Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No

Towers
Chute, Hillary.
American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography,
Volume 17, Number 2, 2007, pp. 228-244 (Article)
Published by The Ohio State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/amp.2007.0017

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/amp/summary/v017/17.2chute.html

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TEMPORALITY AND SERIALITY

IN SPIEGELMANS
IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS
Hillary Chute

Art Spiegelman is one of the most famous

if not the most famousliving cartoonists in the world. Born in Sweden
in 1948 to Polish Holocaust survivor parents, Spiegelman published
his own magazine, Blas, as a fifteen year old living in Queens; by the
time he was at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton), he had taken
over the campus comics magazine, which he re-christened Mother. A
key figure in San Franciscos 1970s underground comics (or comix)
scene, which established comics nationwide as avant-garde and for
adultsand adult intellectuals at thatSpiegelman distinguished
himself by rigorously exploring the mediums formal energies. Here
was this young medium that, in a sense, was the last bastion of figurative drawing, Spiegelman notes in an interview. As a result, nobody
had become preoccupied [in comics] with the issues that preoccupied
modernist art elsewhere.1 In seminal pieces like Dont Get Around
Much Anymore and Ace Hole, Midget Detective (which he memorably described as a confluence of Gertrude Stein and pulp fiction),
Spiegelman brought modernist experimentation to comics storytelling.
And in strips like The Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History
and the early prototype Maus, Spiegelman expanded on the trenchant autobiographical mode that had recently surfaced in adult comics
with the work of Justin Green (whose 1971 Binky Brown Meets the
Holy Virgin Mary, a narrative of sexual awakening and Catholic guilt,
is widely credited as the first autobiographical comics text).
Spiegelman also re-invigorated attention to comics as an art form
at several crucial junctures in the past few decades, directly influencing
the sophisticated comics culture that is currently thriving. In the late
1970s, as the underground was splintering and threatening to sink,
Spiegelman, along with Bill Griffith, founded and edited the comics
revue Arcade, which rejected the more superficial and juvenile

American Periodicals, Vol. 17 No. 2 (2007)

Copyright 2007 by The Ohio State University

Spiegelmans In the Shadow of No Towers

229

aspects of underground comics culture (sex, drugs, gratuitous violence) in favor of a strong focus on innovative work. In 1980, Spiegelman, along with his wife, Franoise Mouly, founded RAW, a magazine
they initially self-published in their SoHo loft. The sophistication, daring, and lavish production in RAWwhich sold out all of its print
runssuggested not only that there was a large community of talented cartoonists out there, but also that comics were, in fact, an art
form; it created an acute awareness of the originality of the form. It
was in RAW that Spiegelman first published his masterpiece, Maus: A
Survivors Tale, serially, over the course of a decade.
The groundbreaking Maus, which was eventually collected and
published in two book volumes by Pantheon, shook up mainstream
expectations of comics when it was nominated for a National Book
Critics Circle Award in the category of Biography in 1986 (it lost out to
a book on Chaucer), and further when it won a Special Pulitzer Prize
in 1992; in the years since, it has become the worlds most famous
graphic novel (although its seriousness of purpose helped this
nomenclature to become commonplace, I prefer the term graphic narrative, as Maus is non-fiction). Depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as
cats, Maus tells the story of Arts father Vladek Spiegelmans experience in WWII, as well the sons struggle to solicit and record his fathers testimony. It is a work of such stunning narrative intricacy that
it is no exaggeration to point out that it has singlehandedly inspired
the academy to recognize the complexity of comics.
Spiegelmans next book of comicsafter an interval of about ten
years, during which he was a staff artist for the New Yorkeris In the
Shadow of No Towers, a rich, hectic, outsized meditation on 9/11, the
central events of which Spiegelman, who currently lives in downtown
Manhattan, personally witnessed. In an interview with the New York
Times prior to the publication of In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman, asked about the material his work covers, admitted, so far it
has been the painful realities that I can barely grasp that force me to
the drawing table. . . . I seem to have a rather grotesque muse.2
So while In the Shadow of No Towers is a strident, fragmented
book, at first glance radically differentand perhaps less appealing
than the powerful, narrative Maus, we may recognize a common
theme: characters brushing up against, and trying to make sense of,
brutal historical realities. In the Shadow of No Towers sometimes feels
more like an interesting theoretical object than an engaging comics
narrative; Spiegelman has said it is hardly like a graphic novel but
rather like novel graphics.3 Unlike Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers
was written to be a series of discrete episodes; additionally, unlike
Maus, it is at least in part composed through color graphics Spiegelman created on the computer (Maus was drawn and lettered throughout with a black fountain pen). Spiegelmans ten comics pages
contained in In the Shadow of No Towers were considered so harshly

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polemical that the Pulitzer-Prize winner had trouble finding them an

American publisher in the wake of 9/11.4 Despite the fact that venues
such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books actively solicited Spiegelmans work in that period,
Spiegelman explains that his shrill, sky-is-falling voice, cracking at
every moment ultimately caused American editors to flee.5 Yet as with
the hugely successful Maus, No Towers is explicitly about the intersection of past and present, both thematically and formally. And as
with Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers makes interlacing temporalities part of the texts very structure.
In the Shadow of No Towers was published in book form in 2004,
collecting ten broadsheet-sized comics pages. Although Spiegelman
gives credit to his first publishers in the acknowledgments of the book,
few American readers are or were aware of its early life as a serial
strip. Spiegelmans pages were originally published serially (and often
sporadically) from 20012003 in the European and American venues
Die Zeit, The Forward, Courrier International, The London Review of
Books, Internazionale, The L.A. Weekly, The Chicago Weekly, and
World War Three Illustrated. While In the Shadow of No Towers was
initially planned as a weekly series, Spiegelman found that many of
the pages took up to five weeks each to complete.6 In this essay, I suggest that the publication of No Towers as a serial comic strip, appearing in print at irregular intervals, reflects the traumatic
temporality Spiegelman experienced after 9/11, in which a normative, ongoing sense of time stopped or shattered; he feels that these
pages represent what he calls a slow-motion diary of the end of the
world.7
As he discusses candidly throughout the book and elsewhere,
Spiegelman became a broken husk of a space cadet after seeing the
first plane crash into the tower ten blocks away from him, running towards the scene to find his daughter (at that time a freshman at the
adjacent Stuyvesant High School), and then getting her out as the
north tower collapsed behind them.8 Throughout No Towers, Spiegelman refers to himself by appellations such as basket case, and he
describes his desire to communicate hysterical fear and panic
(Comic 5; Sky np). But while Spiegelman mocks himself, creating
distance, No Towers argues that paranoia is not delusional. Equally
terrified of his own government and of terrorism (he explains that hes
waiting for some other terrorist shoe to drop), Spiegelmans message
in No Towers is thatas he repeats over and overthe world is ending (Comic 10). No Towers elaborates the continuousness of this feeling long after 9/11, in how the comics page engenders spatial
overlapping and multiple traumatic temporalities. Spiegelman writes
that 9/11 left him reeling on the faultline where World History and
Personal History collidethe intersection my parents, Auschwitz survivors, had warned me about when they taught me to always keep my

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231

bags packed (Sky np). Despite the intermittence of the appearance

of his No Towers pages, Spiegelman sought regularity in composing
them: as he states about his post-9/11 state of mind, If I thought in
page units, I might live long enough to do another page.9
Here, I propose to examineto use the language of the call for papers for this special issue of American Periodicalsthe difference a
periodical/serial context makes to the comics. Specifically, I would
like to examine the difference that a periodical/serial context makes to
In The Shadow of No Towers, a text that cemented Spiegelmans status
as one of the worlds few public intellectual cartoonists.10 (Spiegelmans June 2006 cover story in Harpers, Drawing Blood: Outrageous
Cartoons and the Art of Outrage, is a recent example that indicates
this status; in 2004, a few months after the publication of No Towers,
he was named one of Time magazines 100 Most Influential People in
the World.)11
Spiegelmans book is deeply informed by a serial context, but it
works to refigure a traditional notion of seriality for a text registering
the crisis of witnessing a traumatic world event. The inaugural strip in
No Towers offers an angled, jutting box of text, unmoored at the top
right of the page, providing the following synopsis: In our last episode,
as you might remember, the world ended. Since this strip is Spiegelmans first in the collection, of course, there was no last episode;
Spiegelman here demonstrates the perpetuity of trauma, and also how
it places stress on a dominant notion of the serial. This essay reads
the jagged sequencing of the No Towers strips in their original form
as part of the disruption of linear or regular serial context that Spiegelman also enacts at two further levels: at the level of the books strange,
overall structural movement, and also within the strips themselves. I
assert that No Towers, conditioned by a traumatic temporality, presents an experimental view of sequence and seriality that powerfully
and politicallysuggests the enmeshing of the past and the present.
In the book, Spiegelmans twenty-first-century comic strips are
followed by reprints of old newspaper comic strips from around the
turn of the last century, among them such titles as Frederick Burr
Oppers Happy Hooligan (19001932), Winsor McCays Little Nemo in
Slumberland (19051911; 19241926), Rudolph Dirkss Katzenjammer Kids (18971918), and Gustave Verbecks Upside Downs of Little
Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo (19031905). No Towers is a
thick-paged volume containing Spiegelmans original ten comic
stripswhich he has called the first towerfollowed by seven plates,
which are lavish reproductions of the older comic stripsand which
he has called the second tower.12 No Towers is also unpaginated (although Spiegelmans double-spread comics episodes are numbered
consecutively with Arabic numerals, and the seven subsequent plates
that reproduce the older comic stripsand which vary in size; not all
are double-spreadsare marked with Roman numerals). I read its

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fragmented, unorthodox approach to pagination as a material register

of traumas inability to conform to the logic of linear and temporal
progression. With his strange, two-part structure, Spiegelman calls attention to the ephemerality of comic stripshis own and others
through their figuration as the eminently destructible towers. The
ephemerality of comic strips, Spiegelman suggests, is appropriate for
what he calls an end-of-the-world moment.13 And we may understand the content of the comic strips contained within the towers
themselves as elaborating the following theme: Spiegelmans lamentation about just how ephemeral those skyscrapers and democratic institutions are (Sky np).
The confusion the combination of new and old comics might provoke is, as Spiegelman notes in an interview, exactly the point of the
book.14 He explains this choice in an essay in the book preceding the
historical strips. Given my focus here, it is particularly relevant that
he opens this essay, which is called The Comic Supplement, by explaining how two different media formswhich are here non-serial
formswere unable to capture his attention in the aftermath of 9/11.
Hearing poetry, he writes, his mind kept wandering; and as for
music, he found it too obscenely exquisite (np). Notably, we may understand that most poetry and music are produced in a non-serial
context, created as unique and singular cultural production (which
may account for the negative connotation with which Spiegelman here
endows the word exquisite).
In part, it is the very seriality of the old comic strips that provides
what Spiegelman calls solace to his 9/11-shattered mind: he notes
that the old comic strips, to a certain extent because of the context of
their serial production, were made with so much skill and verve but
never intended to last past the day they appeared in the newspaper
(Comic Supplement np). It is their very perceived regularityin this
case daily or weeklycoupled with the almost existential futility, as
Spiegelman suggests, of crafting aesthetically sophisticated objects not
meant to last, which gives the strips special value to this book on
9/11. The word serial can be understood as taking place or occurring in a regular succession; likewise, the word periodical indicates
recurring at regular intervals (these are the primary definitions from
the OED; the definition of the noun form of periodical provides the
same language: a magazine or journal issued at regular or stated intervals). No Towers everywhere invokesif only to push on or refigureregularity. As a structural object, its narrative composition
highlights its own imbalance, its so-called confusion, by congregating new and old serial comics work, calling attention to the disruption
of linear temporality and duration. No Towers structurally offers no
end that implies healing or transcendence: time moves backwards,
skipping in the movement of the strips from 2001 (In the Shadow of
No Towers) to 1921 (George McManuss Bringing Up Father). Working

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233

specifically against any historico-philosophical metanarrative of

progress, the structure of No Towers argues through its narrative
grouping of original and historical material that the end is in fact a
return to the old.15 The books controversial content, too, provides examples of this political-aesthetic stance, framing events by showing us
such circumstances as 9/11 entwined with Auschwitz, and characters
from the contemporary Maus entwined with old comics characters
from the turn of the nineteenth-century.
One statement in No Towers, from Spiegelmans eighth comic strip
page, seems to sum up the books position: The killer apes learned
nothing from the twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima . . . And
nothing changed on 9/11. His President wages his wars and wars on
wagesthe same old deadly business as usual (Comic 8). A further,
and equally striking, example is Spiegelmans third comic page. The
strip presents at least six simultaneous and even literally contiguous
temporalities, which accrete and interrupt each other, figuring the
pervasiveness of historical trauma that Spiegelman avows is the result
of dominating power unimpeded by disastrous loss of human life. Here
smoke is a figure of the presence of the past: Art connects his fathers
inability to describe the smell of the smoke of bodies in Auschwitz with
his own indescribable olfactory experience in Lower Manhattan in
2001, all the while himself smoking, as he does in Maus, Cremo
brand cigarettes. (In Maus, Spiegelman drew the character Arties
smoke as the smoke of human flesh drifting upwards from Auschwitz,
a move that implied Arties guilt at commercializing the Holocaust and
also the impossibility of escape from the traumas of the past.) I dont
posit the scale of what was happening to me on 9/11 to what happened to my parents, Spiegelman explains in an interview. But of
courseand here he echoes the language of the introduction to No
Towersthere I was standing at the same juncture of personal and
world history.16
So far, my brief discussion of this highly complicated text has
suggested that No Towers, in its composition as a material/physical
object, represents fragmented, anachronistic sequencing by incorporating at its conclusion the seven plates that reproduce old, twentiethcentury American newspaper comic strips. Further, I would like to
examine how the conceptual anchor of No Towers, its play upon a historical serial context, operates within Spiegelmans comics pages. Denotatively, every single unit of mappable space in the bookincluding
the front and back covers and endpapersreferences a historical serial context. I will very briefly describe some fundamental facts about
each segment, noting its serial intertexts, before analyzing those pages
that offer a particularly arresting re-purposing of serial form.
The front cover depicts a host of cartoon characters falling
through the sky, including but not limited to the Katzenjammer Kids,
Little Lady Lovekins, Happy Hooligan, the Yellow Kid, and Krazy Kat.

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The back cover continues the theme in black-on-black, the characters

suspended in space in postures of tumbling. Both front and back
black-on-black endpapers are jammed up against the image of an old,
yellowed Pulitzer newspaper front page from September 11, 1901. In
Comic 1, Spiegelman offers his own, old-fashioned-style gag-comicstrip Etymological Vaudeville. In Comic 2, he draws himself as his
character from Maus, which, as noted, was initially serialized in RAW
magazine, surrounded on either side by tiny versions of old cartoon
characters. He is here holding a comics color supplement of Hearsts
New York Journalcomplete with its own, legible, mini-comic strip
and he also draws here on The Katzenjammer Kids, figuring Mama
Katzenjammer as the face of a woman in downtown Manhattan on
9/11, and creating his own so-called Tower Twins characters, which
are directly based on the Katzenjammer Kids themselves. In Comic 3,
he represents himself again as his character from Maus, and he offers
an example of a Mars Attacks card, a serial novelty item from the
1960s. Comic 4 presents, again, his Katzenjammer doppelgnger
Tower Twins; Comic 5 is still haunted by the pair, who open the strip
as their large, faded images overlay the north tower of the World Trade
Center. They close this page, too, by starring in their own comicwithin-a-comic, titled Remember those dead and cuddly Tower
Twins. Comic 6 gives us references to Happy Hooligan, Little Nemo in
Slumberland, and Maus, blending two temporally distinct historical
serial contexts: one early twentieth-century; one late twentiethcentury. The strip is signed, after Little Nemo creator Winsor McCay,
simply McSpiegelman. Comic 7 refigures the serial comic strip Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and the Old Man Muffaroo; it concludes, as in the previous page, by showing the title character of Little
Nemo, a young boy in the historical strip, here as a mouse, and again
this page carries the signature McSpiegelman. Comic 8, from which
the horizontal band of falling cartoon characters on the books cover is
drawn, features the Katzenjammer Kids, Little Lady Lovekins, Bringing
Up Father, Happy Hooligan, The Yellow Kid, Krazy Kat, and Maus.
Comic 9 draws on a periodical comic book tradition in displaying a
faux card deck called The Architects of Armaggedon supplemented
by the note with apologies to Wally Wood & EC Comics. Finally, the
last comic page features Happy Hooligan, Maus, and a whole host of
serial comics characters, both historical and contemporary, including
Little Orphan Annie, Charlie Brown, even characters from Doonesbury
and R. Crumbs comic books (i.e. Mr. Natural, who appears on the
t-shirt of Spiegelmans daughter-drawn-as-a-mouse, Nadja).
While every one of his original pages is deeply invested in a historical serial context, a few of Spiegelmans pages in particular merit
closer scrutiny here. It is important to note that we may see that an
awareness of serialityagain, taking place or occurring in regular
successionoccurs on every level possible in No Towers: structurally,

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235

thematically, and formally. What one gets when one reads No Towers
is an odd range of serialized comic strips: new work by Spiegelman,
followed by older work by a range of deceased newspaper cartoonists.
Spiegelmans own pages are themselves stippled with characters and
styles from these serial cartoonists: they loop through everywhere,
haunting and invading his pages. As I have mentioned, his work even
offers its own, embedded, serialized comic strip within the serial
comic stripthe Tower Twins. Further, I would like to suggest that
each one of Spiegelmans comics pages itself, in its most basic formal
qualities, recognizes and plays off of seriality in how its frames take
place or occur in successionor not. The idea of seriality in comics is
connected to the material, visual rhythm of the created page, in
which a trace of the imaginary, projected regularity of the grid is always present. My understanding of rhythm in comics is connected to
concepts anchored in both poetics and in musicsuch as pacing,
tempo, phrasing, stress, insistence (Gertrude Steins term), and alteration. 17 (While Spiegelman, as I have mentioned, writes that old
comics, unlike music and poetrysuch as W.H. Audens September
1, 1939, which acquired renewed popularity in 2001were the only
cultural artifacts that appealed to him in the wake of the 9/11 disaster, the inherent formal procedures of music and poetry, outside of
a serial context of publication, have often been usefully discussed to
elucidate the features and qualities of comics pages [Sky np].)18
While cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud defines the
comics medium as juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, what we see in Spiegelmans work, rather, is a kind of
deliberate stress on sequence and juxtaposition as they are traditionally conceived.19
The comics page, and Spiegelmans in particular, always presents
a kind of serialized architecture, either gridded conventionallyoffering regular intervals, regular panels, gesturing towards a consistent
rhythm of acquisition in readingor deviating meaningfully from the
grid.20 To examine No Towerss self-consciously architectural mode,
we need to look at one of Spiegelmans definitions of comics. It is crucial that Spiegelman attaches the very concept of narrative with the
spatial, materializing work of comics.21 In his 1977 collection
Breakdowns (which is rare and out-of-print but is soon to be republished by Pantheon), Spiegelman writes, My dictionary defines
COMIC STRIP as a narrative series of cartoons . . . A NARRATIVE is a
defined as a story. Most definitions of STORY leave me cold . . . Except
for the one that says A complete horizontal division of a building . . .
[which is] (From [the] Medieval Latin HISTORIA . . . a row of windows
with pictures on them).22 The fundamental form of comics, then, is
like a building, composed of rows of windows, or frames. In other
words, the form of comics is basically serial: a sequence of regularly
spaced windows.

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Figure 1. From In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman, copyright 2004 by Art
Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Yet, if Spiegelman thinks of comics panels, and pages, and groups

of pages, as constructed architecturally like buildings, then, what he
proceeds to show in the book is also that if the twin towers are traumatically tumbling structures, and he is in a paranoid shattered
state, the comics page is uniquely equipped to register that fragmentation.23 In Comic 2, Spiegelman begins with a sequence of panels,
preceding the title, which calls attention to the architectural and nontransparent surface of the comics page (Figure 1).24 While the first panel
is a conventional bordered box, the second shifts out from the tier, and
each succeeding panel reveals more and more depth in its position on
the white page, until eventually the panels become the twin towers,
casting a long, opaque shadow diagonally down across the page. In the
last tier of this strip, Spiegelman echoes this graphic analogy when he
writes of New York Citys twin towers, I never loved those arrogant
boxes. In the language of comics, boxes refer to panels. But here,
Spiegelman also echoes the graphic message of the opening of the strip
with a verbal affirmation that towers are boxes and boxes are panels.
This strip shows how the medium of comics uses the space of the
page to narrativize. Spiegelman describes his imaginative re-creation
of his fathers Auschwitz experience in Maus in the following way: Im
literally giving a form to my fathers words and narrative, and that
form for me has to do with panel size, panel rhythms, and visual
structures of the page.25 And now in No Towers, the formal elements
of comics, in part because of the books thematic focus on architecture, are, as he says, allowed to become [even] more overt.26 No
Towers is formally experimental, riveted to showing the efficacy of the
comics medium for traumatic representation. (The way I am using experimental here conforms to Marianne DeKovens use of that term as
the obstruction of normal reading.)27 Confronting the discourse of
history with the discourse of art, Spiegelman interrogates the ontological status of the past.28 In No Towers, comics are presented as the
only way to organize the fragmented, discursive structure of paranoia
and trauma. Working on Maus, Spiegelman referred to comics panels

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237

as coffins; here, in No Towers, they are windows, and the book, while
detailing the crumbling of the towers, also rebuilds them in its basic
graphic procedure: there is a formal recuperation at worka kind of
re-fenestrationwithout the all-too-easy psychic recuperation counseled by mainstream redemption narratives.
By experimenting with what he calls the stylistic surface of the
page, Spiegelman aims throughout No Towers to get the reader lost on
the page by erecting and then violating the grid of the page to reflect
9/11s demolition of what he has called the world grid.29 Often, the
reader does not know where to go next: one usually reads horizontally
from left to right, but at certain moments in No Towers one comes to a
narrative juncture in which one may read vertically or horizontally,
without being instructed which to do first. Strips are interrupted by
embedded mini-strips; panels take on unusual shapes and sizes (figured, for instance, as scatter of snapshots); unhinged images float
over and under frames, disrupting narrative movement; and frames
break out of their erected rows. And in half of Spiegelmans ten strips,
the north tower becomes its own page-spanning vertical frame, a kind
of spectral roadblock creating narrative crisis.30 The cartoon figures
from the past, then, here stand as legible markers for this contradictory double gesture of comics: regular, serialized, re-occurring; about
to be demolished, de-regulated, and de-regulating.
The serialized characters are literal marks of the past, but of the
past as not past, much like, as the book suggests, the World Trade
Center itself. Hence the title of the book. Hence also Spiegelmans
statement, Its inevitable that [No Towers] is a contemplation of
comics as a metaphor for September 11.31 We see this most powerfully
with Spiegelmans serial within his serial, the Tower Twins. In Comic
2the first appearance of these updated, terrorized and terrorizing
Katzenjammer Kidsthe Tower Twins wear the twin towers on their
heads, yet they are also cast within the long, black, diagonal shadow of
the World Trade Center that additionally floats behind the jumbled,
multidirectional panels. And while Comic 2 has the World Trade Centers diagonal shadow as its backdrop, Spiegelmans fourth comic page
has the Twins themselves as a ghostly backdrop, blown up to huge
proportions, the blank white of their startled eyes contrasting with the
Benday dots of their turn-of-the-century costumes, peeking out from
behind a layer of black-bordered comics frames. The conflation of the
towerswhich stand in themselves for Spiegelmans traumatic 9/11
experiencewith the serialized characters becomes even more evident
on the next page, Comic 5, in which a Tower Twins face spectrally
stamps an image of the North Tower collapsing in several panels.
While in the first tier, his face floats in outline behind the tower, it
gradually gains prominence, replacing the fading tower, moving from
background to foreground. As the overall structure of the book
suggests, and as we see here, the past overtakes the present.

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This overtaking is most powerful and most dramatic in Comic 10,

his last, where we see both rigorous experimentation with the space of
the page and Spiegelmans self-figuration as two different, prominent,
historical serialized comic strip characters (Figure 2). This page explicitly considers comics as architecture; at first glance, for this reason, it
might look initially like the most regular page in the book. Here,
Spiegelman draws the twin towers as two large panels, each subdivided by their own panels. The sets of panels-within-panels each tell a
narrative that moves forward in time. Through its spatial dynamics,
this page multiplies temporalities. While it offers two narratives that
move forward within the space of buildings, it simultaneously displays
a separate moment suspended in time. The building-panels stand
against a blue sky; a plane swoops in through the blue of the gutter,
frozen in the moment before it hits the tower. While comics are structurally about moving forward in time, this page makes overt the symptoms of traumatic temporality: time as both frozen, and time as
aiming backwards instead of forwards, as Spiegelman puts it.32 Here
Spiegelman utilizes virtuosic page layout, building a narrative architecture that makes manifest his definition of comics as a complete
horizontal division of a building. Yet through its play of internal and
external space, the architecture of the page splinters and enmeshes
temporalities, showing how in a state of trauma, time is no longer able
to be simply understood and chronologized.
In the first tower of panels, Spiegelman draws himself realistically
in the top tier, facing readers directly: bespectacled, balding, smoking,
looking perplexed. In the second tierand in the remaining tiers he
visually morphs into Frederick Burr Oppers character Happy Hooligan, but a red text box announces that he is a Hapless Hooligan Interviewed on TeeVee as he narrates his disappointing post-9/11
interview with NBC. In the second tower of panels, again, Spiegelman
draws himself realistically in the top tier, facing readers directly, as a
yellow text box announces, On 9/11/01 time stopped. In the second
tier, after a bomb explodes in his face, he emerges from the smoke as
Hapless Hooligan. Yet in the next panel, which is three times as large
as the preceding one, Spiegelman pictures himself, with his family,
amidst a sea of comics characters, as his Maus persona. Spiegelman
here inserts himself explicitly into a historical world of serialized
comics characters, among which his serialized autobiographical Maus
character is a part. He inserts himself into a serial space of the past,
both claiming Mauss prominence in a trajectory and claiming the hold
that the past has on him through the characters of comics history, including his own self-created character, a Jewish mouse, who is mired
in the trauma of Auschwitz. This concluding strip is about the danger
of losing the sting and bite of history, and, paradoxically, the supposedly ephemeral comics characters help him to be grounded in the

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239

Figure 2. From In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman, copyright 2004 by Art
Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

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space where he can be open to ethically remembering the past. The

strip opens with the sentence, Genuine Awe has been reduced to the
mere Shock and Awe of jingoistic strutting. It ends with the sentence,
The Towers have come to loom far larger than life . . . but they seem
to get smaller every day . . . Happy Anniversary.
Throughout No Towers, the past and present jostle and layer each
other, smashing into each other to make graphically legible their coexistence. We see this right away with the title page. Spiegelman reprints the front page from the September 11, 1901 New York World,
which carries the fitting headline Presidents Wound Reopened; Slight
Change for Worse (Figure 3). There is also an equally fitting headline
about the jailing of Emma Goldman for conspiracy to kill President
McKinley.33 As a palimpsest over this century-old front page is a circular, glossy, color panel of the tumbling north tower, glowing orange,
sandwiched by bits of blue sky, and framed above and below by the
glossy yellow letters of the books title and Spiegelmans dark, matte
lowercase signature overlaying a bottom-row report about Mrs.
McKinleys courage. Spiegelman echoes the theme of wounding invoked by the headline with this oft-repeated image of the collapsing
grid of the north tower, bringing to mind Cathy Caruths explanation
of trauma as a wound that cries out.34 Here, the image that repetitively represents No Towerss wound violates the grid of newspaper
columns with an interruption that yet bespeaks a connection between
past and present. Spiegelmans language in discussing this palimpsest
is violent: on this title page, he says the new and old get to be
smashed and co-exist; he also speaks about the crushing together
of past and present.35 Spiegelman here, as elsewhere, unmoors the
trauma of 9/11 from 2001, just as he suggests McKinleys sustained
relevance to our current President in matters of empire: McKinley was
the president who assented to the U.S.s first imperial interventions in
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Phillippines.
The sky is falling, the title of No Towerss introduction, is a clich
that, experientially, on 9/11 became literal for Spiegelman, who lives
proximate to the former World Trade Center. But further, No Towers
asserts, the trauma of 9/11 is both a particular and an ambient
trauma, inflected by and inflecting the past. It is this ideahistory as
untranscendable horizon, as Jameson puts itthat the book endeavors to literalize on the page through its complex register of history,
temporality, and recursive serial form.36 As I have argued, the strips
themselves replicate the disturbance of a linear narrative sequence by
often obstructing the reading pattern comics usually establish, presenting time as moving backwards instead of forwardsa move that is
further intensified, and made intelligible, by the fact that Spiegelman
draws upon and incorporates characters and styles from turn-of-thecentury serial newspaper comic strips. No Towers suggests that
comics provides a political and/or ethical shape to trauma by making

Spiegelmans In the Shadow of No Towers

241

Figure 3. From In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman, copyright 2004 by Art
Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

its processes graphically legiblethat is, readableon the page. To

underline, as I do here, how comics makes language, ideas, and concepts literal is to call attention to how comics can make the twisting
lines of history readable through form.37
The motivating paradox of No Towers is that it borrows its force
and impact from historical newspaper comics serials once viewed as
fishwrap, and yet reminds us, perhaps dismally, of the serial nature of
history. This view of history, which he so forcefully established in

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Maus, is also evident in the repetitive title Spiegelman once (unsuccessfully) proposed for an exhibit at the Holocaust Museum: Never
Again and Again and Again. Spiegelmans latest projecthis first book
in the word and image form of comics since Mausemerged because,
as he says, One needs the voices that come at what it means to live
and die.38 This tells us something about the comics form, the kind of
work to which its rows of sequential windows lends itself most urgently. Spiegelman thus recuperates the trauma of 9/11re-building
the shattered pieces through comicswhile he steadfastly refuses to
recuperate by offering a progressive narrative with a proper end that
would denote closure or healing. But while No Towers draws on serial
characters and settings often forbiddingly to suggest the interlacing of
past and present temporalities, it also attempts to model how history
can become livable, and even productive. Spiegelmans trauma takes
the form of innovative representation and expression in serialized
comics, and yet this approach is contingent upon an anti-transcendent recognition of ephemeralitysomething Spiegelman takes pains
to underline in presenting the correspondence of comics and buildings
that both are all too destructible.

NOTES
1
Art Spiegelman, art spiegelman, in Dangerous Drawings: Interviews with Comix
and Graphic Artists, ed. Andrea Juno (New York: Juno Books, 1995), 7899.
2
Claudia Dreifus, A Comic-Book Response to 9/11 and Its Aftermath, New York
Times, August 7, 2004.
3
Art Spiegelman, Interview, New York is Book Country event, Borders Stage, New
York City, October 2, 2004.
4
At a recent talk, Spiegelman noted that he couldnt say the sky is falling! loudly
enough, a fact that made him crazy and a fringe lunatic in the U.S.while in Europe,
as he sees it, his opinions were very mainstream (Spiegelman, Interview). One payoff
to living in what he distinguishes as neither a red state nor a blue state but the state of
alienation, as Spiegelman suggests, is that hes Seconds Ahead of His Timeand the
press that had rejected his comic strips as too shrill in 2001 now clamor for his work,
given what has unfolded in Iraq. The two above quotations from Spiegelman are both
from In The Shadow of No Towers [New York: Pantheon, 2004]; they are, respectively,
from his seventh original comics episode (Comic 7), and from the prose essay titled The
Sky is Falling!, the first of two unpaginated essays woven into the structure of the book.
Throughout this essay, I will refer to Spiegelmans comics episodes by the number that
he gives them in the text.
5
James Campbell, Drawing Pains, the Guardian, August 29, 2004.
6
Spiegelman explains this in The Sky is Falling (np). However, it is worth noting
that Spiegelman turned around the famous black-on-black cover for the New Yorker,
which appeared just days after 9/11, very quickly (Mouly is the covers editor of the magazine). The cover of No Towers replicates the magazine cover, but with the addition of a
strip of color that stretches across the width of the towers. For more on the construction
of the New Yorker cover, see Art Spiegelman, Cover: How It Came To Be, The
New Yorker (Online Only), October 3, 2001. Accessed February 28, 2007.
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/covers/articles/011008on_onlineonly01>

Spiegelmans In the Shadow of No Towers

243

7
Art Spiegelman, Address on In the Shadow of No Towers, Barnes & Noble, New
York City, September 23, 2004.
8
Dreifus, A Comic-Book Response.
9
Mel Gussow, Dark Nights, Sharp Pens; Art Spiegelman Addresses Children and
His Own Fears, the New York Times, October 15, 2003. For a comparison of the representation of trauma in Maus and in No Towers, see Kristiaan Versluys, Art Spiegelmans In the Shadow of No Towers: 9/11 and the Representation of Trauma, Mfs:
Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006): 9801003.
10
It is likely that Spiegelman is, at least in the English-speaking world, the only
public intellectual of his medium; Robert Crumb, his only rival in fame, has almost entirely withdrawn from public life, largely disdaining the intellectual as tedious, as he
put it in a recent and rare public appearance at the New York Public Library on February 14, 2007.
11
See The Time 100: Art Spiegelman: The Cartoon Genius, by Marjane Satrapi,
Time, April 18, 2005.
12
Campbell, Drawing Pains. No Towers is 141/2 x 20 inches. A typical broadsheet
size is 17 x 22 inches. While No Towers is clearly smaller, its comparably large size, and
its vertical, fold-out format is meant to evoke an old-fashioned broadsheet.
13
Spiegelman, The Comic Supplement, np. This is an unpaginated essay appearing in In the Shadow of No Towers after Spiegelmans own comics pages, which serves as
an introduction to the older comics reprints that constitute the second part of the book.
14
Dreifus, A Comic-Book Response.
15
New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, at least on this point, agrees with
the books value: while she believes the text could have greater metaphorical weight,
she praises the book for not conforming to those creative efforts [that] have tried to impose a conventional narrative upon those events, consciously or unconsciously pushing
the horror and the chaos of 9/11 into a sanitized form with a beginning, middle and
endan end that implies recovery or transcendence. Portraying 9/11 as a Katzenjammer Catastrophe, the New York Times, August 31, 2004.
16
Dreifus, A Comic-Book Response.
17
For more on insistence, see Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude
Steins Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
18
For instance, we may understand the counterpoint of musical composition as
apposite to the narrative movement between word and image in comics, and the distillation of poetic form as apposite to the condensation required by the economical form of
comics, in which contained, spatially constricted panels often must speak volumes.
19
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 9.
20
The phrase rhythm of acquisition belongs to Will Eisner; see his Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative (Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1996), 5. A typical grid of a
comics page might be nine panels, three rows of three. Mauss implied grid is often 12:
four rows of three.
21
Materialize is a verb Spiegelman used in an interview with Joshua Brown (98).
See his Of Mice and Memory, Oral History Review 16.1 (Spring 1988): 91109.
22
Art Spiegelman, Introduction, Breakdowns: From Maus to Now. An anthology of
strips by art spiegelman (New York: Nostalgia Press, 1977), np.
23
Spiegelman, Interview.
24
The second comics page of In the Shadow of No Towers was excerpted on the
cover of PMLA in October 2004. Marianne Hirsch, then the editor of PMLA, noted that
there was some resistance within the MLA to having what was seen as a political cartoon on the cover of its official journal. See Marianne Hirsch, Marianne Hirsch on
Maus, Interview by Martha Kuhlman, Indy Magazine (Winter 2005). Accessed 28 February 2007. <http://64.23.98.142/indy/winter_2005/ kuhlman_hirsch/index.html>
25
Art Spiegelman, Art Spiegelman, Interview by Gary Groth, the Comics Journal
180 (September 1995): 52106.

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26
Art Spiegelman, Ephemera vs. the Apocalypse, Indy Magazine (Autumn 2005).
Accessed 12 December 2006. <http://64.23.98.142/ indy/autumn_2004/spiegelman_ephemera/index.html>
27
DeKoven, A Different Language, 5. DeKoven clarifies this definition in a formulation that, while here she applies it directly to avant-garde writers, is apposite for
Spiegelman: Though we can construe sensible meanings here and there with varying
degrees of readinessfor Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett we can even find ways, after serious
thought, to interpret the whole passage coherentlythose constructions can never account more than partially for the writing (5).
28
The language of historical and artistic discursive confrontation is from Linda
Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge,
1993).
29
Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus CD-ROM [New York: Voyager, 1994]; David
DArcy, Profile: Art Spiegelmans Comic Book Journalism [NPR Weekend Edition, June
7, 2003, transcript]. Because I grew up with parents who were always ready to see the
world grid crumble, Spiegelman explains to DArcy, and when it started feeling that
that was happening here and now, it wasnt a total surprise. Here, it is important to
note that Spiegelmans language of the crumbling world grid is particularly relevant to
No Towers, where he shows us the violation and breaking of the world grid in both
senses of the termphenomenologically and literally on the page.
30
Glancing through Spiegelmans original pages, it is hard not to think of Cathy
Caruths statement that to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or
an event, as Spiegelman repeatedly offers, in various permutations, the image he witnessed on 9/11 of the glowing bones of the north tower of the World Trade Center right
before it collapsed. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 45.
31
Troy Patterson, Graphic Violence, Entertainment Weekly (September 24, 2004):
4445.
32
Spiegelman, Ephemera.
33
Spiegelman, as it becomes clear in the pages of the book, not only likely identifies with the notion of such removal of the President, but also can sympathize with the
fringe lunacy that the public attached to the radical Goldman.
34
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.
35
Spiegelman, Address. The concluding endpapers make a similar argument:
over the same 1901 headline, Spiegelman layers 34 headlines from various newspapers
from the mid-1990s and beyond that work as his most overt justification of his so-called
paranoia. These include: Taliban in Texas for Talks on Gas Pipeline, New Attack A
Matter of Time, In New York, Taking a Breath of Fear, and a 1998 headline titled, A
Terror Warning for N.Y. and D.C.: Terror Kingpin Osama bin Laden May be Preparing to
Bomb New York or Washington.
36
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 102.
37
This language is from Hillary Chute, The Shadow of a Past Time: History and
Graphic Representation in Maus, Twentieth-Century Literature 52.2 (Summer 2006):
199230.
38
Spiegelman, Interview.