Twenty-five years ago, on a Tuesday morning, cartoonist Art Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly, the art editor for theNew Yorker, were outside their Soho apartment when they saw the face of a nearby woman turn the color of ash. She was watching a plane fly into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
The result, three years later in 2004, was Spiegelman’s book In the Shadow of No Towers. The oversized collection of comics, told in the style and format of vintage Sunday newspaper comic strips, chronicled Spiegelman’s emotional and political response to the tragedy of September 11, 2001. This September, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Pantheon issued a new edition of Spiegelman’s book, and the artist marked the occasion with a talk at the Brooklyn Public Library looking back on how both he and the nation have changed.
Before there was a book, there was a New Yorkercover. As the magazine prepared to run its first cover following the 9/11 attacks, Mouly grappled with how to portray the enormity of the tragedy. Meanwhile, Spiegelman had been at work on an art piece of his own, depicting everyday life on a September morning but with the Twin Towers covered by a dark funeral shroud. But as he told the crowd during his conversation with journalist Lawrence Wechsler on September 23 at BPL, both he and Mouly knew it wasn’t enough for the moment.
“I was obsessed with trying to get it right even after Francois said, ‘It’s not working,’ Spiegelman told the audience.
Back at the New Yorker, Mouly wanted to run acover of solid black to express the powerlessness of images. Spiegelman suggested combining her idea with his own concept of the shrouded towers—a black-on-black image that would suggest the looming figures no longer there.
The famous cover art that resulted was Mouly’s own creation, but when her New Yorker editor David Remnick asked who had done it, she named Spiegelman instead, “partly because [we had] no history of shared credit,” Mouly told PW.
The iconic image would go on to become the cover of In the Shadow of No Towers,but for years, few would realize it was not the work of Spiegelman alone. Now, Mouly said, she is pleased to “straighten out the record.” Spiegelman, meanwhile, was finding inspiration in a different form.
‘In America, nobody wanted it’
Spiegelman soon found comfort in the familiar realm of comics—in particular, the vintage broadsheet pages of turn-of-the-century newspaper strips. “The only thing I could do…was hide out in comics,” Spiegelman said during the Q&A. “And pretty soon the ghosts who were disinterred from the towers were the comic strip characters from the beginning of the century.”
He conceptualized a series of imitation Sunday newspaper strips: each drawn in the style and format of newspaper pages of old, but with contents reflecting Spiegelman’s own chaotic, mournful, and increasingly angry response to the events around him.
But Spiegelman’s politics posed a serious obstacle to publication. The artist’s opinion of America on the world stage was deeply ambivalent, and he was fiercely critical of the increasingly militant Bush administration. At the Q&A, he pointed to one page in particular that set American publications on edge: a drawing of Spiegelman (depicted as his avatar in Maus) napping at his desk while George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden face off in front of him. The panel reads, “EQUALLY TERRORIZED BY AL-QUAEDA AND HIS OWN GOVERNMENT.”
“In America, nobody wanted it except, God bless them, [the Jewish newspaper] theForward,” Spiegelman said. Instead, he first found a home in a number of European publications that he dubbed his own “coalition of the willing.” By 2004, when he finished the series, the mood in the U.S.had begun to change: Spiegelman’s longtime publishers at Pantheon were ready to collect the oversized strips into book form for a domestic audience. A quarter-century later, the publisher hasn’t shied away from the implications of Spiegelman’s politics.
For Denise Oswald, VP and editor in chief of Pantheon Books, the politics of Spiegelman’s graphic novel are intrinsic to its legacy.
“The work of Shadow was never solely about commemorating 9/11 as a collective moment for New York, but rather about confronting what the United States unleashed upon the world, and upon itself, in New York’s name,” Oswald told PW.
Though the book’s politics haven’t changed, a few things in the new edition have. For one thing, it’s physically smaller: as Spiegelman told PW, “People weren’t happy about having to take up table space for it back in the day.” But he also says it was appropriate for the book’s last comic, which concludes, “The Towers have come to loom far larger than life…but they seem to get smaller every day…Happy Anniversary.”
So he’s also included an anniversary present of sorts: a cover sticker ironically depicting the burning towers as candles on a birthday cake. The sticker marks Spiegelman’s first use of AI-generated artwork. “I wanted it to look like an old engraving, and I was lazy,” he told PW. “I said, let’s do it with AI and see what happens.” Mouly lent a hand with the prompts: “She’s good at Claude whispering,” Spiegelman said.
Looking back, Spiegelman is struck by the way the book captured the moments just after a crisis that would otherwise have vanished with time.
“It’s kind of interesting, because now it’s more like a diary,” he said. “There are a lot of little anecdotes that are very specific, and are not about world events. It makes it feel real.”
Mouly, too, is pleased to see this memorial come back into the public eye. “The past is not dead,” she told PW. “It is very much living with us. And until we understand this, it’s very hard to not feel lost.”
