He lived just a few blocks away. On September 11, 2001, Art Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, were literally running for their lives as the world they knew dissolved into a cloud of toxic gray dust. Most people remember where they were when they saw the news on a screen, but Spiegelman saw it through his window. Then he saw it from the street. Then he felt the ground shake. This wasn't just a global tragedy for him; it was a local, visceral, and terrifyingly personal collapse of reality. In the Shadow of No Towers Art Spiegelman captures that specific, jagged flavor of trauma that doesn't just go away after the news cycle moves on. It's a weird book. It’s huge—literally oversized—and printed on thick board pages like a toddler’s book, but the content inside is anything but infantile. It is a frantic, beautiful, and deeply paranoid artifact of a man trying to keep his brain from fracturing.
The Glowing Tower and the Ghost of Maus
Art Spiegelman was already a legend by 2001. He’d won a Pulitzer for Maus, the definitive graphic novel about the Holocaust. People expected him to be the "voice of reason" or the "moral compass" of comics. But he didn't want to be that. Honestly, he seemed like he was barely holding it together. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he suffered from what he described as a sort of "neurotic attachment" to the event. He couldn't stop seeing the glowing North Tower just before it fell. That image—the skeleton of the building glowing bright orange against a blue sky—haunts almost every page of the book.
The structure of the work is chaotic because his mind was chaotic. You won't find a standard narrative arc here. Instead, it’s a collection of broadsheets. He originally published these strips in European newspapers like Die Zeit and The Forward because, frankly, American media wasn't ready for his brand of raw, unvarnished dissent. He was angry at Al-Qaeda, sure, but he was also terrified of the Bush administration. He felt trapped between two different kinds of fundamentalism. It's a claustrophobic read. He uses himself as a character—a frantic, chain-smoking mouse or a bug-eyed human—scrambling through a landscape where the sky is literally falling.
Why the Format of In the Shadow of No Towers Art Spiegelman Matters
Size matters here. The physical book is massive, mimicking the "Sunday Funnies" of the early 20th century. Spiegelman retreated into the past to cope with the present. He found solace in the visual language of pioneers like Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat). To Spiegelman, these old comics represented a world that was already "blown up" or surreal, yet they had a permanence that the Twin Towers didn't.
He weaves these vintage characters into his own trauma. You’ll see the Katzenjammer Kids or Happy Hooligan wandering through the wreckage of Lower Manhattan. It’s a jarring juxtaposition. By using these 100-year-old ghosts, he’s pointing out that disaster isn't new. History is just one long sequence of things falling apart and people trying to find a joke in the debris. The thick cardboard pages are a metaphor, too. They feel sturdy. They feel like they won't burn or tear as easily as a regular comic book. In a world where skyscrapers could turn into dust in seconds, Spiegelman wanted to make something that felt like it had weight. It’s heavy. Your arms actually get tired holding it.
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The Political Backlash Nobody Talks About Anymore
It's easy to forget how stifling the atmosphere was in the U.S. circa 2002. Patriotism was mandatory. Dissent was often labeled as treason. Spiegelman wasn't having any of it. He was vocal about his disgust with how the tragedy was being "weaponized" to justify the invasion of Iraq. This made the book incredibly controversial at the time. He wasn't just mourning; he was accusing.
He portrays himself as "equally terrorized by Al-Qaeda and by his own government." That’s a heavy sentiment to put in a comic book. Some critics found it narcissistic. They argued that his personal neuroses overshadowed the collective grief of the nation. But looking back at In the Shadow of No Towers Art Spiegelman twenty years later, that narcissism feels more like radical honesty. He wasn't trying to speak for "us." He was trying to keep himself from screaming. He captures the specific frantic energy of New Yorkers who had to smell the smoke for months while the rest of the country watched it as a TV show.
A Breakdown of the Visual Language
- The Glowing Skeleton: That recurring image of the tower’s steel frame. It’s the visual "thump-thump" of a heartbeat throughout the pages.
- The Comic Supplements: The back half of the book is filled with actual reprints of old Sunday strips. It's like a history lesson that explains why he drew the front half the way he did.
- Color Palettes: He shifts from muted, ashen grays to neon, hallucinogenic colors. It mimics the feeling of a panic attack.
- Self-Deprecation: Spiegelman never paints himself as a hero. He’s a "nervous wreck." He’s a guy who forgot his daughter’s school schedule in the chaos. He’s human.
The Long-Term Impact on Graphic Journalism
Before this book, "graphic memoir" was usually about the past. Maus was about the past. Persepolis was about the past. Spiegelman did something different here—he created "graphic journalism" in real-time. He was documenting a nervous breakdown while it was still happening. You can see the influence of this approach in later works by artists like Joe Sacco or even the way modern webcomics handle breaking news. He proved that the "funny pages" could handle the weight of 2,996 deaths without being disrespectful.
The book doesn't offer closure. There’s no "we will move on" speech. Instead, it ends with a sense of lingering dread. He basically says, "The towers are gone, and I'm still not okay." In a culture obsessed with "healing" and "closure," that’s a pretty punk-rock stance to take. He refuses to let the reader feel comfortable. Even the way the panels are laid out—jagged, overlapping, sometimes upside down—forces you to work to understand what’s happening. It’s an active experience.
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Realities of the Artwork
The detail is insane. If you look closely at the "Tower" plates, he’s hidden dozens of tiny references to New York history and his own previous work. It’s a dense, layered masterpiece. But it’s also frustrating. Some pages feel cluttered to the point of being unreadable. That’s intentional. He wants you to feel overwhelmed. He wants you to feel the information overload that he felt while scrolling through news sites in 2002.
It's a mistake to think of this as just a "9/11 book." It’s a book about memory. It’s about how we use art to process things that are too big for words. When the towers fell, Spiegelman lost his sense of "equilibrium." He used the verticality of the comic strip—the way your eye moves up and down the page—to try and find it again.
How to Approach the Text Today
If you're picking up In the Shadow of No Towers Art Spiegelman for the first time, don't try to read it like a normal book. Don't start at the top left and go to the bottom right and expect a story. Treat it like an art gallery.
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- Read the Introduction First: It sets the stakes. He explains the "time-lag" between his experiences and the drawings.
- Look at the Old Strips: Don't skip the 1900s reprints in the back. They are the "key" to the symbols he uses in the front.
- Check the Scale: Find a physical copy if you can. Reading this on a Kindle or a small tablet ruins the effect. You need the physical weight of the board pages to get what he was doing.
- Contextualize the Politics: Remember that this was written before the Iraq War really started. It’s a snapshot of a very specific moment in 2002-2003.
Ultimately, Spiegelman reminds us that art doesn't have to be polite. It doesn't have to make us feel better. Sometimes, the most honest thing an artist can do is show you exactly how broken they are. He didn't just live in the shadow of the towers; he let the shadow become part of his ink. It’s a messy, angry, brilliant piece of history that remains one of the most honest responses to tragedy ever put to paper.
To truly understand the depth of this work, you should compare the imagery of the "Glowing Tower" to his earlier depictions of the crematorium chimneys in Maus. The visual link between the two suggests that for Spiegelman, history isn't circular—it's a recurring nightmare. Pay attention to the way he uses the character of "The Tower" as a silent, monolithic witness that eventually becomes an absence. The absence is more powerful than the presence ever was.
Next Steps for Readers
- Locate a physical "Board Book" edition: The tactile experience of the heavy pages is central to the work's meaning.
- Research "The Yellow Kid" and "Little Nemo": Understanding these early 20th-century comic archetypes will unlock the symbolic layers Spiegelman employs throughout the narrative.
- Review Spiegelman’s 2002 interviews: This provides necessary context for the political climate in which these strips were originally suppressed in the United States.