Book-It 'o9! Book #7
More of the Fifty Books Challenge! I have been meaning to post this for the past two days and am kinda glad I waited until today 'cause I managed to wrangle imoldfashioned into the book challenge along with me!
Number seven is a library request: an Art Spiegelman I'd heard about but hadn't yet read.
Title: In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman.
Details: Copyright 2004, Pantheon
Synopsis (By Way of Publishers Weekly; the book itself has no back cover, front flap, back flap, or otherwise summary): Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Spiegelman's new work is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction. It's an artful rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by a world-class pessimist ("after all, disaster is my muse"). The artist, who lives in downtown Manhattan, believes the world really ended on Sept. 11, 2001-it's merely a technicality that some people continue to go about their daily lives. He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his trademark sense of existential doom. "I'm not even sure I'll live long enough," says a chain-smoking, post-9/11 cartoon-mouse Spiegelman, "for cigarettes to kill me." The book is a visceral tirade against the Bush administration ("brigands suffering from war fever") and, when least expected, an erudite meditation on the history of the American newspaper comic strip, born during the fierce circulation wars of the 1890s right near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. This beautifully designed, oversized book (each page is heavy board stock) opens vertically to offer large, colorful pages with Spiegelman's contemporary lamentations along with wonderful reproductions of 19th-century broadsheet comic strips like Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley and Rudolf Dirk's Katzenjammer Kids. Old comics, Spiegelman (Maus) writes, saved his sanity. "Unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century... they were just right for an end-of-the world moment." This is a powerful and quirky work of visual storytelling by a master comics artist.
Why I Wanted to Read It: Whilst looking into Art Spiegelman's recent work, I discovered he'd written a graphic novel about 9/11. I was intrigued as I'd read Spiegelman left The New Yorker a few months after the September 11th attacks after ten years there. Spiegelman has said his resignation from The New Yorker was to protest the "widespread conformism" in the United States media, something that (obviously) comes up in the book.
How I Liked It: Spiegelman works through his PTSD of the attacks (his daughter's new high school was by Ground Zero; he and his wife were walking from taking her, one assumes, when they heard a crash and turned around to see the towers collapsing behind them), including the haunting image he claims no video or photograph managed to capture: the glowing image of the tower before it collapsed, an image he recreates and features throughout his story.
To call this story "quirky" is hopelessly inane and an insult. Spiegelman runs through psychedelia in his anguish, but it's understandable and it just works. He borrows images from turn-of-the-century cartoons, stating that after 9/11, many buried themselves in poetry or music, he chose the classic comics. And so bits of his story is told by him occasionally veering into that format, everything from beautifully poignant in the evolving Little Neroesque corner panels to darkly humorous when he borrows Happy Hooligan's image to tell the true story of his Tom Brokow interview with "typical New Yorkers". When asked what his favorite American food is, he responds "Shrimp pad Thai!". A few more like-minded answers and he's booted out of the studio, his bit in the segment obviously never airing.
How did I like this book? I think it's an invaluable account of 9/11 that isn't only American but universal, maybe. Spiegelman grappling with mass tragedy manages to be beautiful, at times darkly amusing (as I said), of course tragic, and immensely thought-provoking (walking through the charred streets, he remarks to his wife "I finally understand why some Jews didn't leave Berlin right after Kristallnacht!"). This is a fucking amazing book and a testament to history, if nothing else.
Notable: I admit, up until fairly recently, I'd only been familiar with Spiegelman through MAUS. His rather singular artistic style throughout the book (simple ink drawings in one style, with occasional photos, and an insert of an early cartoon he'd done relevant to the story at hand) is quite restrained-looking compared to In the Shadow of No Towers and now Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which feature photographs as well as so many styles it's nearly impossible to pin down only one as the definitive of each of the respective books. I don't know if Spiegelman has evolved (although reading the reprint in Breakdowns of his 1978 underground collection suggests no) in style or if he felt MAUS warranted a more stark approach (although heavily personal, his other work manages to be even more autobiographical) to better tell a story he thought wasn't his own? Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
Number seven is a library request: an Art Spiegelman I'd heard about but hadn't yet read.
Title: In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman.
Details: Copyright 2004, Pantheon
Synopsis (By Way of Publishers Weekly; the book itself has no back cover, front flap, back flap, or otherwise summary): Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Spiegelman's new work is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction. It's an artful rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by a world-class pessimist ("after all, disaster is my muse"). The artist, who lives in downtown Manhattan, believes the world really ended on Sept. 11, 2001-it's merely a technicality that some people continue to go about their daily lives. He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his trademark sense of existential doom. "I'm not even sure I'll live long enough," says a chain-smoking, post-9/11 cartoon-mouse Spiegelman, "for cigarettes to kill me." The book is a visceral tirade against the Bush administration ("brigands suffering from war fever") and, when least expected, an erudite meditation on the history of the American newspaper comic strip, born during the fierce circulation wars of the 1890s right near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. This beautifully designed, oversized book (each page is heavy board stock) opens vertically to offer large, colorful pages with Spiegelman's contemporary lamentations along with wonderful reproductions of 19th-century broadsheet comic strips like Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley and Rudolf Dirk's Katzenjammer Kids. Old comics, Spiegelman (Maus) writes, saved his sanity. "Unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century... they were just right for an end-of-the world moment." This is a powerful and quirky work of visual storytelling by a master comics artist.
Why I Wanted to Read It: Whilst looking into Art Spiegelman's recent work, I discovered he'd written a graphic novel about 9/11. I was intrigued as I'd read Spiegelman left The New Yorker a few months after the September 11th attacks after ten years there. Spiegelman has said his resignation from The New Yorker was to protest the "widespread conformism" in the United States media, something that (obviously) comes up in the book.
How I Liked It: Spiegelman works through his PTSD of the attacks (his daughter's new high school was by Ground Zero; he and his wife were walking from taking her, one assumes, when they heard a crash and turned around to see the towers collapsing behind them), including the haunting image he claims no video or photograph managed to capture: the glowing image of the tower before it collapsed, an image he recreates and features throughout his story.
To call this story "quirky" is hopelessly inane and an insult. Spiegelman runs through psychedelia in his anguish, but it's understandable and it just works. He borrows images from turn-of-the-century cartoons, stating that after 9/11, many buried themselves in poetry or music, he chose the classic comics. And so bits of his story is told by him occasionally veering into that format, everything from beautifully poignant in the evolving Little Neroesque corner panels to darkly humorous when he borrows Happy Hooligan's image to tell the true story of his Tom Brokow interview with "typical New Yorkers". When asked what his favorite American food is, he responds "Shrimp pad Thai!". A few more like-minded answers and he's booted out of the studio, his bit in the segment obviously never airing.
How did I like this book? I think it's an invaluable account of 9/11 that isn't only American but universal, maybe. Spiegelman grappling with mass tragedy manages to be beautiful, at times darkly amusing (as I said), of course tragic, and immensely thought-provoking (walking through the charred streets, he remarks to his wife "I finally understand why some Jews didn't leave Berlin right after Kristallnacht!"). This is a fucking amazing book and a testament to history, if nothing else.
Notable: I admit, up until fairly recently, I'd only been familiar with Spiegelman through MAUS. His rather singular artistic style throughout the book (simple ink drawings in one style, with occasional photos, and an insert of an early cartoon he'd done relevant to the story at hand) is quite restrained-looking compared to In the Shadow of No Towers and now Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which feature photographs as well as so many styles it's nearly impossible to pin down only one as the definitive of each of the respective books. I don't know if Spiegelman has evolved (although reading the reprint in Breakdowns of his 1978 underground collection suggests no) in style or if he felt MAUS warranted a more stark approach (although heavily personal, his other work manages to be even more autobiographical) to better tell a story he thought wasn't his own? Maybe I'm reading too much into it.