Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers

Art Spiegelman is one of the most famous—if not the most famous—living cartoonists in the world. Born in Sweden in 1948 to Polish Holocaust survivor parents, Spiegelman published his own magazine, Blasé, 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 Francisco's 1970s underground comics (or "comix") scene, which established comics nationwide as avant-garde and for adults—and adult intellectuals at that—Spiegelman distinguished himself by rigorously exploring the medium's 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 "Don't 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 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, Françoise Mouly, founded RAW, a magazine they initially self-published in their SoHo loft. The sophistication, daring, and lavish production in RAW—which sold out all of its print runs—suggested 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 Survivor's 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 world's 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 Art's father Vladek Spiegelman's experience in WWII, as well the son's struggle to solicit and record his father's 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.

Spiegelman's next book of comics—after an interval of about ten years, during which he was a staff artist for the New Yorker—is 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...