history of the American newspaper comic strip, born during the fierce circulation wars of the 1890s right near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his trademark sense of existential doom. 11, 2001-it's merely a technicality that some people continue to go about their daily lives. The artist, who lives in downtown Manhattan, believes the world really ended on Sept. It's an artful rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by a world-class pessimist ('after all, disaster is my muse'). 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.Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Spiegelman's new work is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction.

government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda. 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. 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. 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. For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the terrorist attacks of Septemwere both highly personal and intensely political.

In the Shadow of No Towers by SPIEGELMAN ART