In the Shadow of No Towers
Sep. 9th, 2004 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
richardf8Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers came out yesterday. I've been waiting for this release for over a year, and made it a point to head up to our local Barnes and Noble to buy it straightaway.
Got home with it and put it aside, I had my own strip to pencil, but once I got the pencilling done, I picked up Spiegelman's book and began reading. These pages were originally published in broadsheet format, and that format has been preserved on heavy cardstock. In many ways, for Spiegelman, this work is therapy art, it is his process for dealing with 9/11 and its aftermath. Reading it was, for me, very therapeutic as well. His work encompasses the experience of watching the towers fall, clear through the decision by the GOP to hold its convention in New York. He talks and illustrates at length the degree to which he feels violated and betrayed by the co-option of 9/11 for the current administrations political ends. But this is not Ted Rall's detached political polemicism, but something different, something deeply personal, felt close to the heart and deep in the bones.
The artwork itself showcases Spiegelman's versatility, with him working not only within the traditions of his own Milieu (R. Crumb & Co.) but also consciously including tributes to sources as diverse as Herriman's "Krazy Kat" and McCay's "Little Nemo's Adventures in Slumberland." His own character from Maus appears as both Ignatz and Little Nemo. Indeed, after his work is done, he presents pages from the Hearst strips that affected him, just so you'll be able to appreciate those influences in the work itself. The things he does with Eagles is amazing. In most scenes in which they appear they represent the abuses to which patriotism has been subjected.
This is a work that is, above all, heartfelt. Regardless of what one may think of the politics he advances, or of the theories he espouses, the fact that this is the honest expression of feeling of someone who bore witness to the events is indisputable, and makes the work all the more affecting. This is a work that I will be reading again and again, so richly is it woven.
Got home with it and put it aside, I had my own strip to pencil, but once I got the pencilling done, I picked up Spiegelman's book and began reading. These pages were originally published in broadsheet format, and that format has been preserved on heavy cardstock. In many ways, for Spiegelman, this work is therapy art, it is his process for dealing with 9/11 and its aftermath. Reading it was, for me, very therapeutic as well. His work encompasses the experience of watching the towers fall, clear through the decision by the GOP to hold its convention in New York. He talks and illustrates at length the degree to which he feels violated and betrayed by the co-option of 9/11 for the current administrations political ends. But this is not Ted Rall's detached political polemicism, but something different, something deeply personal, felt close to the heart and deep in the bones.
The artwork itself showcases Spiegelman's versatility, with him working not only within the traditions of his own Milieu (R. Crumb & Co.) but also consciously including tributes to sources as diverse as Herriman's "Krazy Kat" and McCay's "Little Nemo's Adventures in Slumberland." His own character from Maus appears as both Ignatz and Little Nemo. Indeed, after his work is done, he presents pages from the Hearst strips that affected him, just so you'll be able to appreciate those influences in the work itself. The things he does with Eagles is amazing. In most scenes in which they appear they represent the abuses to which patriotism has been subjected.
This is a work that is, above all, heartfelt. Regardless of what one may think of the politics he advances, or of the theories he espouses, the fact that this is the honest expression of feeling of someone who bore witness to the events is indisputable, and makes the work all the more affecting. This is a work that I will be reading again and again, so richly is it woven.
Funny you should mention Ted Rall
Date: 2004-09-09 06:40 pm (UTC)Re: Funny you should mention Ted Rall
Date: 2004-09-09 07:52 pm (UTC)I'm waiting for Rall to prove to me that he can draw a woman's body or make decent use of perspective. Contempt for "Art School" comic artists does not excuse his draftsmanship. Rall's a good writer though, and his political sentiments are not all that far off from Spiegelman's.
I sense a certain amount of envy from Rall. Certainly, he has been working very hard, with his "Attitude" books, to become the Spiegelman of his generation (Rall is decdedly Gen X). But too often Rall is every bit as much the agent provocateur as he accuses Spiegelman of being. The artistic merit of his "Terror Widows," "Pat Tillman," or "Reagan in Hell" cartoons are debatable, though I got a chuckle out of the last. But he does seem to bask in the flames they draw from the right.
Of course, you can't BE a cartoonist without wanting to be the center of attention. There's no other reason to do it. Rall condemning Spiegelman for it is a classic case of the chap with the beam in his eye pointing out the mote in the other fellow's.
Rall does good work, he would do better to focus on building that up than on tearing Spiegelman down.