Spiegelman and Miller in Dark

Spiegelman and Miller in Dark Presentation In this short essay, the author will compare Spiegelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers" and Miller's "Dark Knight Returns" as depictions of an urban center like Gotham City. Like their human counterparts, the cities reflect the societies that built them there in the first place. They are decaying slowly and crumbling around the ears of the city inhabitant. Both graphic novels are printed on heavy board stock and are dark in character and in color.

On the cover of both graphic novels, black figures prominently as the background color of both New York City and Gotham City. Both cities have architectural styles with exaggerated characteristics, such as massively multi-tiered flying buttresses on cathedrals or the huge statuary. The larger than life city scape provides a surreal background that is a commentary upon the corrupt and crumbling urban environment that is literally falling down around the ears of the people. After ten years out of the public eye Gotham City is in the throes of violence.

This brings Batman back as a middle aged vigilante. Miller created a tough, gritty portrayal of reality in The Dark Knight Returns is set in an anti-Utopian near-future version of Gotham City that is clearly dark, gritty and polluted Miller 11). It looks like everyday is Halloween and October 31st. The problem is that All Saint's Day is not all sweetness and light and the solution to the problem as we will allude to later in the essay will leave us wondering if the cure is worse than the disease.

In The Shadow of No Towers, suggests parallels between the Holocaust suffered by the older Spiegelmans and that of their son on September 11, 2001. Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers comic strips were too politically incendiary to find wide release in the United States. Spiegelman is and was a sharp critic of the administration of former President George W. Bush. Spiegelman's New York is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction.

It's an artful New Yorker's complaining rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by an apocalyptic pessimist as the author comments that "after all, disaster is my muse (Spiegelman 1.)." The artist lives in downtown Manhattan and really believes that the world ended on Sept. 11, 2001. It's merely a technicality that people in the city go continue to go about their pointless, hectic daily lives.

He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his registered trademark sense of existential end of days doom. The imagery from the second page on is replete with oversize graphic novel illustrations that reflect the real Manhattan skyline on any cloudy day (ibid, 2). The image of Gotham in Miller's construction is similar with its dark and grimy reality that threatens to eat up the reader in a spray of acid rain (Miller 11).

The imagery of a middle-aged Bruce Wayne walking in the gritty Gotham does nothing to help this imagery of decaying city landscape that reflects his own aging and decaying body and life which he wonders about in the meditative cynicism of old age. Even the street preacher who is carrying a sign wales in pain like the dying city that knows the end is just around the corner (ibid 12).

"I'm not even sure I'll live long enough," says a cigarette smoking, cartoon-rodent Spiegelman, "for cigarettes to kill me (Spiegelman 3)." The book is a tirade against the administration of former President George W. Bush ("brigands suffering from war fever") and when least expected, an erudite recapitulate on the history of the American newspaper comic strip born as it was during the yellow journalism of the circulation wars of the 1890s right near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan (ibid 4).

It is ironic that in both books that the world's financial capital is associated with evil and darkness. In The Dark Knight Returns, Gotham City is hell on earth, street gangs roam but there are no heroes. Decay is ubiquitous. It is 10 years since the last recorded sighting of the Batman and things have got worse than ever. Bruce Wayne is close to being a broken man but something is keeping him sane: the need to see change and the belief that he can orchestrate some of that change.

Unlike in Spiegelman, there is hope that things might get better. While things are dire, the heroes are still alive and around to train the new generation of fighters against evil. In the Spiegelman comic, the heartbroken narcissist remarks that he was close shaven, but now slowly becomes a mouse. Ironically, he seems more composed in rodent form. At least he now perceives reality as it really is and as a mouse experiences it, always looking up nervously and wondering what will hit him next (ibid 3-4).

Now, he can wait for the other shoe to drop on him like the little mouse he is and as the evil leaders actually see him and acknowledge the constructed reality as collateral damage that he could not avoid (ibid 2). New York looks much the same as Gotham after 9/11. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani's beautiful city has had its seemingly everlasting, eternal monuments to commerce and trade destroyed in a matter of minutes.

Millions remember the events of the September 11 attacks on the twin towers and the place we were at the time Not many can do it with the force, expressed in comic art form in Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers. Spiegelman presents a personalized, political, and critical diary of his experience of 9/11 and its after effects. Composed from September 11, 2001 to August 31, 2003, the comic spells out in essay and old comic strip reproductions from the early 20th century.

Spiegelman's own feelings of dislocation, grief, anxiety, and outrage over the attacks and what he feels were the subsequent "hijacking" and kidnapping of the terrorist attack by the Bush administration to serve what he believes is a twisted political agenda. Like in Miller's Gotham city, there are no heroes to rescue the people from the terrible cityscape.

The central image in the sequence of original broadsides, which returns as a leitmotif in each strip, is Spiegelman's impressionistic vision of the disintegration of the towers in flames as they are coming down before they disappear in a pile of dust (Spiegelman 2). As Manhattanites, Spiegelman and his family experienced the event firsthand. But the images and styles in the book are as fragmentary and ever-shifting as Spiegelman's reflections and reactions.

The author's closing comments as reflected in the headlines on back covers of Spiegelman reflects a larger and more chilling irony that permeates In the Shadow of No Towers. Despite the ephemeral nature of the comic strip as an art form, the old comics at the back of the book have outlasted the seemingly indestructible twin towers. In the same way, Spiegelman's memoir has immortalized the towers that vanished amazingly in minutes in a pile of hot and glowing debris.

Miller's gritty, untidy artwork is perfect for The Dark Knight Return's grim depiction of the dark and seedy garbage infested City of Gotham, does nor depict an ultra-glossy, futuristic technocracy> Rather, like Spiegelman, he presents an overwhelmingly dark picture of urban reality and life. Perhaps Spiegelman is unfortunately correct. Cynicism is always philosophically they only defense-able position and most of us can not wrap our minds around it.

While Miller's reality is dark, in an imaginary world like his, there can be an alternate reality that is not quite as grim as the world that we all have to live in and deal.