It is the intimate story of one family trying to cope. It is a raving rant about the after effects of the violence and its repercussions throughout the world at large, and the smaller interior world of the author's psyche. It is an extremely personal memoir of the attacks on the WTC, which Spiegelman and his family witnessed at close range. This unusual hybrid book, 42 oversized pages printed on heavy card stock, is a combination of comic book illustrations and prose. They lived in the towers' shadow, in TriBeca, and their daughter was in school that morning - a school located at Ground Zero - a tizzy producing experience if there ever was one!! It's a trait that leaves one ill-equipped for coping when the sky actually falls." And the sky literally fell on the author and his family that day. Minor mishaps - a clogged drain, running late for an appointment - send me into a sky-is-falling tizzy.
Ironically, his parents taught him at an early age to "always keep my bags packed." He writes in the book's Introduction, an extraordinary essay, "I tend to be easily unhinged. Spiegelman is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Maus, where he used the medium of comic strips to portray the Holocaust, his parents' experience as survivors of Auschwitz, and his own experience as a child of Holocaust victims. There is no more eloquent description to mark absence, to recall violence and infamy, than the cover picture of these two shadows. For days, weeks, months after September 11, I saw, in my minds eye, almost exactly the same image portrayed on the cover of In The Shadow Of No Towers - darkest black shadows of the two landmarks against a night sky - emptiness during the daylight. Even now, three years after 9/11, I sometimes forget and look towards the southwest, expecting to see the buildings' lights.
With my lousy sense of direction, I always knew where I was by marking my location in relation to the two buildings, soaring skyward, so visible above everything else. As a Manhattanite, the World Trade Center's twin towers used to be my New York City lodestone. I was deeply moved by Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow Of No Towers before I even opened the book.
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