The Art of Falling: A Study of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers

When you’re at the top, what else do you have left to experience but a great falling, a descent into the depths of madness and despair from never being able to truly reclaim a throne once mounted? Art Spiegelman is a pioneer of underground comics, taking advantage of his interest in alternative narratology to create unorthodox representations of tragic and traumatic events, and in 1992, “he won a Pulitzer for ‘Maus,’ his holocaust in the medium of comics” (Hajdu 1). In the Shadows of No Towers seems to reflect a recurring metaphorical theme of falling, from the memoir of the day’s events witnessed by Spiegelman himself, the falling towers, the fall of the city in the wake of such a catastrophic event, the fall of the seemingly invulnerable, yet characteristically ephemeral ideas of democracy and peace in a twisted governmental hegemony, and the fall of Art himself, “falling through the holes in his head” (Spiegleman 6), simply “waiting for that other shoe to drop” (1).

In the Shadows is Art’s way of dealing with the travesty of 9/11, trying to reconstruct (or perhaps restructure) and confront the horrors of not knowing whether his child, who just started high school next to the where the towers were falling, was going to live or not, running to the school that was engulfed in smoke. It is his way of representing the disintegrating and smoldering skeletons of what were once iconic buildings of New York, and the panic and anxiety he felt for the town he once considered himself only to be a resident of instead of Home. Unlike Maus, the events in No Towers in not necessarily chronological; he portrays the events as they are traumatized in his mind, in fragments and whirls, and construes them into what feels like a newspaper filled with advertisements and dissociated strips. This is a form of reflection, showing how Art views the world of Pre-9/11 as a much more iconic ad idealistic America. In the post-event Manhattan, Spiegleman recalls many poetry reading on the street, as well as musicians musing the public trying to deal with a slew of emotions, but the only form of art that could “get past [his] defenses and flood [his] eyes and brain with something other than images of burning towers” (11) was 20th century art. He sees the transparent nature of political cartoons as supposedly having a shelf life shorter than anything else in the world, yet these images seemed to him to speak to the current events more predominantly and relevant than any other media. The nature of the subjective and hermeneutic comic allows it transcend common and popular notions of fixated time and historical and social context. This is why he not only included these outdated comics at the end of his storyboard but also implements the styles and characters of these old scenes to his current inner and outer turmoil in almost every page. The pain and tragedy that is felt by Art in the 21st century are not new; it is a perpetuation of the feelings that have been accumulating and accruing in man for many generations. The comic provides a medium that allows the cartoonist to explore abstract and concrete ideas within an increasingly visual and literate culture. The nostalgia he feels for the past may strengthen the notion that Art feels the inevitable march towards destruction, the falling of institutions, buildings, and humans, simply waiting for the shoe, the event that will finally bring some resolution to his miserable situation of being torn between his hatred of governmental administration and love for New York.

Throughout the entire piece, Spiegelman chooses to expand on topics that have earned other comic artists exile, imprisonment, and hostile critique from their social spheres. He often alludes to the political power of the Bush administration as a sort of evil and manipulative entity. In the allusion to 19th and 20th-century historical political cartoons, Spiegelman criticizes the current political sphere in a time where other comics avoided touching on topics like these. This is perhaps the reason why only one American Newsprint decided to run In the Shadows of No Towers, and why it was also fairly popular in the circuitry of newspapers in England, France and Italy, as the concepts of demonizing United States leaders is a common conception of American government. Spiegelman satirizes modern America and our leaders by taking old comic strips and reinventing and remodeling the ideas they were communicating to fit within our cultural sphere. The intriguing aspect of the specific satire that he chooses is that a lot of the themes of the past are still relevant today. His revitalization is remnant of the consolidation he found in the critiques of early political cartoonists. The artists would put a lot of quality work into their materials that would be outdated the next week, or sometimes even the next day, with the next hottest thing off the press, being demoted to the trash bin or used to wrap fish. And yet there was still a strong presence of sustainability and connectivity that soothed Art in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in these timelessly relevant short-lived masterpieces.

In the first issue, the extended metaphor of waiting for the other shoe to drop is introduced. In the cartoon, a man is about to go to bed, and when he takes off his first shoe, it plops loudly on the ground. With his second, he slowly and gently sets in on the floor. Later that night, after he had already fallen asleep, he is awoken by slander from neighbors that live downstairs, waiting for his other shoe to drop so they may sleep as well. The original idea expressed by the idiom entails that waiting for the other shoe to drop is someone is waiting for an inevitable conclusion or next step. Spiegelman repeats this theme throughout his story. With his daughter, he is skeptical about letting her go back to the high school that was almost collapsed by the plane attacks because he felt that another incident could occur at any time. He is also unsure of his future, often feeling like he will die. During the attacks, he thought his life was going to end on that unfortunate evening, which showed on his face, frightening his children. In the scene where he is a smoking mouse, the panels fill up with more and more smoke, alluding to the polluted air that he protests the government is skewing the facts about. He says he is unsure if he will ever even live long enough to die from all the cigarettes he smokes, or if the shoe will drop first.

This idea of waiting for the shoe to drop is linked with the recurring theme of falling. As the towers outlines slowly disintegrated, so did America and the ideas of peace and democracy. Art notes that even though he searched for answers to what happened, when the old lady on the street was yelling racial slurs at him, combined with the Arab Americans accusing the Jews of perpetrating the attack on the towers, did he finally end his conspiratorial search for the truth about how much the American government knew about the attacks beforehand. He concluded that the end was nigh when the government immediately instrumentalized the attack for their own agenda (Spiegelman, i). This marks the fall of America and any hope for the future. The first issue also has a three panel strip where Americans are watching the attacks happen on TV, and they are forever changed physically and emotionally by the event, symbolizing a sort of “loss of innocence,” and inability to ever return to a normal state of being, which is why the first issue is entitled “The New Normal” (1). There is also a vague repetition of the phrase “the sky is falling” (ii). Spiegelman was a bit dumbfounded at the realization of things that seems so concrete were actually quite ephemeral and transient. The sky falling is a stylized representation of how democracy, peace, justice, the citizens, and even the towers crumble, some of the foundational elements of human existence. The sky is everything he once held to be almost invincible, now falling, forever. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush riding on top of the giant eagle, with Cheney holding a box cutter and slitting the eagles throat is a great example of the sky falling, and how our freedom and sense of justice is being mutilated by the “unelected government” (7) referring to the loss of Bush in the actual vote and his win by electoral college. The famous image of the falling man is mentioned on page 6,but Art puts himself and many other Manhattan occupants in the same position, saying he is falling through the holes in his head, unsure of whether they were there from before the attacks or not. He is slowly losing his sanity, not necessarily because of the events that occurred, but in part because of the way people reacted to the situation; their lack of anger and their patriotic support for an administration that is crumbling our government.

The first issue also contains a three-panel piece that offers a skeptical view of the media and how it portrays the falling of the towers that he juxtaposes with his actual experiences of being at Ground Zero on the day of judgment. He got to experience the scene “unmediated,” where most of the country and world only saw what was portrayed on the television, a medium for logos, “almost as well suited as comics for dealing with abstractions” (1). A dashed line is drawn across the three panels and ends at a plane crashing into the television where Spiegelman is watching with his infamous cigarette, what I believe to be a comment of how 9/11 became a logo for an agenda to invade other countries, whether perpetuated or simply taken advantage of. The real terrorists are those who used the death of millions to persuade the public to back a war in the Middle East where Warmongers and Oil lobbyists would gain monetary fortunes from. There are two towers on each side of the page, displayed with a glowing orange to represent the image that was burned into Spiegelman's psyche, a visual mark of his post-traumatic stress. In the middle is a giant circle. A foot looms overhead of a scared crowd of new Yorkers, looming building saturated with bright oranges and reds with a yellow sky, to symbolize burning and smoldering. The foot is the recurring theme of waiting for calamity to inevitably follow, possible connecting with his last sentence saying he would “feel like such a jerk if a new disaster would strike while [he is] still chipping away at the last one” (1). The caption under the foot is also a recurring theme of distorted product placement and advertisement to satirize consumerism and American’s desire for materialistic goods that detract us away from what is truly happening in our world, and even in our own states and neighborhoods.

In the second issue of In the Shadow of No Towers, the first strip is depicting Spiegelman with an albatross tied to his neck, saying he is doomed to repeat the story of 9/11 to whoever will listen, a comment on how the horrors of the even are tied to him for eternity, the looming thoughts constantly pulling at his throat, as he is forced to recount the tales in his comic. He goes on, insisting the sky is falling, concurrent with the theme of the fall of justice, but that he is told he is only suffering from PTSD, which he describes as the moment of trauma when time stands still, a reasonable response to the current events that were happening, inducing a feeling of timelessness and daunting memories merging. The last visible panel shows Art in a trance-like state as he starts to recollect his memories of the burning towers… The panels that formulate the strip of Spiegelman’s slowly begin to turn outwards, revealing a three-dimensional depth, and by the last two, only a slim side view of the panels remain as symbols of the towers, with the last panel/tower burning. The shadows of these buildings cast their length down the entire page showing that the events that follow are all in the shadow, the surroundings, wake, aftermath, of the collapse of iconic America. There is an image on the page that shows Osama Bin Laden holding a bloody sword across a table from George W. Bush, who is holding the American Flag while pointing a gun at Bin Laden - a recognized form of art against injustice. This is the war on terror, with Spiegelman sitting in between them sleeping in his depiction of himself with a mouse’s head as in Maus. The caption below states how he is terrorized by both Al Queda and his own corrupt government, perhaps in an attempt to exploit how hard it is to truly define who are the real terrorists in this tragic event, the alleged perpetrators or the perpetuators. Sprawled about the table are little collectible figurines from old comics, with Art holding onto a forgotten dream, an ancient comic page as he tries to figure out exactly what he actually saw on 9/11. This issue is an excellent example of how experimental Spiegelman’s piece is. The towers at the bottom represent motion in what Scott McCloud refers to as “the mental process called closure” in Understanding Comics (107). We see the towers decline in size from each panel, and this is how Spiegelman remembers and chooses to display the events that transpired that day as reflected in his fragmentary recollection. He attempts to incite the imagination of the reader, having them fill in the “motion… produced between panels” (McCloud 107). He wants us to picture the scene that has branded itself into Spiegelman’s brain, the molten outline of the towers slowly crumbling away, taking with them any sense of justice and dignity we might have once had, leaving us in the shadows of the departed towers, in the ruined and disintegrated aftermath of pre-election season. He also plays with the reader's preconceptions of how to read comics. He lets the reader choose what order to read some strips in, which “is still considered exotic” (McCloud 115) for most forms of media, left mostly to video games and other experimental mediums. On this one page, Spiegelman uses 7 different styles of art and mixes them with 5 separate story strips while also mixing in throw back comic characters of the 19th century, Hanz and Fritz with the towers protruding from their craniums. The story of the moments after the first tower was hit is shown in the feature strip, featuring the characters of old newspaper funnies sections, and ends in a dramatic irony meant to enthrall feelings of outrage towards the public and how American culture is as a whole. The advertisement in the final panel is on a billboard that blocked Art and his wife’s view of the flaming towers, ironically displaying an ad for a movie called Collateral Damage, about terrorism. On the board, the quotes “Veteran Firefighter’s Wife and Child Killed in Bomb Blast” and “What would you do if you lost everything?” (2) are from the actual poster to further demonstrate how ironic it is that we as Americans pay to see the kind of violence and terror shown in the movie, but when these things happen in reality, it does not have quite the same effect on the audience and actors. The burning towers tangent is a reflection of how Spiegelman, though he refers to himself as having no fundamental connection with New York, first shows a hint of identity linked with the towers and not just the human lives within. While he was tragically devastated by the images of humans jumping from the top of the towers to their deaths and the smoldering silhouette of the once soaring towers, even just the thought that the towers are no longer there bothers him.

With a synopsis of the story so far over the background of the smoldering tower on the far left and a lit cigarette on the far right, issue three of the book uses humor to express the deep emotions witnessed during such a time of panic and distress. The first main panel shows onlookers staring at the burning towers from a sky bridge while Spiegelman is being dragged across by his wife on their way to pick up their daughter from school, stating that a 2-pack a day habit of smoking does not prepare one well for this kind of situation (3). Smoking is a prevailing theme for this issue. He uses his anthropomorphized mouse from Maus to explain what the smell of the city was like while smoking a cig. As the mouse goes on using light humor to illuminate the tragic event, he protests and criticizes the city for not paying enough attention, or possibly blatantly lying about, the air quality after the collapse of the towers. Spiegelman uses this to relate to how his father described the stench of the concentration camps that he was put in during the regime of Hitler. His father could never quite put into words what the camps smelled like, simply stating that it was “indescribable” (3). After the attacks, Spiegelman described the smell as a mix of “Asbestos, PCB, lead, dioxins, and body parts” (3), simply indescribable to someone who was not there. As the frames continue, the scene fills with more and more smoke from the mouse, alluding to how he feels the air quality is now, jokingly making a statement exclaiming that he might not live long enough to die from cigarette carcinogens. The advertisement bits in this issue are crucial to the theme and multi-modal feel of the whole project. The Mouse holds up a sign that Speigleman made to protest the school district for not even cleaning the air ducts after the collapse that covered the entire school in dust. This form of protest demonstrates the outrage that Art feels was lacking after the attacks happened; the outrage towards the school district, the politics, and government intervention all surrounding the issues that ensued after September 11. The TOPP card placed where it shows the fragmented and distorted memory of the event as a whole. This was not something that Art was most likely thinking about during the panic. It is instead something that became a part of the memory through the reconstruction process, and the destruction of the White House plays on the notion that justice is being destroyed, engulfed in flames by an uncontrollable force, soon to be destroyed even further by the Bush administration.

George Bush and Dick Cheney fly in with a grandiose entrance at the top of issue four mounted on an eagle, Cheney slitting the albatross of freedom’s neck with a box cutter. This, to some, may be an upsetting image, dark and decrepit, but to Spiegelman, the atrocities committed by these two were much worse than any picture or image could ever truly capture. Bush and Cheney are “brigand suffering from war fever” who have “hijacked those tragic events” of Sept. 11th, using them to profit and propagandize for a war in Iraq (4). Hanz and Fritz are again depicted in this issue as the burning towers, being taken advantage of by paparazzi holding vultures, symbolizing their willingness to exploit tragedy as well just to make a quick buck or gain invaluable exposure for their works of art. Again, there is an ambiguous chronology in this issue, with little panels each describing a different event that he witnessed while trying to get his daughter out of school, for fear of the towers crashing down on the school at any moment. Art has suppressed some of the day into his unconscious memory, which is why he takes months to turn out one issue at a time for this project, each adding only about 15 minutes to the story. In this traumatic event, Art describes time as standing still. He did not experience these events in a normal order like we usually perceive time. To him, his memories all occur at the same exact time, and these panels are his attempts at putting together a narrative that makes sense to others, while Spiegelman himself sorts through the many emotions he felt on that day. On the last little strip of comic, our hero finally understands how much love he actually had for his city and fellow citizens. Before, he was a rootless cosmopolitan, a vagabond and homeless bum wherever he traveled. After experiencing the emotions of that day, he understands better how rooted in New York he actually was, and in a reference to Maus, sees why some Jews did not flee Berlin right after Kristallnacht. It is interesting to note that this was the issue he was working on during the one year anniversary of 9/11/01.

Spiegelman critiques our system of government blatantly in issue five, and even the citizens themselves. He seems to be letting out a lot of his anger, and this section would appeal much more to an international audience than most Americans, being the most politically charged, controversial, and accusatorial page yet. “Rampaging republican elephants… dimwitted democrat donkeys… no wonder real Americans choose not to vote” (5), he rants, opting for a new political party that truly represents America and her peoples' true interest… The revolutionary Ostrich Party! The donkey and elephant are both 19th-century dinosaurs, he explains, and Americans would be much better suited to an animal that digs its head into the ground as the visual art he provides ensures (5). On their posteriors, there is a target painted, a comment possibly on how Americans like to pretend or shy away from real problems and would rather “bend over and take it” than to stand up for true justice and liberty, whether it refers to classist, elitist, corporate monopolies raping the less fortunate of their already dwindling monetary finances, funding and perpetuating a war based on a lie, or misconstruing information through heavily politicized media. The comic strip at the bottom is a revamp of an old Foxy Grandpa style cartoon, which also presents a perfect opportunity to display how Spiegelman uses old cartoons to touch on new ideas. In the scene, Foxy Grandpa is actually Uncle Screwloose (Sam). The two boys are the twin towers from before and are now also representational of Americans and the ideals of democracy. They are seen screaming for Uncle Screwloose to help them put out the fires from atop the towers. Satirizing the way he feels the Bush administration used the tragedy to take advantage of an opportunity to invade the Middle East for profit and commodities, Uncle tries to get rid of the burning towers by splashing the kid towers with a bucket of oil. When Uncle sits down, he is then attacked by a hornet’s nest, which he uses a chemical sprayer to neutralize the annoying bugs, spraying everywhere and even killing an “Iraknid” (5). The boys and the uncle all get chased by the hornets, with the uncle running into a house while letting the boys get stung. Uncle’s actions are how Art views our government’s reactions to September 11th. To show how Art uses old comics to satirize current events, let’s take the scene with the nest. Today, this could be modified hermeneutically to coincide with view on Monsanto. They are spraying our food with pesticides, which are killing bees and other animals, which will eventually come around to affect our own health, like how the swarm chases after the children after Uncle Screwloose’s frantic spraying. Crazy, is it?

Six touches on the main theme of falling. Since the attacks, Art is no longer sure if the event made him delirious, or if he had always been this way. The images of falling people haunt him. He is falling. America is falling. We are no longer a nation that stands united to fight against the tyranny of the world; we are now a bunch of ostrich with our heads in the ground. We are falling, with no end in sight. We are doomed to eternally wait for that other shoe to drop. Our death is our infinite descent to destruction. Art has a fretful interaction with a local homeless woman on the street to his studio. She always yells at him, but it is seemingly incoherent, until after the attacks. When the towers fall, the shadows have the woman yelling racial expletives, blaming Art and other Jews for the planes crashing into the buildings. This is the moment he truly realized that It doesn’t really matter how much the government knows about the attacks and who really did it, their political corruption was seen though the response to this horrible momentous time in American history. With the increasing homelessness and disparity seen on the streets, Art pontificates upon the thought that this crazy old lady’s demons may have finally been released, distorting their shared reality. In another homage to old cartoons, the narrator is seen in the last panel waking up from a dream about political corruption, only to be told he was frightened from falling out of bed by a mother wearing a gas mask, potentially symbolizing that the mother know how bad things really are, but tries to cover things up and live life as a new normal.

Seven opens up with Art’s disdain for American culture. He shows how we get so scared of some propagated color system supposedly warning us of what level of the terror threat we have to watch out for today. He hides under the American flag but comments on how he feels no safer there. America is just as evil and demonic as these other terrorist organizations, inciting fear into the public simply to gain support for an illegal invasion of innocent countries. As he hides under the flag, the terrorist alert color is red, white and blue, which corresponds to a “virtual certitude of terrorist attack” (7) How awful is it that his son woke up from a nightmare where he was getting bombed in Baghdad? In yet another allusion to old comics, Art illustrates how he views the Bush administration as marching backward, right towards a cliff that he has his followers jump off of. This alludes to the Muffaroo cartoons, where the pagers are turned upside down to complete the rest of the story. Spiegelman is seen walking and reflecting on how his leaders are reading the book of revelations, instilling even more fear, control and propaganda into the public, he is awkwardly reading the skeptical fantasy of Phillip K. Dick. The depression he feels from the bipartisan divide of the country makes him prognosticate on whether he or anyone else will be around long enough to read his printings, worried that America will just bomb everyone, and everything, including the sacred ideas and comics of the past.

There is a little anecdote atop issue eight, where Art grieves for the ghosts of old Sunday comics that have been disinterred under the falling of the great towers. These ghosts would haunt Art, and become a focal point of his narrative style for this multi-modal collage. Dressed up as a jingoistic cheerleader for America, Spiegelman is seen jumping around, cheering about how we won the war. This quickly dissipates, and he admits that he cannot harbor such feelings for a system that he does not coincide with ethically. He can no longer tell between his neurotic depression and justified paranoia. Holding up two glasses, he can’t discern whether the cup is half empty or if there is actually on a fourth of a cup of water. The papers and headlines are drowning him, confirming that the building he saw incinerated really did fall, and the monstrous amounts of headline make his anxiety and depression seem so natural and beckoned. Falling can be equated with drowning in this scene. From Auschwitz to Hiroshima, we have learned nothing in Art’s eyes, because our president still wages unprecedented wars, including the war on wages, the classist and elitist dividend. In a throwback comic parody, a man is obsessed with alternative media about what really happened with the 9/11 attacks, and how much our own government had to do with things. He reads that someone counted as missing in the pentagon was actually inside the plane, and hears from the television that there were no Jews on the flight, and how Arabs could never learn to fly a sophisticated plane. He falls asleep, and in the early hours of the morning, his wife gets up to take a shower and turns the radio on. This cares the man, and he flies up and clings to the ceiling fan, accusing his wife of being a terrorist for listening to the propaganda on the radio. This is the absurd nature that Spiegelman sees Americans as participating in, yet sees us as recovering from a tragedy in the wrong manner.

Issue nine criticizes how easily everyone seemed to have recovered from the attacks. There is no unity, no peace, nothing but a new normal with the feint distant memory of tragedy now at the source of traumatic stress suppressed within the minds of citizens of New York. He wonders if they are all still just a bunch of stunned pigeons still trying to understand and deal with what had happened to them. Displacement is a central issue for this scene, where visual things are being displaced with each other, Art shifting forms to have feet, arms and a cat for a head. The displacement phenomena is a way of shifting blame, citing how we demolished Iraq instead of Al-Queda, and how despite the tons of air pollution from the collision, the mayor puts a smoking ban on bars and restaurants. The advertisement in this scene shows a deck of apocalyptic cards, with George W. Bush as the joker, connecting the end of the world with oil lobbyists such as Ashcroft and Rumsfeld, as we draw closer to the nigh end.

The last issue visually represents the two twin towers as large panels, with another antiquarian comic celebrity guest, Happy Hooligan. Art deals with all the commemorations and anniversaries of years after the event and sets up a fictitious yet truthful interview with Happy through a televised media reporter. The reporter mocks Happy after he says that they will ask him about his favorite American hero, though he does not believe in heroes. She says it’s ok because his point of view never makes it on the televised network anyways. With each question about America, Happy responds with ideas that are unpatriotic yet honest. He is kicked out of the interview because his ideological impressions do not line up with the media’s intentions. This is exactly what happened to Art’s project when he tried to get it published in America, only landing one press because he had been working with them for year and simply because he was Jewish. The end of the comic is about a ticking time bomb. We are all waiting for the bomb to go off, and in arts eyes, when it does, our greatest fear may come true; that we are actually immortal after all, and will continue to fall, fall… fall… into the shadow of towers that once stood for democracy, justice, freedom, and choice, now disintegrated into ash and rubbles, celebrated by forgettable events that continually fail to bring us together as a global community, falling continuously, infinitely, forever… eternity….. fate.

Timelessness is an eerie feeling that is often associated with the feeling of awe. It is hard to explain this feeling lexically, which is why the etymological root of Awful and Awesome are from the same word, Spiegelman can only seem to view the burning towers as an awesome sight to witness, but the feeling he gets is not awesome, it is awful. There is a sense that time is at a standstill, which as he references reading Phillip K. Dick, may be an allusion to some of Dick’s most popular novels. “On 9/11/01, time stopped” (10) Art remenecis, and the next day, the entire atmosphere was that of a “ghost town”(6). “By 9/12/01, clocks began to tick again” (10). But not those used for the standardized measurement of time. For Spiegelman, these are the ticks of a time bomb ready to explode, waiting for the shoe to drop. We have passed the point of no return to the old normal, and the glass is at a quarter full for the current paradigms of control. There seems to be little chance in Spiegelman’s eyes that we may one day learn from this tragic event, and instead, it becomes a travesty. The burning images will forever be in the minds of all those affected by the September attacks, but we tend to easily forget that we have the potential to control our fate, it is not written in a book. Falling, falling… falling….. down we tumble. Freedom is the point where you have nothing else left to lose (8).

Works Cited

Hajdu, David. “Homeland Insecurity.” Rev. of In the Shadow of No Towers, by ArtSpiegelman. New York Times Book Review. (2004): 13. Pdf.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Cbr.

Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Random House, Inc., 2004. Cbr.