In the Shadow of No Towers by SPIEGELMAN ART

And Spiegelman, always the astute cultural critic, knows this better than anyone. But this latent fear has also invigorated the capitalist schadenfreude of everyone from Fox News to Manhattan street merchants to the Bush administration, not to mention the supposedly liberal New York publications that avoided Spiegelman's post-9/11 rants like they were undocumented Arab immigrants. This kind of unrelenting dread has kept artists of all kinds in full sublimation mode since the invention of the cave drawing, and has provided human culture with no shortage of standout works. In his foreword to No Towers, Spiegelman writes that the book's gorgeous 'single-page units,' printed on 42 pages of heavy card stock and designed to resemble the Sunday newspaper comics panels of a bygone era, 'corresponded to my existential conviction that I might not live long enough to see them published.' His parents' ordeal in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis, he goes on, taught him to 'always keep bags packed.' Spiegelman freely admits that the psychic terrors of 9/11 corresponded to a deep-seated 'self-inflicted' trauma, a fervent belief that Armageddon - both the religious conflict and the Bruce Willis movie - was, as the Rolling Stones sang in Gimme Shelter, 'just a shot away'. This is because the world around the famed comix lifer has always seemed on the verge of annihilation - as he confesses more than once in his sprawling, sharply satirical In the Shadow of No Towers, a collection of strips built by Spiegelman over the last three years and finally published by Pantheon Books just before the third anniversary of 9/11. It's just manipulation.' - Brooklyn, NY, rapper El-PĪrt Spiegelman's works, especially the groundbreaking Holocaust comic Maus, have always been as much about phenomena occurring outside his vertiginous comic strip frames as it has been about the events within them.

They didn't experience it, they don't understand what we feel, and they don't understand us. The people who actually experienced it have no connection to these people coming in. The same people want to feel our pain over 9/11, but they don't realize that we're in a completely different place. It's the same scumbags who don't live anywhere near you, but are still going to organize a force to stop you from having an abortion - because they care about you. 'I take serious offence to the RNC being in my fuckin' city it's really pissing me off.

In the Shadow of No Towers by SPIEGELMAN ART