‘Shadow of No Towers’ has value but many shortcomings

Lately there has been a good deal of anguished discussion among book critics over — shades of the 1950s! — the growing impact of comic books (that’s graphic novels to you, bud), specifically regarding whether one can be a real work of literature.

It’s a silly question, as Art Spiegelman demonstrates — yet again — in his first new book of comics since he won the Pulitzer Prize for “Maus,” his searing graphic novel about the Holocaust.

“In the Shadow of No Towers” is Spiegelman’s outraged and highly personal reaction to not only the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, but also what he sees as the American government’s inept response to the attack and its aftermath.

Spiegelman and his family live in Lower Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers came down. In both a long prose introduction and the comics pages that follow, he relates the story of racing on foot with his wife to his children’s schools, desperate to find his son and daughter. Both children were fine, but living in proximity to such a catastrophic act of violence left Spiegelman and, he suggests, most New Yorkers in a state of mind he calls “unhinged.”

Indeed, Spiegelman was unable to grapple with his depression, anxiety and anger until he began to draw comics panels about his experiences and feelings. Drawing his artistic inspiration from the early days of newspaper comics, he populated his new work with characters taken from or inspired by “Little Nemo,” “The Yellow Kid,” “The Katsenjammer Kids” and “Krazy Kat,” among others.

The result is a visually stunning volume the size of a coffee-table book. Each page is full of visual wit and word play, often to horrifying effect. Spiegelman’s radical politics are brilliantly on display; in one panel, he draws himself as a mouse sleeping at his drafting table while Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush stand grinning over him. The caption reads: “Equally terrorized by Al-Qaeda and By His Own Government …”

But Spiegelman indulges his own personal neuroses to such an extent that at times he comes across more as a crank than as an artist with a worthwhile radical vision. For example, he rages against the ban on cigarette smoking by a New York City administration that refused to confront the matter of toxic pollution left in the city’s air by the crumbling towers. While it’s true the city should have taken steps to protect its citizens from free-floating asbestos and God only knows what else, cigarette smoking is a public health crisis all its own. Spiegelman all but brags about his own two-pack-a-day habit.

Secondly, the book lacks unity, composed as it is of Spiegelman’s observations, personal crotchets, fears, anxieties and sometimes inconsistent political views.

He does end with a powerful meditation on the 2004 anniversary of 9/11 while the Republicans — a source of evil, in Spiegelman’s world — prepare for their convention nearby. But there is something abrupt and arbitrary about the whole enterprise. Spiegelman fills out the book with large-format reprints of long-ago comics that have inspired him, and while these are instructive — and gorgeous to look at — they underscore the overall impression that this book is not a wholly realized piece of work.

The last shortcoming is the assumption Spiegelman seems to make that his comics work is more valuable because it is so labor-intensive and time-consuming (apparently each double-page spread took Spiegelman three months to complete).

There’s a great deal of value in Spiegelman’s account of the 9/11 disaster, but what this book really amounts to is the graphic equivalent of a personal essay — the kind of essay that, say, Jonathan Schell, Gore Vidal or Woody Allen could compose in a few days. The fact Spiegelman uses a different form and a slower manner of composition neither enhances nor detracts from its artistic value.