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Graphic Narrative: An Introduction

Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers presents readers with a truly collaborative text housing two different yet parallel collections: a collection of his own ten graphic pages which represent the memoirist’s struggle after the World Trade Center attacks, and a collection of “old comic strips” which were “the only cultural artifacts that could get past [his] defenses” at that time. This particular collection of comic strips reflects Spiegelman’s own mourning process after September 11; including old comic strips about New York City, patriotism, and the tension between high and low culture in the United States at the turn of the last century, he is able to reflect a certain historical nostalgia about New York City specifically, and about the United States more generally. Through the technique of palimpsest, the materiality of ephemera, and an understanding of seriality as both a mode of production and a way to represent the self and daily life, Spiegelman assembles images and artifacts into a substantial text employed in collecting and archiving memory. The things that Spiegelman believes shouldn’t be ephemeral, like the towers or democracy itself, are shown in this memoir as fleeting and warped, while the things that would seem to be solely ephemera, daily comic strips or an image witnessed before the towers collapsed, may be indelible.