Art Spiegelman told the assembled audience at Cooper Union on September 10 that he couldn’t get a major American media outlet (besides the Forward) to serialize “In the Shadow of No Towers,” the artist’s depiction of September 11, 2001. Instead the panels appeared mostly in Europe. At his lecture and slideshow, the chain-smoking Spiegelman described his famous black-on-black New Yorker cover after the terrorist attacks, as well as his increasing suspicion that the magazine’s “monocle” was a far too reasonable lens for his September 11 work. Michiko Kakutani has reviewed the book here, which is now available from Pantheon. There has been an outpouring of work about the attacks, of course, but, to my knowledge, nothing on this scale from a major artistic or literary figure that attempts to encompass the whole of September 11.
