"Without the shadow of the towers", by Art Spiegelman: when terror reached the comic

Aquel martes, el dibujante Art Spiegelman y su esposa, la directora de arte de The New Yorker, Françoise Mouly, salieron de su apartamento, en las inmediaciones de la estación del metro Canal St, y caminaron por Green St hacia el norte, en busca de una cafetería.They crossed with a woman who opened her eyes and mouth huge, a mixture of astonishment and fear, while listening to a thunderous noise. O eso recordaría luego el autor de Maus, la premiada novela gráfica sobre la Shoah, al recordar su experiencia sobre lo que sucedió el 11 de septiembre de 2001 en Nueva York y sus consecuencias en su libro Sin la sombra de las torres.

Mouly started shouting the name of the eldest daughter, took him by the hand and dragging him running the kilometer and a half that separated them from the northern smoking tower of the World Trade Center, because too close there was the Stuyvesant high school building, where the teenager was studying, Nadja.While ran, the second kidnapped plane crashed into the South Tower.

The school was chaos.Some boys knew, others did not, but other distressed parents like them had gathered at the door.They were taken by Nadia, but not their Nadja;minutes later, when she finally appeared, the girl didn't seem scared.Until he saw them.Then they explained: the cut of light, the tremor they had felt, had been the south tower, the first to come down.

They were four blocks when they saw the north fall. “La imagen central de mi mañana del 11 de septiembre —una que no fue metida en la memoria pública mediante fotos o videos, pero que aun años más tarde continúa grabada en el interior de mis párpados— fue la de los huesos encendidos, amenazantes, de la torre norte justo antes de que se evaporase”, escribió Spiegelman en los años que siguieron hasta la publicación de In The Shadow of No Towers, en 2004.

Many times he tried to recreate that glow, and none liked it;Finally she achieved an approach to her memory of disintegration thanks to digital drawings."I came to locate some sequences of my most vivid memories around that central image, but I never managed to draw others.".For example, hundreds of handmade posters with photos of people who did not return to their homes;or isolated Manhattan, with the bridges and closed tunnels.

As they ran, Mouly had the impression, "he recalled for the twenty -anniversary, in The New Yorker - that" a black hole seemed to swallow everything that had been based on reality until that moment ".In that void he had to create a lid for the special number of the magazine, they told him.

"The only adequate solution seemed not to publish any cover image: a completely black cover," he told The Guardian.“Then Art suggested to add the silhouettes of the two towers, black on black. Así fue como desde la idea de ninguna tapa salió una imagen perfecta, que expresaba algo sobre la insoportable pérdida de vidas, la ausencia súbita en nuestro horizonte, el desgarro abrupto en el tejido de la realidad”.

That representation stared at Spiegelman's head;He liked it, ”he said to NPR - how he had hit the weekly public."You justified 50 years of modernism," someone had written.

Tiempo después, cuando empezó a llevar una suerte de registro desordenado de sus emociones —”mis tiras son ahora un diario en cámara lenta de lo que viví mientras buscaba alguna clase de ecuanimidad provisional”, escribió—, terminaría por alumbrar una de las ideas centrales del libro que sería su primer proyecto grande en los 10 años que habían pasado desde Maus II.

The silhouette of the buildings looks, black on black, on the lid;Also in the interior details the game is repeated, to show bodies that fall. Son personajes de las tiras cómicas estadounidenses de comienzos del siglo XX: Little Nemo, de Winsor McCay; Bringing Up Father, de George McManus; Der Katzenjammer Kids, de Rudolph Dirks; The Upside Donws, de Gustave Verbeck.They reappear in the big panels that make up each page, transferred to 2001.

“Antes del 11 de septiembre mis traumas eran todos más o menos autoinfligidos”, escribió en el ensayo que abre el libro, con su sarcasmo habitual, pero correr de la nube tóxica que momentos antes había sido la torre norte del World Trade Center me dejó tambaleando en esa falla geológica donde la Historia del Mundo y la Historia Individual se chocan: la intersección sobre la cual me habían alertado mis padres, sobrevivientes de Auschwitz, cuando me enseñaron que debía tener siempre la maleta hecha”.

De allí había salido Maus, publicada en fragmentos desde 1980 y como libro en 1986, seguido por una segunda parte en 1991 que la convirtió en la primera (y hasta ahora, única) novela gráfica que ganó un premio Pulitzer.The story is both a family memory and a historical document about the rise of Nazism and the concentration and extermination fields;The investigation of a child who wants to understand his mother's suicide and a reflection on why the suffering of atrocities does not make anyone better person.

Maus está ambientada en la década de 1970 en Nueva York, donde el joven Spiegelman trata de entrevistar a su padre, el desagradable y quejoso Vladek, sobre su vida en Europa, la persecución, Auschwitz y la emigración.Both have mice head;The Poles of the novel look like pigs and the Germans, like cats.Father and Son are not supported: Vladek sees Art as a failure;Art cannot be with Vladek more than a few minutes without feeling overwhelmed with anguish.Only the past joins them, which one wants to talk about and on which the other wants to hear, although both reluctantly.

Los ratones de Maus reaparecen en Sin la sombra de las torres."It was a way to represent me when I couldn't even see my own image in the mirror," wrote the artist.His mouse is comments, for example: “I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke smelled in Auschwitz.The closest thing that came was to tell me that it was indescribable.Exactly so smelled the air in Lower Manhattan after September 11 ”.

Spiegelman told the immediate trauma, as the way he naturalized having a police barricade on 14Affection for the chaotic neighborhood I can honestly call my home ”.While his first instinct was to go with his family anywhere, the reaction that followed was the opposite:

No me podía imaginar que abandonaría mi ciudad por la seguridad de, digamos, el sur de Francia, para luego abrir el Herald Tribune en algún café y leer que Nueva York se había convertido en basura radioactiva.

He understood, "he said in the auditorium of The New School, where he presented the book in 2004," why some Jews did not abandon Berlin after the night of broken crystals ".

Si bien había advertido el uso político que de inmediato se dio a los hechos —tanto que confesó su inclinación por muchas teorías conspirativas sobre el gobierno de George W. Bush y Dick Cheney, y su fastidio cuando en la escuela sustituta a su hija le pidieron que fuera vestida de rojo, azul y blanco—, se sorprendió de que “los secuestros del 11 de septiembre fueran a su vez secuestrados por la camarilla de Bush, que lo redujo a un afiche de reclutamiento para la guerra”.

With the invasion of Iraq and laws such as national security, "new traumas began to compete with still fresh wounds".He was convinced to make Comix again - as the comics for adults are distinguished - “full -time despite the fact that comix are so fucking laborious that one must assume that he will live forever to be able to do them”.

That is why he left his other tasks - the RAW Magazine and the Editorial for Children Little Lit, both projects with Mouly - but he did give up the New Yorker's covers.He bothered what he called "the broadly widespread conformism among the mass media during the Bush era".He began to think of some vignettes so far from what, when he already had them in motion, the magazine rejected them.

Like many other United States publications. Por no decir todas: la única que lo aceptó fue The Forward, heredero del medio en yiddish donde publicaba Isaac Bashevis Singer.In Europe it was published Die Zeit, Courrier International, The Independent and The London Review of Books.

"Between 2002 and 2003 he thought a series of 10 pages of large scale on September 11 and its consequences," the creative process described.I wanted them to be weekly publications, but each one had been.Then they offered to collaborate with the German newspaper, whose paper edition uses large color format pages.Wrote:

They seemed perfect for huge skyscrapers and huge events, and the idea of working in units of only one page corresponded to my existential conviction that I would not live enough to see them published.I wanted to distinguish between the fragments of what I had lived and the images of the media that threatened to devour what I had really observed, and nature as a collage of a newspaper page encouraged my impulse to juxtapose my fragmentary thoughts in different styles in different styles.

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The first four panels deal with attacks directly.In the first one you see a family on September 10: the father (beer in hand), the mother, the daughter and the cat watch television.11, the same family, in the same position, but open eyes of fright and electrified hair.The 12, the same family, again narcotiated by TV although still with crazy hair, with the patriotic aggregate of a flag.

On the sides of these panels, the tower burning silhouette that Spiegelman saw fell was repeated in the ten illustrations that make up the book. Spiegelman retoma personajes antiguos de historietas y también chistes viejos, como el del borracho que llega a su casa del bar y se quita un zapato con estrépito, pero piensa en los vecinos y apoya el otro suavemente: nadie más puede dormir en el edificio porque falta el golpe de un zapato.

Sin la sombra de las torres muestra a una multitud espantada que corre entre rascacielos mientras un gigantesco zapato con una mecha de explosivo encendida, cae sobre ellos."Waiting for the other shoe to fall," the painting is titled, and has as the only text: "New!Improved!Jihad, brand footwear.Handmade materials.(Only big extra numbers.) In the fine businesses of your neighborhood! ".

Spiegelman se dibuja a sí mismo cayendo de una torre en una secuencia de cinco imágenes, pero en el piso se ve a un hombre sin techo; un cuadro anticipa el mundo polarizado de hoy con su alerta sobre los estados desunidos entre republicanos y demócratas; otro muestra al dibujante-ratón atrapado entre Osama bin Laden, con una cimitarra sangrante, y Bush, con un arma de fuego: “Igualmente aterrorizado por Al Qaeda y por su propio gobierno, nuestro héroe se puso a mirar viejas tiras cómicas en vez de trabajar”, se lee.

The attack reappears as a chorus, here and there, as Spiegelman advances towards the political climax of his work: “When the planes collided with the towers, I was thrown into some alternative reality where George W.Bush was president! ".

Spiegelman is rarely warm in his opinions, and the criticisms for his anti-bushism in full invasion of Iraq were added to their long history of controversy.A 1993 New Yorker for Valentine."I couldn't understand why Afro -Caribbeans were offended.I thought they didn't want to leave the Jasidicos the monopoly of the offense, ”he ironized when he remembered Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)."I thought everyone should kiss and reconcile.I didn't expect controversy ".

When it was the massacre at Columbine high school, he drew a yellow school bus from which armed children.For July 4, the independence of the United States, drew the atomic bomb. En 1999, poco después de que cuatro oficiales del Departamento de Policía Nueva York (NYPD) mataran de 41 tiros a un inmigrante de Guinea, Amadou Diallo, desarmado, dibujó a un policía en un juego de tiro al blanco que ofrecía “41 tiros a 10 centavos”.

Days later 250 NYPD agents made a picket in front of The New Yorker offices and a New York Post racist editorial recommended that when he needed protection he called “Al Sharpton instead of 911” and insulted him."I felt very proud of that lid," he told Larb.“The story of Amadou Diallo had come out in the news, but it was considered interest to black people.This lid comes out and suddenly it became super chic to go to the City Council to protest Diallo. Estuvo Susan Sarandon y mucha otra gente, se convirtió en algo de toda la ciudad”.

"And there was another controversy, for a drawing in The Nation," Larb continued.

—Yes, in 2014, when Israel was at war with the Palestinians in Gaza.

Spiegelman says not to be a sionist, but rather an agnostic that would feel “in favor of a solution of a state if so, or a solution of two states if it were so, but I do not like a solution where aState occupies another ".And in that 2012 illustration, that no publication accepted, except The Nation, made a collage with an illustration of Bible stories of the 1930s.Counted:

Goliath approached from the horizon to a little David, who was in the foreground with a deep.And I discovered that, if I cut Goliath and put it next to David, they were the same size.It is an old optical illusion that has to do with the perspective lines and a scale that becomes smaller.So the epigraph said: "Perspective in Gaza: the illusion of David and Goliath".It seemed like a useful snapshot of reality, an image that helps to understand events from a different perspective.

His wife put the image on the author page that Spiegelman has on Facebook.“I received many likes and I got excited, and then I looked at the comments.It turns out that Like means ‘we are going to kill you where we find you, son of a bitch’ ”, closed the story.

The following year, after the massacre in the writing of Charlie Hebdo, the bloody attack in Paris, Spiegelman bothered him that a group of writers of the Pen Club boycoteara a dinner for benefit because the organization had given Charlie Hebdo the prize to valueIn freedom of expression."If they didn't deserve it, who?".He then drew "Notes from a first amendment fundamentalist" - new, only the Nation published it: "Notes from a fundamentalist of the first amendment", which is the constitutional text that establishes freedom of expression in the United States.

Spiegelman no disfruta mucho de dar entrevistas porque siente que un ratón de 300 kilos se le viene encima con cada pedido: tendrá que hablar de Maus, claro.The book reached the Bestsellers list of The New York Times, translated into 20 languages and "became canonical," the artist told the CBC Canadian radio, with less arrogance than concern: "I thought it was an anomaly, and now It is a gender.Science fiction, fantasy, holocaust.And it baffles me.I don't know if in a cheerful way ".

As many of his colleagues and acquaintances are the same comic atmosphere, when he received the news from Pulitzer he thought it was a joke. “Pero recibí una llamada urgente de un dibujante maravilloso, también amigo, Jules Feiffer: ‘Tienes que entender lo que recibiste.It is either a license to kill or something that will kill you, ”he told The Guardian.

En los últimos años, sin embargo, se ha permitido hablar más abiertamente de Maus, “de una manera que mi yo más joven miraría con desprecio”, siguió en CBC. ¿La razón? “Trump”.

Very carefully avoided every occasion of caricaturizing the former Republican president, because he considers him a narcissistic and any sample of attention feeds that type of personality, he said.“Take a step back and I tried to see what the hell is happening to us.It makes me want to withdraw something I said in 2001 ″. Luego de meses sin poder superar el impacto de los atentados del 11 de septiembre, comprendió que podía trabajar sobre el tema, en lo que por fin se convertiría en Sin la sombra de las torres. “El desastre es mi musa”, se burló de sí mismo, y se puso manos a la obra."Now the disaster is only a fucking disaster," he added, back to 2016-2020.

In that kind of pause was when Covid-19 started. Con Mouly se retiraron a una propiedad que tienen en los bosques de Connecticut y allí lo encontró el pedido de ilustrar una novela breve de Robert Coover."Well, if you don't have mice or Jews I would like to see if I can try," he replied. Street Cop, era la oportunidad perfecta para no trabajar sobre la realidad política y esperar el fin de la pandemia en algún momento.

“I really admire coover, I like his work a long time ago.And here that neither Jews nor mice, ”the project told Larb."And best of all: it was a dystopia, but it wasn't what I was living.It was next door.That allowed me to approach and inhabit it ". Si de Maus a Sin la sombra de las torres pasaron 10 años, en 2021, al cabo de otros 10, salió este nuevo gran proyecto (aunque el formato del libro es pequeño) de Spiegelman.

Los dibujos finales de Street Cop retoman y profundizan las visiones apocalípticas de In the Shadow of No Towers, pero destilados por esa distancia y esa reflexión que la inmediatez de los atentados le impidió. “Creo que con Towers avancé como pude, como quien atraviesa un huracán”, analizó.“The style changed sequence to sequence and panel to panel.And that seemed very correct to treat the fragmentation that caused me 11-S ”.

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