What has Art Spiegelman been doing in the 12 years since he finished Maus?

Answer: drawing editorial cartoons for The New Yorker, publishing various children's comics and witnessing firsthand the largest catastrophe in American history.

The flaming skeleton of the World Trade Center figures prominently throughout In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman's new graphic novel about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He describes the image as something that is both "awesome" and "tragic," but, in any case, impossible to shake.

Towers is not at all a follow-up to Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part graphic novel where the Jews are mice and the Nazis cats. It would be unfortunate if it was interpreted that way.

Whereas Maus was a chronological narration of a particular story (Spiegelman's father's Holocaust experience), Towers is a montage of Spiegelman's turbulent emotional reaction to the cataclysmic events of 9/11, events the Manhattanite witnessed up close.

It lacks the structural cohesion of Maus, but this seems to be intentional. Towers comes across as the frenzied ramblings of someone suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome -- a condition Spiegelman admits to being diagnosed with after 9/11.

"I still believe the world is ending," he writes in his intro. "But I concede that it seems to be ending more slowly than I once thought ... so I figured I'd make a book."

The "book" is unlike anything I've ever seen. The vibrant, colorful pages are printed on something called "heavy stock," which means they're more cumbersome than typical comic book paper.

The pages of Towers are designed vertically instead of horizontally, thus combining the two opened pages into one fluid succession of panels, resembling a colorful sequential poster more than a comic book.

Like any good graphic novel, though, Towers' value comes not just from its look, but from its ideas. Probably my favorite panel in the book is a relatively unadorned one.

The drawing is of Spiegelman crouched on the ground with an American flag draped over the top half of his body.

"I should feel safer under here," he says via a thought bubble, "but damn it! I can't see a thing!"

Throughout Towers, Spiegelman struggles to overcome the internal struggle between his high-strung, emotional reaction to the tragedy and the cynical intellectual distance he continually tries to put forth. Ultimately, the two extremes complement each other quite well, yielding a narrative rife with despair and anger. His paranoid fury is reserved not just for the terrorists either.

"You rob from the poor and give to your pals like a parody of Robin Hood while distracting me with your damn oil war!" he lashes at President Bush in a text box over a hazy distortion of the glowing towers.

Spiegelman strays a bit, though, in his somewhat simplistic approach to the United States' ideological divide. Middle America, he claims, is "where 44 percent of Americans who don't believe in evolution tend to gather," despite admitting that he's never even visited any of the so-called "red states" personally.

Also, I was personally un-enthused about Spiegelman's decision to tack on 10 extra pages of vintage comic strips from the early 20th century. Although he says it's because these strips helped get him through the tragedy, they do not hold this special significance for me or anyone else not personally attached to Hogan's Alley.

Spiegelman may not be the first artist to capitalize on the 9/11 tragedy, but he is the first one that I know of who was actually there.

His is a fascinating artistic account of what that day was like for those who witnessed it up close as well as a potent political diatribe against those whom he feels exploited the tragedy for far more insidious reasons than art.