Discourse Chronicle

Spiegelman’s stories and artwork are part confessional and part societal commentary, part humor and part nightmare. He doesn’t set his cartoons and graphic novels in a fantasy world in order to fly his theories and messages in under our conscious radar.

Instead, he forces us to examine the very real world we live in by baring his own animated soul on small rectangular sheets of paper. In doing so, he packs a plane full of sweaty dynamite and aims it directly between your eyes.

[…]

Equally as engaging, if not quite as hauntingly fully realized, Spiegelman’s 2004 series of political cartoons, “In the Shadow of No Towers,” was an an angry emotional and intellectual reaction to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

By offering an intensely personal account of his and his family’s experiences during and following the collapse of the towers, he simultaneously gives us the most intimate view we’ve had of the tragedy, but also the least pretentious, most scathing critique of the Bush administration’s opportunistic response.

The resulting cartoons were turned away by every mainstream publication in our country, eventually appearing in the Jewish Daily Forward and several European magazines. Fortunately for us, the pages were collected into a hard-bound addition that communicates perfectly one man’s rage, astonishment and sense of loss in the wake of a galvanizing act of terrorism.

[Ryan Malphurs and Jennifer Hayley are two rhetoric colleagues from the English department who research 9/11 and terrorism. Jen is using Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers in her current project. The article above places that collection of political cartoons into perspective with Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Spiegelman is speaking at the University of Oregon on February 27, 2006. BK]

category: Comics, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics