In the Shadow of No Towers

Please note: The following is a section from the introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers. You may view spreads from book at: http://www.pantheonbooks.com/graphicnovels/towers.html.

The Sky Is Falling!
I tend to be easily unhinged. Minor mishaps a clogged drain, running late for an appointment send me into a sky-is-falling tizzy. It s a trait that can leave one ill-equipped for coping with the sky when it actually falls. Before 9/11 my traumas were all more or less self-inflicted, but outrunning the toxic cloud that had moments before been the north tower of the World Trade Center left me reeling on that faultline where World History and Personal History collide the intersection my parents, Auschwitz survivors, had warned me about when they taught me to always keep my bags packed.

It took a long time to put the burning towers behind me. Personal history aside, zip codes seemed to have something to do with the intensity of response. Long after uptown New Yorkers resumed their daily jogging in Central Park, those of us living in Lower Manhattan found our neighborhood transformed into one of those suburban gated communities as we flashed IDs at the police barriers on 14th Street before being allowed to walk home. Only when I traveled to a university in the Midwest in early October 2001 did I realize that all New Yorkers were out of their minds compared to those for whom the attack was an abstraction. The assault on the Pentagon confirmed that the carnage in New York City was indeed an attack on America, not one more skirmish on foreign soil. Still, the small town I visited in Indiana draped in flags that reminded me of the garlic one might put on a door to ward off vampires was at least as worked up over a frat house s zoning violations as with threats from "raghead terrorists." It was as if I d wandered into an inverted version of Saul Steinberg s famous map of America seen from Ninth Avenue, where the known world ends at the Hudson; in Indiana

Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman to the comics world is a Michelangelo and a Medici both, an influential artist who is also an impresario and an enabler of others...[Maus s] great innovation unmatched and possibly unmatchable was in its combination of style and subject .It would be almost impossible to overstate the influence of Maus among other artists.
New York Times Magazine

Spiegelman has become one of The New Yorker s most sensational artists, in recent years drawing illustrations for covers that are meant not just to be plainly understood but also to reach up and tattoo your eyeballs with images....From his Holocaust saga [Maus] in which Jewish mice are exterminated by Nazi cats, to the The New Yorker covers guaranteed to offend, to a wild party that ends in murder: Art Spiegelman s cartoons don t fool around.
Los Angeles Times

A startling and provocative work.
- Newsday

For one moment on an otherwise perfect fall day in Manhattan, time stood absolutely still, and since then history has rushed past too quickly for any artist to keep up. This disjunction between experience and understanding gives In the Shadow of No Towers something so much more than a linear narrative: It is a love letter to a city that this artist, no matter his fears, could not bring himself to leave.
-Paper Magazine

Like Maus, Spiegelman s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, Shadow brilliantly captures incendiary history through a personal story in this case, of the artist affirming his choice to be a rooted cosmopolitan.
-GQ

A posttraumatic masterpiece.
-O Magazine

This is a powerful and quirky work of visual storytelling by a master comics artist.
-Publisher s Weekly (starred review)

You don t have to be a comics aficionado to see that Spiegelman has done a superb job of capturing the tragic absurdity of life in New York City on 9/11 and for months thereafter.
-Newsweek