09.04.20 In the Shadow of No Towers Comic 5 & 6 Notes

Both 5 & 6 seem more linear so that the audience can follow them.  The top of 5 is a bit more ambiguous than others, but mostly this flows more clearly.  A less chaotic layout seems to stick with you better than the other organization, but Spiegelman also seems to be better able to organize his thoughts.  The level of chaos also seems to reflect how easy or difficult the events are to handle emotionally.

Comic 5
Government response is obviously not helping (tossing oil on a fire?) and is also being politicized to further unrelated goals; Uncle on 5 also shows up in 2 spanking the tower twins (punishing them for being on fire?); Uncle tries to deal with bees because they’re so small and fly away, so it’s just easier to squash the giant Iraknid; Uncle seems to think that by giving oil (which is the most valuable resource, which is money) he is helping without actually assessing the problem at all; running from the bees the door of the house is obviously open, but the government figure runs inside and locks the American people out, keeping them from being safe although they had the opportunity.

Comic 6
Image of Spiegelman falling- Through the Looking Glass-type image, tumbling from somewhere normal to somewhere completely insane; comparing himself to the jumpers; in free-fall; down (on his luck)
Little Nemo- perpetually lost inside a dream world, only to be awoken by his mother; is the homeless woman experiencing something similar, like being snapped out of a dream?; appearance of this and other old comic images becomes a symbol of “the presence of the past,” the way trauma always keeps returning, also the way old comics satirized the weird little things in the world and now the world in them seems to have come to life
The picture of the street woman’s inner turmoil- even she was affected by the events of 9/11, and they seem like a dream or a scene from Dante’s Inferno; everything in the whole world is on fire; the pale horse, the eye at the center of the wheel, horsemen of the apocalypse, and other images taken from Revelation; cross and crescent as conflicting religious symbols; the way the image interrupts a straightforward progression of time and then the story resumes as normal after it
What happened on this day is so crazy that it can only be undersstood as the manifestation of an insane woman’s visions.

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