Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda. He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey—with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit—the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.

Udgivet af Pantheon 2004

Art Spiegelman
Den amerikanske tegneseriekunstner Art Spiegelman blev født den 15. februar 1948 i Sverige. Hans forældre var jødiske flygtninge på vej til USA efter at have overlevet naziregimets rædsler i Polen og Tyskland. Spiegelman begyndte sin tegneseriebane i den amerikanske underground-bølge i 1970'erne, hvor han medvirkede i forskellige antologihæfter. Af Spiegelmans værker er det vist kun hans absolutte mesterværk Maus om forældrenes oplevelser under anden verdenskrig, der er udgivet på dansk. I 1992 fik Spiegelman tildelt Pulitzer-prisen for Maus. Art Spiegelman er gift med franskfødte Françoise Mouly. Deres datter Nadja Spiegelman er forfatter. (Ovenstående personbeskrivelse er taget fra ComicWiki under en Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 licens)