CartoonsNew York cartoonist Art Spiegelman's autobiographical meditation on post-9/11 Manhattan is a work of enormous power, as anyone familiar with Maus, his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his parents' survival of Auschwitz might expect.
A large- format full-colour hardback, it consists of 20 pages between elegant two-tone black covers relating, in two sections, his reaction to the tragedy. His daughter, Nadja, was at school at the foot of the towers on the day of the attacks. His "pivotal image", that of the North Tower's glowing bones moments before it vapourised, defied his best efforts to paint it before being digitally realised on computer. It remains, he says, "burned onto the inside of my eyelids". Its after-image, no less than his own bewildered indignation, glows on every page.
Almost equally disturbing is the drawing captioned "Waiting for that other shoe to drop". A panicked crowd, their faces rendered in garish pinks, blues and greens, flees a giant shoe falling with smoking fuse from a blood-red Manhattan skyline. A subhead reads: "New Improved JIHAD brand Footwear". His disillusion with Bush's hijacking of the hijackings, a recruitment poster for invading Iraq and rage at the 2000 election failed to encourage American mainstream publication. Consequently these shocking narratives appeared first in Die Zeit where he was afforded a free hand. Publication in France, Italy, The Netherlands and England followed. Latterly, as he explains, "A profile of me in the Art Section of the New York Times in the fall of 2003 even included the very panel of me feeling 'Equally terrorised' by Al Quaeda and by my own government that had made some editors visibly shudder two years earlier".
In these eclectic cries de coeur the author, morphing into Spiegelmaus, wonders as he chainsmokes whether toxic air will get him first. An accompanying photocollage of two small children in gas masks is headed "NYC TO KIDS. DON'T BREATHE". Bush on the back of the American eagle its throat slashed with a Stanley knife asks "Why do they hate us? Why?"
Spiegelman, reworking his "Waiting for that other shoe to drop" (this time Republican cowboy boots rain on a Ground Zero crowd of bewildered characters from the innocent dawn of American cartooning,Little Orphan Annie, Happy Hooligan, J.Wellington Wimpy, and so on, rendered by a guesting Robert Crumb), heads the drawing with a quotation from Auden's 'September 1939', "The unmentionable odour of death offends the September night". On 9/11/03 Spiegelman laments the fact that "That odour still offends as we commemorate two years of squandered chances to bring the community of nations together . . ." As the artist and family (as mice) flee a new putative disaster, Spiegelman's wife sports a T-shirt on which Crumb's Mr Natural explains it all: "The whole universe is completely insane".
While some Manhattanites sought solace in poetry from the terror of 9/11, Spiegelman drew his from an extended perusal of newspaper comics from the 1900s. Part two of this book consists of a learned dissertation on their development as well as a selection of some that eerily prefigure the day New York's sky fell. These beautifully rendered pages are, as Hearst's New York Journal boasted of its comic supplement of 1896, of "a polychromatic effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe". Somewhere in an enchanted place over that rainbow The Yellow Kid, Happy Hooligan, Little Nemo, Jiggs and Maggie and George Herriman's Krazy Kat will always be playing.
Spiegelman ends his introduction on an uncharacteristically optimistic note. If the world is ending it seems to be ending more slowly than he once thought. Slowly enough one hopes for further bulletins from this modern master of his form.
Tom Mathews is a cartoonist. His weekly Artoon appears on W8
In The Shadow of No Towers By Art Spiegelman Viking, 40pp. £20