I had some time and a little spare cash today, so I went out and picked up Art Spiegelman's latest. It's not for everyone -- as you can tell from the digital excerpt below, it's pretty wildly partisan. But I think -- for a large segment of us, anyway -- In the Shadow of No Towers pretty closely expresses what we feel on this anniversary of the Sept. 11th tragedy: a creeping, shaking horror both at what happened on that day and at what has happened since.

It'll be compared to Maus, of course, and it shouldn't be. This is a very different work. Maus was an interested-but-dispassionate reflection on his father's horror; In the Shadow of No Towers is a reflection on Spiegelman's own. With very little temporal remove from the events of that day three years ago, In the Shadow of No Towers doesn't even try to wrap its head around what happened. All it can do is talk. This is raw emotion, fashioned into art.

Even the book's latter half -- an unexpected diversion into the early history of the comic form, complete with full-color reproductions -- strikes a moving and disturbingly eerie chord. It's actually somewhat hard to believe that Spiegelman didn't create these images himself, post-9/11. But he didn't; these images always been there, waiting for us to rediscover them and imbue them with new meaning.

It's almost enough to make you believe in an collective, psychic unconscious -- that somehow, on some preconscious level, we all always knew that something like this would someday happen.

There's something to see here -- check it out next time you're in Borders. This is a book, I think, that people will remember.

And for locals, of course, mine is available for loan.



UPDATE: I wound up having more to say about 9/11 than I wanted over on my other blog.