Cartoonist Spiegelman takes on Sept. 11
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-10-05 09:31

 The man who turned the pain of the Holocaust into a Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book novel has returned to serious cartooning with a controversial book on the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath.

 Art Spiegelman drew Jews as mice and Germans as cats in telling his family history in the black-and-white "Maus," which won a special Pulitzer in 1992.

 It took another glimpse of the apocalypse to send Spiegelman back to making serious comics with "In the Shadows of No Towers", a colourful 38-page, broadsheet-sized board book that paints the Bush administration as the villain.

 Spiegelman, a chain-smoking, balding and bespectacled, quintessentially obsessive New Yorker, set out to document his own experiences of Sept. 11, 2001, but became enraged at the ensuing US-led war on Iraq and a "hijacking that was hijacked".

 "These pages were never meant to be the overarching final word on what we had all lived through," Spiegelman told Reuters at his cluttered Soho studio less than a mile (1.6 km) from Ground Zero.

 "These were bulletins and dispatches from the war zone of the inside of my head, from the rubble inside my head."

 His messages are sometimes delivered by comic characters of the past, including the Katzenjammer Kids, wearing flaming towers on their heads like hats.

 The top of one page features President George W. Bush riding behind Vice President Dick Cheney on the back of a bald eagle with Bush saying, "Let's roll," as Cheney uses a box cutter to slit the throat of the bird, who cries, "Why do they hate us? Why???"

 Spiegelman was on the street in his downtown neighbourhood when the first hijacked airliner hit the World Trade Center.

 "I really did feel that I was going to die, at first that day and then soon thereafter," said Spiegelman, 56.

 He and his wife raced to snatch their daughter from her school at the foot of the burning skyscrapers, where nearly 2,800 people died. Together, they witnessed the collapse of the north tower and the black cloud that filled the streets.

 His examination of the disastrous day and the fall-out from the attacks is dizzying -- at times angry, neurotic, ghoulish, comic and ultimately political.

 "I was galvanised by Sept. 11," said Spiegelman, who days after the attacks created a memorably mournful black-on-black New Yorker magazine cover of the Twin Towers that is used for the cover of the book.

 "There's a very strong political dimension on all the pages as my project changed from being personally anecdotal to responding to a hijacking that was hijacked by America" to pursue "an agenda that was in place when the Bush cabal took over."

 His gut-wrenching reaction to Sept. 11 led him to leave a 10-year stint as a consulting editor at the New Yorker, where he had contributed covers, illustrations and essays.

 Spiegelman said he had grown restless at the magazine, where "I felt like a farmer being paid to not grow wheat," as he cashed pay cheques for far less labour-intensive work than is required to combine pictures and words in his comics.

 He proposed doing a cartoon series about Sept. 11 but found no takers in the mainstream US media during the months following the attacks, including the New Yorker.

 "It's really hard to shriek that the sky is falling and keep your monocle in place," he joked in reference to the dandy that serves as the high-brow magazine's logo.

 Spiegelman found a place for his panels in European papers and in the small-circulation English-language edition of the Yiddish newspaper, the Forward.

 He introduces his 9/11 series with an essay. Then comes another essay on the early history of newspaper comics followed by reproductions of seven classic comics that echo themes related to Sept. 11.

 EPHEMERA

 Spiegelman said the old comics inspired and motivated him.

 "They have the magic of being able to propel you back into another time," he said, about the art form "made on paper that would be used to wrap fish later. Their vitality, their reflection of and channelling of the day around them was very vital to me when I didn't think anything was going to last.

 "I made something that was ephemeral. I made it about something that looked like it was going to last forever, those pyramid-like towers. The towers proved to be ephemeral. Ephemera for me proved to be more monumental that I originally had thought."

 The book inspires love-it or hate-it reactions.

 Newsweek magazine called it "a crazy quilt of cartoons, real-life headlines, humour and horror," and "a superb job of capturing the tragic absurdity of life in New York City on 9/11 and for months thereafter."

 Time magazine said Spiegelman "loses all sense of perspective" and ripped him for describing himself in the book as "equally terrorised" by al Qaeda and by his own government.

 Noting the book's image of a poster, "MISSING, A. SPIEGELMAN'S BRAIN last seen in Lower Manhattan, mid-September 2001," Time said "Let's hope somebody finds Spiegelman's brain soon."

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