E-Mail This Article to a Friend Spiegelman speaks The author of Maus tackles September 11

Since the publication of the second volume of Maus in 1991 and his subsequent special citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee, Art Spiegelman has become the most influential person in the world of comics — proving that they could boldly go where they’d never been before. Meanwhile, he spent most of the years following Maus II not producing comics. Instead, he did illustrations and essays for the New Yorker — until September 11, 2001. Following that day, Spiegelman, who lives with his family within sight of the World Trade Center and witnessed the towers’ collapse, returned to comics with renewed vigor. His In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon) is a kind of comic diary of the days immediately following the event. Unlike Maus, it’s in full color rather than black and white, and printed on what the publishing business calls "baby board," which is named after the children’s board books for which it’s the primary medium. And In the Shadow of No Towers is big — a 9x14-inch volume that folds out into broadsheet-sized spreads. Half of this monumental but short book is composed of Spiegelman pieces; the other half is made up of examples of early-20th-century comics like Hogan’s Alley, the Katzenjammer Kids, and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland that Spiegelman says are the only form of art that gave him solace in the days following September 11 and eventually rejuvenated him in his commitment to comic-book art. The Harvard Book Store is bringing Spiegelman to the Brattle Theatre on September 20 (the event is free, but all tickets have been claimed). He spoke with the Phoenix recently from his studio in SoHo.

Q: How did you decide on the large format for In the Shadow of No Towers?

A: Well, I didn’t start there, but I went there because of the invitation from Die Zeit, a German newspaper, to do whatever I wanted. And the scale seemed appropriate to these big towers and trying to take on these various things. And the kind of collage superimposition lent itself to these big-sized pages, which only encouraged my yearning backwards toward the early Sunday comics, where they got to be that size by definition.

Q: It’s interesting that you use the term "collage." The way the pages are set up, there’s no obvious starting point for a sequential reading — you can dive in just about anywhere on the page.

A: Well, sometimes it was intentionally trying to disorient you. And occasionally, it’s just the same way a newspaper page collages things, and ultimately, a city is a collage of a certain kind. But also very specifically, on the very first page, I disrupted the possibility of reading it in order intentionally, so that as soon as you open the first page, you see these two towers, one on the left side of the page, falling, and one on the right-hand side of the page. So on the upper right of the first page, it says, "In our last episode, you might remember the world ended." And then there’s that long, vertical thing going down the right. Now, when you read comics, you’re made to read from left to right — the artist tells you where to go next. And here, very specifically, I made it so you wouldn’t know where to go next. You either go down to find the rest of the tower on the lower left or you ignore it for a while or you read down and then have to go back up to find other bits of the page — it was to make your brain split, which is basically what happened that morning. There are other ones where it’s much easier — you’re specifically guided through a left-to-right sequence down a page. But on occasion, it’s making use of that question specifically to say, "Okay, dive into the rubble and see what’s there."

Q: In Michiko Kakutani’s daily review in the New York Times, she said that the work seemed unfinished. Do you think there was an expectation for something more novelistic — and longer — like Maus?

A: Yeah, but everybody wants what they had last. Me too, I want September 10th. But in that sense, yeah, this doesn’t even try to be novelistic. I mean, it couldn’t have had the Olympian overview she’s looking for — it’s a series of journal entries. This is more like a war-torn diary. It’s not trying to say, "Okay, remember back in 2001, here’s what happened then from our now Olympian perch." We’re hardly on an Olympian perch; we still have rubble falling all over.

Q: I’ve found that people have had two reactions: "Wow, it’s really amazing!" followed by "It’s only 32 pages?" Do you think people are still dealing with how to read comics — that there are different expectations now that comic books are being written about in the New York Times?

A: It’s amazing, in the last couple of years, this whole thing has gotten to some kind of tipping point where while the rest of the world is turning to shit, comics are flourishing. And being tagged with this kind of label, the "graphic novel." The novel has a certain kind of reverberation that focuses on the narrative element rather than the visual element. And also, it implies a certain kind of long form, and it’s kind of funny to me to hear that. Having been lauded as the daddy of the graphic novel, or something, I’m making a very short work that harks back to the one-page comics of the beginning of the 20th century. It’s not about creating a long form. If anything, it’s a graphic essay rather than a graphic novel. And a graphic essay in kind of ellipses and poetic elision.

Q: How did you propose this large format with board pages to your publisher?

A: It grew out of two things. One, at first, I was offering a broadsheet-sized book, and my publisher just looked at me very cross-eyed, saying, "You know, we can’t make a book that big." So then I thought, "All right, how big can I make it? I guess more like tabloid size than broadsheet size." So I tried making them as spreads, but the problem there had to do with the gutter, where one page meets the next — it’s very hard to make the type match up and things like that. And there’s a man at the New Yorker, in the production department, who said, "Well, the only way to do that is a board book," because then one spread is really just one piece of paper. There it was, like, great, I can make a book fatter than Maus, in one year rather than 13! For me it was such a wonderful solution because the comics do this anyway in American culture — this kind of collision between adults’ and children’s culture. A giant-sized baby-board book is that as well. And, well, these little baby books are made the same way. It’s supposed to be: your first book is going to withstand a lot of punishment. Yet I’ve never seen anybody with kids who’s had a kid who reached puberty who still had those board books intact. They look durable, but they’re very fragile in their own way. Which is like the towers.

Q: In one of your essays in the book, you talk about comics being "architectural structures." And the board book is certainly more permanent than newsprint. So you have those two ideas coming together: a very ephemeral medium being produced in a very solid, durable form.

A: To me that’s one of the things that makes this a book rather than just the pages I first made. The book, by having that second tower, as I’ve been thinking of it, the second section of old comics, raises overtly the issue of what’s ephemeral and what will last. For me, it may be the real theme of the book.

Q: Obviously, these early comics predated you. When did you start to discover them?

A: I think really when I was about 12 years old and hiding out from the after-school life of just being made to play baseball. I’d flee to the library and look up the old newspapers while they were still in bound volumes rather than on microfilm.

Q: So you must have a lot of sympathy for Nicholson Baker’s campaign to save old newspapers.

A: Nicholson Baker saved my butt! There was one page I wanted to reprint, and it’s amazing how scarce these things are, when you talk about ephemera. The Kinder Kids page, that’s by a man who became a famous painter, one of the Cubist guys, Lyonel Feininger. But the page that I wanted to reprint, I could trace down three existing pages. One in Germany, that was crumbling and I couldn’t communicate with the person. One that was temporarily lost, which was a copy that had been reprinted in other books over the years, which is somewhere in an airplane hangar near Ohio State University. And the third one’s at Duke University, and it was just being unpacked at the time I got there, and we shot from that.

Q: And what was the Baker connection?

A: I found out that he had the first volume of the Chicago Tribune as part of his holdings, and then he said, "Oh yeah, I just sent them down to Duke University," so there it was.

Q: One of the other things that you reprinted that I thought was so beautiful and had never seen before was Winsor McCay’s Nemo in Slumberland.

A: I wish I could have reprinted more. The week after that one is New York City in flames.

Q: Was this always part of the plan, to have these reprints?

A: It was when I started thinking of it as a book rather than as these pages that I was making provisionally month by month. When I wanted to do a book, I wanted to have old comics in it. It started rather prosaically — nobody knows who the Happy Hooligan is, and that’s probably okay, I can just say it’s an old comic and I use him to represent me in one sequence, and I thought maybe it would be nice to have some panels from the past as part of making it into a book. And then it grew into elucidating the theme of what’s ephemeral and what lasts. When towers are ephemeral and governments and ideals are ephemeral, then maybe ephemera gets to be longer lived. At that point, starting to look back specifically at what to reprint — it’s amazing how many of these pages could exist in dialogue with so many of the other themes of this book. So you have that page specifically with Nemo and his friend knocking down the buildings where the Towers will go up and come down 70 years later.

Q: One of the amazing older comics is The Fairy Palace, by Gustave Verbeck, where the benevolent little fairies become bearded goblins.

A: That’s the perfect metaphor for me, for our political situation: the friendly genie turns into a raging bull. That’s an amazing reduction of our understanding of the Middle East. That’s the Arabian Nights version of the part of the globe we just bombed. He’s turned into a beast.

— Jon Garelick