Art Spiegelman’s Politics Beginning to Overshadow His Comics Legacy

The UK Guardian interviewed far-left cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who says America’s in need of a “counter-revolution”, which sounds very appalling coming from his perspective. And when he began drawing comics again after a hiatus in the post-911 years, this is what he did: He produced a series about 9/11 for the German magazine Die Zeit, which was later run by other European magazines and American Jewish weekly the Forward. On one page he describes himself as “equally terrorised by al-Qaida and by my own government”. He felt that other American publications were too quiescent in the aftermath of the attacks, and not yet receptive to his fear that the US government was using 9/11 as cover for a massive crackdown on civil liberties and to launch xenophobic wars. “Sigh! It’s hard to be an artist who is consistently Seconds Ahead of His Time,” he writes in the foreword to In the Shadow of No Towers, a book that compiled these comics and is being reissued to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. (Although, he says, it may come out late – a shipment has been held up in the strait of Hormuz.) Why was he so alert to the implications for US civil liberties? “Well, my tendency is not to trust th...