Ashes in the Gutter: 9/11 and the Serialization of Memory in DC Comics' Human Target
[T]he serial packaging of a long-form comic lends certain structural and design elements that can be used to reinforce the shape and continuity of an overarching story.
–Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature
Serialized monthly from August through October, 2003, "The Unshredded Man"—written by Peter Milligan with art by Javier Pulido—is a two-part storyline from the short-lived Human Target series published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. The story begins at the end of issue #1 of the series, with a two-page prelude involving an almost mind-numbing paradox: a living dead man recalling the moment of his own demise. "I remember the day I died" is the prelude's first caption, overlaying a vertical panel focused on an average looking, middle-class man, his eyes closed, kissing a woman on the cheek.1 With each successive panel on this page (eight in all), we follow the unnamed man on his way to work, and each panel contains a similar intermixture of mundane visuals and surreal ruminations. The juxtapositions are stark: as the man waves goodbye to his smiling wife and two sons, we read, "If I'd known I'd be dying that day I'd have said something more to Helen and the kids"; as the man's blank face and unassuming frame are crowded on the subway, we learn that "the idea of dying, of escaping exposure, shame and prison had been on my mind for some time." Through the caption boxes it becomes apparent that the unnamed man has been involved in questionable business practices that could land him in jail; feeling "the noose tightening," he recalls walking the streets, "trying to figure a way [End Page 208] out of the hole I was in." The panels accumulate in rapid succession, shrinking in size and becoming increasingly suggestive of claustrophobia—in panel 7 the unnamed man finds those around him on the teeming street pointing to the sky; panel 8 tightens on his eyes, which are widening in alarm. Turning the page, the mundane and the surreal finally coalesce with horrifying clarity (see Figure 1): "Of course I remember the day I died," reads the caption, "The whole world remembers" (34).
With this call to remember, overlaying an image representing a world at the threshold of epochal change, the prelude ends. The Twin Towers dominate the splash page, their immensity functioning as a reminder of both their seeming invincibility in the face of the inescapable collision, but also of what we know will be the magnitude of their fall. Pulido renders the towers even more imposing by rotating his image of the skyline slightly off the perpendicular, a move that gives him more room to stretch the towers diagonally across the page, helping him capture a sense of the moment's surrealness. The inherent stasis of the comic-book page lends the image an eerie stillness: we know what happens next—what must happen next—but the inevitable is held off, at least until the story's promised continuation "Next [Issue]."
The striking splash page immediately amplifies and complicates the prelude's treatment of memory. Pulido's lines are light and economical, tending more towards iconic representation than realism, but the moment being depicted can nevertheless be instantly decoded and contextualized as the morning of September 11, 2001. Indeed, how could it be anything else? As the narrator says, "The whole world remembers," and the page's power stems in large part from the indelibility of the horrific images from that day. Word and image thus combine to tease at the line between fiction and reality: "reading" the splash page means identifying it as a re-imagining of a real-world event. Put another way, the...
