In the Shadow of No Towers

The local library had this recent Art Speigelman book on it's shelves. I read some of the collected strips when they originally appeared in newsprint form and I really liked them then - a very personal record of 9/11 mixed with politics. He and his wife went looking for their daughter whose school was right next to the World Trade Center. He uses lots of great cartooning tricks to tell the story, most effectively by scrambling up his story of that day with his more recent political ideas and even characters from old comic strips. He also scrambles up the pages, making them coherent but confusing, which reminds me of watching TV that day.

I wouldn't buy the book though, because it feels padded. There's only 10 strips (granted, they're large scale, but still, only 10), and then the book is filled out wiht pages of old newspaper comic strips which have little or nothing to do with the rest of the book. It feels padded, and though I enjoyed the old strips, they didn't work well with the rest of the book.

PS The cover, adapted from his incredible haunting NYer cover from the week after the attack, is great.