I just completed In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spegialmen. Unlike his GN, Maus I and Maus II, this was a new kind of format, and piece of work. In the Shadow of No Towers was bright and busy. In some panels the words were over the art work, instead of the normal boxes. He jumped around from using very symbolic cartooning to more detailed, depending on what he was trying to convey. The frighten people were draw as symbolic children.
The story itself was of Art Spegialmen's first hand account of the trauma he endured at ground zero, of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Through out the GN, Spegialmen kept showing the "glowing bones of the towers" before they fell. This I found a bit repetitive, however, it was used to show, that he couldn't get this image out of his mind. His story was of him and his wife, trying to locate their daughter at school the day of the attacks. He tells of how traumatized he was, and how it took the attacks of 9/11 for him to realize he was a "grounded cosmopolitan", which he'd never seen before.
Unlike the previous two GN I have read from Spegialmen, it didn't feel like there was a new spin to an old story. I do realize that this book were published in a different country before being released in the USA, but it still does not give much new insight in to the horrors of 9/11. This sort of family affair/ horrors endured, plagued the media. And myself who hasn't really heard many stories of the feelings of the New Yorkers on 9/11, has heard this one many of times.
I was however drawn into his ramblings of how trivial the safety procedures were we adopted after the attack. I probably would have found this GN more interesting if he focused more on his feelings about the politics and his conspiracys, rather than the drawn out family horror as I mentioned previously.
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2 comments:
I don't feel like you are going very deep with this. You're critiquing it for not saying something new, and yet does it need to say something new in order to be able to evaluate what it is saying?
You also ignore the whole last 1/2 of the book, which I had asked you to go back and consider again.
I guess I just see you critiquing things for not being what you want or conveniently ignoring sections when they don't make sense as opposed to actually talking about what is there or trying to make sense of/ make a guess about what is not immediately clear. Really get in there and ask questions -- but then take it to the next step and attempt to answer those questions.
I did evaluate what it said, and voiced my opinion of how I felt about reading it. I did go back and look at the last half, yet a lot of it just didn't seem to fit in, and with out clear guidelines of what I'm suppose to be looking at, I can not make a argument that they fit with the rest of the book.
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