history seemed to be the subject of spiegleman’s philosophic struggle. world history versus personal history, biography v. autobiography, abstract historical account v. first hand account…spiegleman is worried how 9/11 will be remembered. he talks about how the first cartoon characters (starting in 1893) were drawn to be remembered for that morning and then forgotten. how interesting would it be, then, to unearth the dead comics and juxtapose them with present catastrophe. are these characters, krazy kat, katzenjammer kids, foxy grandpa, still alive? or were they destined for history to forget them. spiegleman chooses comics that feature explosions, falling towers, ethnic slurs on porpose. but they all, as spiegleman is well aware of, tap into their cultural milieux and are politically charged. silly antiquated comic characters take on new lives, spiegleman cares for and nutures them, he raises them from the dead. the comic, especially In the Shadow of No Towers, should not be forgotten.
spiegleman relies on history to finish his narrative. his memory of the events of 9/11 slowly comes back to him and sometimes it’s unreliable. only the incessant vision of the burning towers remain with him, so he turns to old comic strips to "flood my eyes and brain with something other than images of burning towers" but he also has nothing left to say, or, he’d rather piggyback on what some cartoonist in 1936 had to say rather than invent a new way of saying it presently. mckinley was assasinated by some crazy ‘other’ so the government arrested every suspect associated with this ‘other’. somwhere in the back of that issue of the New York World newspaper was a comic strip, some other history, there’s always two histories.
so for my personal history, id like to say that i have nothing to say and im sticking to it. this culture was inundated with 9/11 stories and responses for a year, then everything fell silent. during this distracted time, our leaders had their way (yes, even landing the republican national convention in NEW YORK!). stuff happened that according to spiegleman made his SCREAM! he found old comics as a remedy, a coping device, a source of inspiration. ill stick with having nothing to say.