State of the art Art Spiegelman’s September 11, Marjane Satrapi’s Iran, and Joe Sacco’s Sarajevo BY JON GARELICK
	In the Shadow of No Towers By Art Spiegelman. Pantheon, 38 pages, $19.95. Persepolis 2 By Marjane Satrapi. Pantheon, 192 pages. $17.95. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo By Joe Sacco. Drawn and Quarterly, 112 pages, $24.95.
	In Spiegelman’s footsteps: Satrapi and Sacco Although she hadn’t met Art Spiegelman at the time, Marjane Satrapi recalls that Maus was an important inspiration in telling her story of growing up in revolutionary Iran in comic-book form. An artist and illustrator, Satrapi wrote children’s stories before she created her acclaimed memoir, Persepolis (2003). "Maus was the first comic that I read that was not a comedy and was not a superhero story," she said recently, over the phone from Paris. Encouraged by studio-mates in Paris to set her own story to pictures and words, Satrapi dove into the form. Originally released in two volumes, it became an immediate hit in France, was translated into a dozen languages and was picked up by Pantheon/Random House in the States. Whereas the first Persepolis deals with war and revolution, Persepolis 2 opens with Satrapi as an adolescent in Vienna, where her liberal-minded middle-class parents have sent her to school. Persepolis 2 is, in its own way, as moving as its war-torn companion volume (in which close relatives and friends are imprisoned and executed by the Iranian government or killed by Iraqi bombs). Like its predecessor, Persepolis 2 takes the particulars of the exiled young Marji and her depression ("I was nothing. I was a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity") and puts them into the framework of typical adolescent and young-adult anxieties. It also takes us through Marji’s return to Tehran, an early marriage and divorce, and her final exile. As in Spiegelman’s work, the comic-book form serves Satrapi’s subject matter. Her simple, woodcut-style forms have a childlike simplicity that’s belied by a taste for stylized design (comparisons have been made to Matisse) and Satrapi’s grounding in the history of Persian art. Where Spiegelman employs parody and satire, Satrapi scores with understatement: the subtext of loneliness and loss underlies the whole book and gives extra power to that final separation at the end. Satrapi is still in touch with her parents, who visit her in Paris and talk with her regularly on the phone, but she knows she can’t go back under the current regime. "Today in my country you have journalists who are in jail for saying the same things I’m talking about," she says. "I don’t have any reason to think that my life will be safer than theirs." Joe Sacco, meanwhile, can be seen as one of the most literal of the current crop of comic-book artists. After early work writing autobiographical and fantasy pieces, he returned to his college training as a journalist. Drawing on travels to Palestinian refugee camps and Bosnia, he has given an Orwellian journalistic dimension to the comic-book form. Palestine (Fantagraphics, 1995) was striking for its behind-the-scenes depiction of life in the Gaza Strip, in which an anonymous group was individuated in Sacco’s interview material and in the meticulous rendering of faces. His Safe Area Gorazde (Fantagraphics, 2000) was equally compelling in depicting the miseries of the war in eastern Bosnia. Sacco’s The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, brought out in late 2003, has just entered its second printing. Unlike his previous books, it focuses entirely on a single individual, Neven, a "fixer" who negotiates day-to-day connections for foreign journalists but who has a somewhat nebulous past as a paramilitary. With a Muslim mother and a Serb father, Neven says, "I decided to stake my cards with Bosnia. I don’t know why." Sacco implicates himself in Neven’s moral equivocations — he sees himself as the journalist-exploiter, drawn to disaster. "Put yourself in Neven’s shoes," he repeats while relating one shady dealing or another. And, "Put yourself in my shoes." Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde were marked by their panoramic sweep. The Fixer is more claustrophobic, and the story of Neven is, perhaps intentionally, not the whole story. But Sacco’s drawing and sequencing of panels — the heart of comic-book art — are breathtaking. Turning the page from a tight "one-shot" of Sacco standing amid rubble to a two-page epic spread of blasted cityscape, you know you’re in the hands of a master.

When Art Spiegelman published Maus in 1986, he set a new standard for how far comic books could go. In this "graphic novel," he wrote about the Holocaust, telling the story of his father’s experience at Auschwitz. His formal inventiveness (turning the Jews into mice, the Nazis into cats) and his ear for Jewish-American dialogue allowed him to engage a subject seemingly unapproachable, and it won him a Pulitzer Prize. Now, after years spent creating mostly cover illustrations for the New Yorker, he’s returned to the comic-book form ("comix," as he likes to say) to tackle another horror: the attack on the World Trade Center.

The scale and approach of In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon, to be published September 7) are altogether different from those of Maus. Spiegelman witnessed the World Trade Center disaster firsthand, unlike the Holocaust. He and his family live in SoHo, not far from Ground Zero, and a recurring story line of In the Shadow of No Towers regards Spiegelman’s attempts with his wife, Françoise Mouly, to get their teenaged daughter, Nadja, out of a nearby school. We never see them complete the task. Instead, time stops, as Spiegelman returns again and again to the moment of the north tower’s collapse, and his fear, rage, and anxiety come pouring out on the page.

Maus, published in black-and-white, laid out on six-by-nine-inch pages, proceeds as an orderly, sequential narrative — novelistic. In the Shadow of No Towers goes back to the era before the comic book, to the comics’ birth in publications like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. These were not the episodic four- or five-panel "strips" of the later dailies, but full-page broadsheet illustrations, often collagelike. Spiegelman — who says in his introduction these old comics were the only art form in which he could find solace in the days after September 11 — returns to this form. In the Shadow of No Towers measures 10-by-14 1/2 inches, but each page is designed to be read folded out, so a full "page" is actually 14 1/2- by-20. The collage-style design of each page includes multiple, nonsequential "strips" as well as single-panel illustrations. You can start anywhere on a page, and read its content in any order.

There are 10 of these "episodes," but there’s much more. Spiegelman’s inspiration comes from the comforting "unpretentious ephemera" of those old broadsheets. But, he also points out, "comics pages are architectural structures — the narrative rows of panels are like stories of a building...." Early-comics genius Winsor McCay, he says, "drew monumental structures designed to last." In the Shadow of No Towers is published on glossy stock pressed onto thick cardboard pages. Its cover is a gloss-and-matte-finish version of Spiegelman’s black-on-black image for the post–September 11 New Yorker. Aside from the McCay-like designs, this is, as the old North Point Press used to tout in its use of acid-free paper, a "permanent book."

Spiegelman’s introductory essay can stand on its own as a personal reflection on September 11. And after his first-person graphic episodes, an essay on the history of the newspaper-comic supplement introduces some of the sources of his inspiration: McCay’s Nemo in Slumberland; Richard Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, which introduced the Yellow Kid; Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids; and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Several of these, too, are reproduced full-size.

That should give you an idea of the scale of In the Shadow of No Towers. Into it, Spiegelman has put everything he knows about American comics and American history. Passed out at his drawing table, wearing a Maus mask, he has nightmares of Osama and George W. standing on either side of him, his desktop populated with the characters of cartoon history — the life of his subconscious. The Katzenjammer Kids show up wearing burning twin-tower hats. Cartoon tropes about the sky falling and waiting for that second shoe to drop recur in page after page. The narrative voice shifts from first person to third and back again.

The twin towers themselves, of course, are the dominant motif. There are towerlike parallel stacked panels, and the recurring image of "the looming north tower’s glowing bones just before it vaporized." In one paranoid fantasy ("I insist the sky is falling; they roll their eyes and tell me it’s only my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder"), the comic frame actually turns sideways, its edge becoming one of the towers. And then there is the smoke — the toxic cloud of dust covering lower Manhattan conflating with the smoke of the Holocaust ovens in Maus and the smoke from Spiegelman’s endless chain of cigarettes.

Paying tribute to his early-comics heroes, Spiegelman epitomizes the same subversive streak that brought the Yellow Kid to life more than 100 years ago. But in his satiric comedy ("Gotten Himmel!" cries a mama Katzenjammer fleeing the collapsing towers) he also establishes himself as a link in Jewish-American comedy from Lenny Bruce and Philip Roth to Jon Stewart. He has given unity of design and purpose to free-floating anxiety and rage. Scale and monumentality are brought together with that sense of life as transient, perilous, fragile, a world in which his Holocaust-survivor parents "taught me to always keep my bags packed."

There is crucial variation in the black-on-black cover design of In the Shadow of No Towers — a four-color horizontal rectangle against those black vertical forms, filled with falling cartoon characters against a tiny cityscape. Yes, they suggest those falling victims of 9/11, but they’re also a window of light in the abyss.

Marjane Satrapi will discuss Persepolis 2 in a Center for New Words event in the third-floor conference center at Simmons College, 300 the Fenway, on September 9 at 7 p.m.; call (617) 876-5310. She will be at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner, on September 10 at 7 p.m.; call (617) 566-6660. Art Spiegelman discusses In the Shadow of No Towers in a Harvard Book Store reading on September 20 at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, at 6:30 p.m. Call (617) 661-1515.