by JULIET WATERS

Open In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman's 10-inch by 14-inch coffee-table-sized memoir, and the first thing you'll see is the front page of the New York World, September 11, 1901. It's five days after President William McKinley was shot by a self-described anarchist who, it turns out, was more mentally ill than politically driven. The lead story is McKinley's "slight change for the worse" (he would die from gangrene on Sept. 14). Less prominent is the arrest of Emma Goldman for conspiracy. The "Anarchist Queen," as she's described here, will be jailed for two weeks before it's established that she had no substantial relationship to the assassin. Her right to lecture and to mail the magazine she edits will, however, be taken away.

That time of crisis, paranoia and injustice is virtually forgotten. It's impossible to believe the same could happen to our own contemporary turn-of-the-century tragedy. Given the amount of energy that has gone into memorializing 9/11, a commemorative coffee-table comix memoir might seem to some a little bit too much, too late.

But this is the work of comix icon Art Spiegelman. "Disaster is my muse," writes Spiegelman, who hasn't produced a graphic novel since Maus II, the story of his parents' experience of the Holocaust. Not that he hasn't been busy. A staff writer and artist at The New Yorker until 2003, he designed the now classic cover of the black-on-black Twin Towers. He and wife Françoise Mouly have followed up their seminal '80s anthology Raw with Little Lit, an anthology of comix for children. Soon after 9/11, however, Spiegelman decided to return to doing his own comix full time.

According to his introduction, the mood of hysteria and panic he felt at the time didn't really fit the "complacent tone" of The New Yorker. In 2002, there was no place in the American media for a panel he drew of himself feeling equally terrorized by al-Qaeda and the U.S. government. So he took up an offer to publish his 9/11 memoir in Die Zeit, a weekly broadsheet in Germany. "The giant scale of the colour newsprint pages seemed perfect for oversized skyscrapers and outsized events." It hearkens back to a time not so long ago when journalists and illustrators seemed to have a lot more space.

In the Shadow of No Towers is largely a memoir of the days just after the attack. For Spiegelman this was an intensely traumatic week. His daughter Nadja had just started high school in a building at the foot of the towers. Classmates had parents who worked at the World Trade Center, and many of the kids saw bodies falling past their windows. Because of the rush to retrieve Nadja, Spiegelman was right at the site, close enough that he still has the image burned into his memory of the north tower's glowing bones, just before its collapse. Another memory that haunts him is the smell. He remembers his father trying to describe the smell of the smoke in Auschwitz as "indescribable." This too is the only word that describes the odour in lower Manhattan.

Smell is an incredibly powerful trigger, and In the Shadow of No Towers reads like the work of someone who's been traumatized from several directions simultaneously: as a resident of a neighbourhood that was a war zone for many months afterward, as the parent of a child who was vulnerable, as the child of survivors, and finally, as an American cultural dissident who, arguably, may have gotten a little too comfortable and is desperately trying to distinguish "neurotic depression from well-founded despair."

By including a short history of comics and by incorporating imagery from the most popular strips, c. 1901, Spiegelman frames 9/11 in a form that seems ever destined for extinction: the comic strip. The mood he creates is one with equal measures of timelessness and transience. For the right reader, open to its rich, if cryptic, nuances, this is the most powerful memorial 9/11 may ever have.

In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman,
Pantheon, hc, 42pp, $27.95