9. In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon, $20): In September, Listings Editor Wayne Alan Brenner wrote that the legendary Spiegelman’s much-anticipated response to September 11, 2001, “is an invigorating obstacle course for the eyes. It’s a workout for the reader’s mind, too, as the artist has ditched his recent straightforward narrative style to return to the more complex architecture of his days as an underground cartoonist. Of course, it’s not that Spiegelman was bored with comix-as-usual; it’s that he was – and still is – jarred by his WTC experience; and the overlapping narratives, the fractured panel layouts and stylistic contrasts … work to similarly jar the reader. They also jar the deep history of New York newspaper comics: Characters from the past are mixed into the artist’s response, as if they – Happy Hooligan, Ignatz Mouse, the Katzenjammer Kids, and others – had to deal with the towers crashing into their reality.”
This article appears in 2004.