Synaptic

Rich with detail, strong with argument and voice, and inventive in its analytical process, Sydney’s paper offers us a rare opportunity to examine a graphic novel up close and appreciate the form’s visual and narrative complexity. Sydney approaches Spiegelman’s work with intimate knowledge of and enthusiasm for the graphic novel as a form and with critical sensitivity to the subject of 9/11 and how it has been, and will be, remembered.

-Kathy Korcheck

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In the Shadow of No Towers is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, completed in the years following 9/11 and published in 2004. It features ten full-color spreads prefaced by an introductory essay and followed by another essay and short anthology of historic comic plates that inspired and consoled the author while he dealt with the trauma of his first-hand witness to the attack on the Twin Towers. In this work, Spiegelman explores his personal reaction to the terrorist attacks as well as his perception of the country’s reaction through the use of literary and artistic methods and deliberate reference to other comic works. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers explores both personal and nationalized American reactions to the terror attacks of 9/11/2001 through the use of motif, stylistic choices, and reference of historic and nostalgic comix.

Analytic Process

The close reading portions of this paper are based on the analyst’s own close-reading approach— firstly, an analysis of overt narratives, or storylines and panels that follow a traditional and simple rhetorical and stylistic approach; secondly, an analysis of implicit narratives, or storylines and panel sets that offer more commentarial, “between the lines” messages and implications; and finally, an analysis of latent narratives: planted or hidden elements or clues to a more ephemeral layer of the graphic novel which are communicated mainly through artistic elements and supplementary reference of cultural phenomena and externally-sourced works. By recognizing these concepts in Spiegelman’s work, the analyst is able to interpret not only intentionally obvious messaging, but also messaging stashed in rhetorical and stylistic layers. While this paper does explore the overt narratives of In the Shadow of No Towers, the close reading analysis focuses more on detailing and understanding the implicit and latent narratives layered in Spiegelman’s writing and illustration.

Expository Comments

Many of Spiegelman’s implicit and latent narratives in this work reference or more clearly explain the overt narratives he includes. For the purpose of exploring the implicit and latent, I include an expository summary of the relevant overt narratives.

The work begins with an introductory spread, providing thematic overlay to set the tone of the piece. Spiegelman is newly traumatized by the events of 9/11, and has turned to historic comics and retrospective design for comfort. In the first four pages, Spiegelman describes the events of the day as well as the days to follow. He and his wife search for their daughter, Nadia, who attends school a few blocks away from the attack, fearing her school may have been affected in the immediate fallout. Along the way, Spiegelman notices his fellow New Yorkers taking 52 pictures and hears Nadia’s classmates discussing the attacks with more awe and less terror. He and his wife are eventually reunited with their daughter, drawing the personal overt narrative to a close.

On page 5, a localized narrative begins with commentary on the difference between the effect of the attacks on New Yorkers and on the rest of the country. Spiegelman has a run-in with a homeless Russian woman on page 6, who, rather than cursing him in Russian like he is used to, screams anti- Semitic statements at him, linking the present to his past work on the Maus novels.

After page 5, Spiegelman begins to shift from processing his own trauma and the local trauma of his city to focus on the nationalized trauma and subsequent patriotic nationalism purported by his government, mass media, and other Americans, providing commentary on the situation from personal, local, and American perspectives. He ends the collection of spreads with a recollection of an interview with a media outlet that deemed him “not American enough” and an image of his family, in full Maus style, fleeing the influx of Republicans to New York for the Republican National Convention in 2004.

While the overt narrative does contain a broad sense of the personal, local, and nationalized reactions to the events of 9/11, the implicit and latent narratives provide a more complete view of the complexities and perspectives these reactions represent.

Motif

A motif, or a usually recurring salient thematic element, is a deliberate rhetorical tool used by artist and authors to layer subsequent information, ideas, and themes overtop a more explicitly communicated narrative (“Motif”). Spiegelman’s use of motif in In the Shadow of No Towers pervades the entire comic work, providing the reader with deliberate yet discreet clues to the author’s intended purpose. In order to engage the reader beyond the narrative of the work, Spiegelman uses three main motifs throughout In the Shadow of No Towers: shoes, the towers, and birds.

The first of Spiegelman’s motifs, the shoe, appears throughout all ten pages of the work. Its first appearance occurs in a strip entitled, “Etymological Vaudeville” (1). Illustrating the classic use of the phrase, a bumbling drunk drops one shoe on the floor while getting into bed; suddenly conscious of his sleeping downstairs neighbors, he places the other shoe gently onto the floor. Shortly after, he is woken by shouts of, “Drop the other shoe already so we can sleep!” While Spiegelman does not explicitly explain his other allegorical choices in the work, it is crucial that the reader understand and continue to recognize shoes in each spread; in this effort, Spiegelman illustrates the idiom of “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” Lower on the page, Spiegelman illustrates the “shoe” as a massive brogue with a lit fuse falling from the sky onto screaming 1950s-style characters. In this illustration, Spiegelman recalls the idiom and manufactures a mid-century-esque scene in which the recognizable fear of invasion and chaos of a generation past is coupled with the anxiety and fear of a post-trauma New York: everyone waits in fear of the next disaster.

Shoes continue to appear in the panels that follow. From page 5 onward, cowboy boots represent American nationalism, and can be seen on flag-waving Americans and members of the Bush presidency alike, a nod to Bush’s Texan roots. Page 5’s main illustration, Americans with their heads stuck in the ground (members of the “Ostrich Party”) bears a side note: “Beware of cowboy boots!” next to a boot-clad man with a target painted on his raised behind. Cowboy boots also appear on Spiegelman’s borrowed historical cartoon characters, identifying these characters as representative of Americans. However, Spiegelman separates himself from this crowd in the self-starring strip on page 9, where he makes a blatant point of displaying his loafers–perhaps in this instance boots represent patriotism, and shoes a more anti-establishment lean. On the final page, boots rain down on a crowd of comix characters (including a Maus-style representation of Spiegelman’s family) as the 2004 Republican national convention is held in New York.

The towers themselves are also used as a more on-the-nose motif. The “glowing bones,” as Spiegelman refers to them, are such a symbol of Spiegelman’s personal trauma that they appear on every spread— representative of his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder in the years following the attacks. Spiegelman also references the towers in other iterations. On page 2, his panels literally become towers, shifting in 3D to display their burning edges. At the bottom of the page, Spiegelman employs double-entendre when he writes, “I never loved those arrogant boxes, but now I miss the rascals, icons of a more innocent age,” implying that the nostalgia he feels for drawing comix is paralleled in his emotions toward the towers. The falling of the towers has caused him to raise his pen again, and the dichotomy of loss and gain has carved a rift between his past and present life.

The towers are also metaphors in a few senses. The “glowing bones” of the towers are an anthropomorphic metaphor, representing both a skeletal spectre that haunts him and the embodiment of the death of Americanism— Eric Darton’s biography of the towers describes them as symbolic of a litany of American values behind which every American could stand: achievement, renewal, selfbetterment, and above all, the power of the free market (Darton). To Spiegelman, the “death” of the towers and the subsequent media frenzy and political action indicate the death of an era of unchecked nationalist optimism.

He continues to humanize the towers by representing them as the “Tower Twins,” a parody of the classic comic The Katzenjammer Kids detailed later in this paper, painting the historically terroristic Kids as the victims of manipulative authority figures. This portrayal acts as a referential interpretation of the relationship between civilian New Yorkers and the U.S. government. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, Spiegelman references “the twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima” as humanity’s last great terrorist event, pulling 9/11 away from the sphere of national tragedy and into a universal commentary on the capacity of humans to kill each other en masse. This reference to these specific WWII events hearkens back to his days of illustrating Maus, calling to mind his own personal history as well as the history of the world and America’s role in it.

Spiegelman’s third motif is a bird, used throughout his work, each time with a separate and distinct representative power. His first use of a bird, this time an eagle, appears in the second spread. Spiegelman portrays himself with a bald eagle in an “Uncle Sam” hat tied around his neck, evoking recall of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which the sailor who wears the albatross does so as a sign of suffering and remorse. This use of allegory through the eagle motif casts Spiegelman as the sailor, retelling the tale of the falling towers to a largely indifferent yet fascinated audience.

The eagle appears again on page 4, ridden by a grinning George Bush and a grim Dick Cheney. The former vice president is depicted slicing the bird’s neck with a box cutter, a direct reference to a CNN article from 2001 that controversially claimed hijackers used box cutters to attack airplane passengers and crew. By placing this particular act of supposed terrorism (the box cutter story has never been supported or proven by any evidence) in the elected hands of the government, Spiegelman inserts an implicit narrative into the spread—that of an antagonist government utilizing news media to appear victimized at the expense and victimization of its national constituency. The eagle asks, “Why do they hate us? Why???” and from the familiar, haggard expression on its face, the reader can infer that this eagle represents Spiegelman himself, victimized by his own government. Red “Republican” eagles appear alongside blue “Democratic” doves and red angels of death on page 7—while Spiegelman identifies with neither party, he clearly believes Democrats to be more passive, peaceful political agents and Republicans aggressive and deadly.

Spiegelman also employs other symbolic species of birds. The “Ostrich Party” on page 5 depicts Americans “sticking their heads in the ground,” neither Republican nor Democrat but a “third party” that “actually represents us.” Page 4 features a vulture on the back of a photographer as he shouts, “Watch the birdy!” at the flaming towers, referencing the overt narrative of the first five pages—his confusion and dismay at seeing amateur and professional photographers picking at the remains of the falling towers. A ubiquitously omnipresent pigeon, clearly representative of local New Yorkers, appears on page 9 to illustrate the stupefaction of New Yorkers after the attacks. On pages 2 and 9, Spiegelman quotes Chicken Little—“The sky is falling!”— in an attempt to wake those around him to the daily terror he perceives thanks to posttraumatic stress disorder. Due to their prevalence, the reader can go so far as to assume that perhaps the presence of birds in Spiegelman’s work is prompted by the nickname given to airplanes, acting as an attempted shifting of blame from himself—the wearer of the albatross—to the real perpetrators. Stylistic Choice According to comic artist, analyst, and author Scott McCloud, there are five arenas in which an artist can make decisions that will affect the way a comic story is understood: moment, frame, imagery, word, and flow.

The first arena is moment. An artist shows the moments he believes to be the most important in a story–a concept that seems obvious, but is intentional in subliminally conveying what objects and ideas are (and are not) important. For instance, Spiegelman obscures some panels in the page 3 spread with overlaid illustrations of postcards and propaganda. Not only do these overlays enrich the storyline with another layer of detail, but their presence between the reader and the story heighten the speed and frantic feeling of the page, eliciting similar feelings in the witness of the story as those likely felt by the author and his wife as they searched for their daughter.

The author’s choice of frame is also important. Spiegelman takes more license with his frames in this work than in previous works like Maus, superimposing one strip atop another, using strips as borders for the main artistic “event,” and overlapping strips in order to partially or fully obscure certain moments. One example of this can be found on page 4 of the graphic novel. Spiegelman notes the abundance of photography by others on the day of the attacks, and narrates his ongoing search for his daughter in “photos” as well, illustrating in a softer, more lifelike style that portrays Spiegelman’s characters as they are rather than as caricatures of themselves; for a moment, pulling the narration from the arena of comix and into the arena of storytelling. The panels show only vital moments, snapshots which condense the entire experience to just a few seconds. The layout of the photographic panels is scattered, evoking the chaos and surrealism of the experience.

Spiegelman carefully chooses his imagery to fit the intended mood of his commentary. While he often resurrects characters from Maus to portray himself and his family, he also dabbles in surrealism and hyperrealism to evoke shock and empathy from the witness. Pages 6, 7, and 8 all include detailed, artistic parodies of classic 1960’s and 1970’s underground comic styles, including highly disturbing, complex imagery and symbolism of death, pain, and anarchy. He also portrays characters in his story as characters borrowed from classic and retrospective comics and graphic novels, a stylistic choice discussed at greater length later in this paper. One unique example, however, comes from page 7 of the novel. Spiegelman portrays the bipartisanship of the nation as well as his blatant disgust and distrust towards the executive branch of government at the time through his illustration of the entire spread in shades of red and blue, with only himself and a few “extras” he relates to drawn in grayscale.

Imagery in the form of non-sequitur is also used to convey a sense of confusion and disarray in Spiegelman’s own mind. On page 9, Spiegelman includes a self-portrayal strip. In each panel, Spiegelman’s body, head, or hands are replaced by objects in the room around him, including his cat, the lampshade, his own foot, and finally, a full transformation to the mouse from Maus.

When he is not using the vernacular of a borrowed comic, Spiegelman’s voice throughout In the Shadow of No Towers is his own. It appears as both expository narration within panels as well as in dialogue. Though much of the commentary and story is written in first person, Spiegelman often switches to third-person-omniscient to give the story more of a “newsroom” feel, heightening the drama and playing on the reader’s recall of storytelling modes used by news sources of the time. Page 6 of the graphic novel juxtaposes Spiegelman narrating himself as The Falling Man on the left hand side of the spread against his first-person narrative of his encounters with the Russian homeless woman. The choice is effective in separating commentary from active storyline by contrasting present, reflective omniscient narration with thematic dialogue.

Spiegelman’s choice of flow is the final arena in which he can make stylistic choices to affect the story. He uses flow in a variety of ways to convey separate emotions and settings. Where the content is technical and complex (maps, intricate step-by-step retellings of the tragedy, complex metaphor), flow from panel to panel is largely uninterrupted. Spiegelman also uses a simple, left-to-right, top-tobottom flow when artistic differences between panels hold an important storytelling cue. For instance, Spiegelman’s commentary on the lower Manhattan air quality post-attacks is positioned around the point in the story when he and his wife are running to their daughter’s school– his smoking habit inhibiting his progress. He intertwines the “real-time” story with a commentary on air quality, narrated by his own character from the Maus novel. As the panels progress, the cigarette smoke surrounding the character gets thicker and the narration more agitated. Spiegelman’s flow is more complex when he includes political commentary more heavily. On page 5, the flow of panels progresses across the page from left to right, then down the left side. The background image from page 4 is superimposed on the image of the glowing towers, and the reader is given a cue to the direction of flow by the increasing blurriness of the two joined images.

Reference to Nostalgic/ Historic Comix: Race

Spiegelman’s choice of certain referenced comix in In the Shadow of No Towers is deliberate in charging his panels with racial strife. As the son of two Holocaust survivors and as a Jew living in New York, his exposure to and experience with racial issues runs deep. He is able to process certain aspects of his city and nation’s grieving process through a racially charged lens, offering a new approach to the idea of Americanism and patriotism after the attacks.

To demonstrate and cultivate the overarching theme of racial terror, profiling, and fear, Spiegelman chooses to use Rudolph Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids as a running theme and operative metaphor for the attacks, towers, and government response. In their first appearance in Spiegelman’s novel, the usually terroristic Kids wear the Towers as hats, and, rather than causing mischief, are the victims of it. The Kids’ grandfather and parents continue to ignore (and sometimes, exacerbate) the flames shooting from their children until at one point both children are doused in oil and pesticides in their grandfather’s war on the Iraknid. Grandfather is routinely portrayed as Uncle Sam, though he retains the German accent of the original character—an offhand gesture toward villains from past Spiegelman works.

Another racially charged work, Happy Hooligan, features Spiegelman himself as Happy in his own parodied version. Happy, an “Irish tramp…an eternal loser with a heart of gold” epitomizes class and racial tensions of the day, satirizing them in a way that appealed to lower-class immigrant families (Sabin). The plate included in Spiegelman’s appendix utilizes symbolism and storyline with an eerie connection to the 9/11 attacks. Happy is asked to dress as an Arab, but when his friends point him out and the camel recognizes him to be an imposter, he is thrown into a circus strongman rehearsal. The final panel shows a confused Happy being asked by a lawyer which of the strongmen “dropped a weight on him.” The symbols—of imposters, legality, and retaliation via displaced violence—resonate with those who share Spiegelman’s malcontent. In post-9/11 America, the dual “weights” of responsibility and allegiance were dropped on racial relations, especially between Americans of Arab descent and other Americans. Grewal’s 2010 article on racial profiling after 9/11 covers the gendering and racialization of Muslims in the media after 9/11, exploring the trope of the “Muslim male” as representative of an entire race and religion (Grewal). Just as Happy is portrayed clad in a turban and beard in the historic strip, Spiegelman features the representation throughout his parodies, drawing the turban and beard on characters to indicate their applied role as “terrorist”— even when the character is Spigelman’s own wife.

Reference to Historic/ Nostalgic Comix: Politics and Culture

Spiegelman’s choice of referential comics is an exercise in self-portrait as much as it is a political and cultural commentary. His choices—Krazy Kat, Bringing Up Father, and Mr. Natural (as well as 1970’s comic style)—carry symbolically significant cultural weight. In the first instance, the love triangle of Ignatz the mouse, Kat, and Offissa Pup is utilized to show the relationship of the displaced homeless, the police, and New Yorkers. Spiegelman portrays himself as both his character from Maus and Kat, symbolically carrying the burden of the towers as individual bricks. Like Ignatz, he is both a perpetrator and prisoner of aggression. Spiegelman also appears as the clueless immigrant patriarch from Bringing Up Father, who, in the appended plate, props up the leaning tower of Piza with a pile of scrap wood—more allegorical reference to U.S. involvement in the “falling tower” of Middle-Eastern tension.

Spiegelman also borrows thematic elements from comix culture not included in the appendix of In the Shadow of No Towers. As Mad magazine first featured Maus as well as some of his other early works, Spiegelman’s connection to the edgy, symbol-ridden style of the underground comic genre is evident in his illustrative choices. The artist invokes the angst and rage of the age in his final four spreads. Spiegelman uses both the iconic 1970 Mr. Natural cover art from the comic of the same name on page 10 as well as on his daughter’s t-shirt on pages 4 and 10—he comments on the destruction of innocence through the attacks by pairing such a lurid, violent comic with his own daughter. The simple illustration of a grinning Mr. Natural bears the caption, “The entire universe is insane!”—an apt observation made especially obvious for the final panels of the work.

Spiegelman’s anti-government tendencies align with his disdain for media manipulation, as shown on pages 1 and 2 of his graphic novel. He comments that on television, the towers aren’t any bigger than the host’s head, but logos are huge—ending the criticism with the comment, “it’s a medium almost as well suited as comics for dealing in abstractions.” Analyses of terrorism and media coverage concur. Psychologists Li, Quiong, and Brewer define and delineate the differences between patriotism and nationalism and their opposites, as the world after 9/11 is highly polarized. Their paper finds that “love of patriotism” also tends to be construed with attitudes, feelings, or actions of what one could call “anti-other,” which expresses that a love for one’s own nation constitutes a disdain for other nations (Li and Brewer). Spiegelman’s rejection of this line of thinking expresses his wish for the terror attack to be construed as a crime against humanity rather than a political mode of inciting nationalistic feelings in the American public.

Spiegelman explores the idea of displacement— of anger, of terror, of retaliation—on page 9. In an obvious metaphor. he likens the replacement of the family cat with the U.S.’s war in Iraq (a “war on terror” that Spiegelman believes demolished a country rather than the terrorism thought to reside there). He continues to explore the theme, noting the New York Times’ apology letter for minor journalistic errors as they continued to print military speculation as fact, and rampant financial sector crimes for which Martha Stewart was made a martyr. The Happy Hooligan comic in the appendix, explained earlier in this paper, as well as Douglas Kellner’s 2004 paper on media manipulation explore the idea of political propaganda in the form (and under the guise) of news media (Kellner). This media hijacking by the party in power as well as the fundamentalist, dichotomized storylines it spread played into the helplessness of Americans in a post-terror state.

Concluding Remarks

Because it explores an event so complex and intrinsic to 21st century American identity, the purposes of the graphic novel are many. As a victim himself, In the Shadow of No Towers provides its author with the mode and opportunity to heal and process his own personal trauma. While he may never forget the “glowing bones,” creating the graphic novel transformed the fallout of terrorism into an expression of the most American value of all—freedom of speech and of expression. In creating, reading and referencing his favorite historic comix, he finds peace in a personal, local, and national sense.

The work also gives Spiegelman a voice—his experience with the reach and impact of Maus and his local celebrity status provide him a means of reaching the greater public with a story untold in the mass media. The work solidifies his identification as an American—not from his patriotism nor from his love of nation, but from the creative and radical use of his First Amendment rights.

For the reader who can remember 9/11, the work becomes a new lens through which to view the tragedy and in turn a new basis for discussion—for the reader who cannot, it acts as a supplementary education and testament to the many voices of America. For the analyst, it provides an exercise in careful study of stylistic themes, quick recognition of parallels, and immersion in a complex melding of artistic and textual language. In the Shadow of No Towers explores without explanation, illustrates without advertising, and censures without apology—it is an iconic and essential facet of the American 9/11 narrative.

Works Cited

Alsultany, Evelyn. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11. New York UP, 2012.

Boettcher, Mike. “Box Cutters Found on Other September 11 Flights.” CNN, 24 September 2001.

Darton, Eric. Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center. Basic Books, 2011.

Grewal, Inderpal. “Transnational America: race, gender and citizenship after 9/11.” Social Identities, 2010, pp. 535-561.

Kellner, Douglas. “9/11, spectacles of terror, and media manipulation.” Critical Discourse Studies, 2004, pp. 41-64.

Li, Qiong and Marilynn B. Brewer. “What Does It Mean to Be an American? Patriotism, Nationalism, and American Identity After 9/11.”Political Psychology, 2004, pp. 727-739.

McCloud, Scott. Making Comics. Harper-Collins, 2006.

“Motif.” Merriam-Webster.com. Accessed 24 November 2016.

Powell, Kimberly A. “Framing Islam: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of Terrorism Since 9/11.” Communication Studies, 2011, pp. 90-112.

Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels. Phaidon, 1996.

Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. Random House, 2004.