Â‚Every Day Is 9/11!Â•Ž: Re-Constructing Ground Zero In

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MARTIN LUND Linnaeus University

‘Every day is 9/11!’: Re-constructing Ground Zero in three US comics

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article analyses three comics series: writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Tony comics Harris’ Ex Machina (August 2004–August 2010); writer Brian Wood and artist Ground Zero Riccardo Burchielli’s DMZ (November 2005–February 2012); and writer Garth 9/11 Ennis and artist Darick Robertson’s The Boys (October 2006–November 2012). archifictions Taking literary critic Laura Frost’s concept of ‘archifictions’ as its starting point, the War on Terror article discusses how these series frame the September 11 attacks on New York and architecture their aftermath, but its primary concern is with their engagement with the larger social ramifications of 9/11 and with the War on Terror, and with how this engagement is rooted in and centred on Ground Zero. It argues that this rooting allows these comics’ creators to critique post-9/11 US culture and foreign policy, but that it also, ultimately, serves to disarm the critique that each series voices in favour of closure through recourse to recuperative architecture.

The attacks on September 11 continue to be felt in US culture. Comics are no exception. Comics publishers, large and small, responded immediately and comics about the attacks or the War on Terror have been coming out ever since. Largely missing from these comics, however, is an engagement with Ground Zero; after depicting the Twin Towers struck or falling, artists and writers rarely give the area a second thought.

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There are three major exceptions: Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris’ Ex Machina (August 2004–August 2010); Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s DMZ (November 2005–February 2012); and Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys (October 2006–November 2012). This article discusses how these series frame the attacks and their aftermath, but its primary concern is with how they engage with larger social ramifications of 9/11 and with the War on Terror, and with how this engagement is rooted in and centred on Ground Zero. I argue that this rooting allowed the creators to critique post- 9/11 US culture and foreign policy, but that it also, ultimately, served to disarm that critique. I do so for multiple reasons: first, to broaden the expansive, but narrowly focused, scholarship on comics and 9/11; second, to add comics to the larger critical discussion about pop cultural representations of 9/11; and third, to contribute to the still-poorly understood meaning of Ground Zero in US cultural memory and production in the years following the 9/11 attacks.

GROUND ZERO, COMICS AND 9/11 Fans and scholars have long claimed that US comics have a special relationship with New York City. This claim is particularly common in relation to Marvel Comics (Bainbridge 2010; Costello 2009: 11) or to superhero comics (Reynolds 1992: 18–25). Others go so far as to claim, for example, that NYC ‘enjoys a special relationship to the cartoon arts’ (Worcester 2011: 139). Two particular problems with such claim stand out: first, they do not explain the significance of this supposed relationship; second, and more important, they do not account for the fact that the relationship between real-world space and its depiction is never one of direct reproduction, but of representation. Visually, cartooning works via ‘amplification through simplification’ (McCloud 1993: 24–59). This process strips images down to focus on particular details or aspects, allowing them to be more intense in their appeal for reader identification. Moreover, comics writing, particularly of serialized comics, regularly addresses current events or articulates an abstracted interpretation of predominant popular attitudes and sentiments. The end-result is never a portrait of the world the comic claims to portray, but always a symbolic, selec- tive and ideologically informed imaginative construction (Lund 2015b: 36–37). Further, as historian Kevin Rozario has noted, representations of 9/11 are themselves far from direct: the attacks did not disclose reality but provided ‘the occasion for constructing a sense of “reality” […] that validated some ideologies and feelings while casting others as insignificant, inauthentic, and lacking moral urgency’ (2007: 185). Ground Zero was reconceived as ‘sacred space’ and invested with meaning by multiple, conflicting, claims to and about it (cf. Sturken 2004; Greenspan 2013; Nobel 2005). By early 2002, it was an ideologically charged memory site, ‘ready to be filled with whatever meaning or ideology or image the present decides to assign’ (Stamelman 2003: 18). When reading comics about 9/11 and Ground Zero, then, it is important to consider how they are figured and what consequences and ways forward are highlighted. There is not room to discuss all 9/11 comics, but their ideological range should be noted. Marvel released three comics within a few months, all of which were marked with belligerence and adhered to the martial framing seen in official channels and the media (Straczynski et al. 2001; Anon. 2002c, 2002d; cf. Entman 2003). More publishers followed suit, publishing anthologies that ranged from the aggressive and the racist to the pacifistic and the

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carefully considered (Mason 2002; Anon. A 2002a, 2002b). Other reactions ranged from the highly individual – verging on myopic – and confrontational (Linsner 2002) to the politically radical (Tobocman et al. 2001). A few later comics are also worth considering here: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) is the writer-artist’s musings about the effects of the attacks on him personally and about their political uses; Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s adaptation of the 9/11 Report (2006) is a piece that privileges New York; and writer Alissa Torres and artist Sungyoon Choi’s American Widow (2008) is a critical account of the writer’s experiences after her husband’s death in the attacks. These comics are either national or individual in focus, while the local level – New York’s experience – is almost completely absent. Although, as anthropologist Neil Smith noted, ‘[t]he World Trade Center catastrophe’ was a profoundly local event only gradually made “sensible”, as “9/11”, for televi- sion viewers, it is the mediated experience that is often privileged’ (2002: 97; cf. Strozier 2014). I am not arguing that it is wrong to consider national or global effects; 9/11 was a national and global set of events (Frost 2014: 199), but many of their repercussions initially developed with reference to Ground Zero, only for the place to become peripheral. Ground Zero is not entirely absent in the comics cited, but almost. In Marvel’s first comic, new Twin Towers rise out of the old ones’ smoke (Straczynski et al. 2001). Rebuilding, happening between panels, is a fait accompli, and, by implication, so is the city’s healing; what is important is ‘revenge’ for the attacks. In the other two, Ground Zero is only a place from which to look towards Afghanistan and the war (Anon. 2002c, 2002d). In the two anthologies published by other US superhero publishers, rebuilding is a topic of its own in a few stories, as are the towers themselves, but is always either an expression of national resolve (cf. Ross 2002: 127) or ‘a nostalgic desire for the towers’ return but also a persistent disbelief that they are indeed gone’ (Frost 2014: 202). For Spiegelman, the towers are a ghost that signifies the turning of reality into politically useful memory (2004); in the Report, they are a target of the attacks (Jacobson and Colón 2006); and in American Widow, Ground Zero and the towers are almost entirely absent (Torres and Choi 2008). The material chosen for this article can be tentatively viewed as what cultural critic Laura Frost calls ‘archifictions’: ‘literature that deploys architecture – and architects – to think through the spatial and temporal boundaries of September 11 as well as the implications of repairing national trauma through literal building’ (2014: 200–01). By the time Ex Machina, DMZ and The Boys were published, the process of rebuilding at Ground Zero had already begun. Although the process was supposed to be transparent, and public input considered, little came of invitations for citizen participation. By April 2003, architect Michael Sorkin had already declared the process closed and the conversation over (Sorkin 2013b: 136; cf. Nobel 2005: 117; Greenspan 2013). When Barack Obama and John McCain visited Ground Zero on the 2008 campaign trail, the wars that came from 9/11 were part of public debate, but the event was receding from attention and ‘Ground Zero remained a hole in the ground’ (Greenspan 2013: 158–59). Architectural critic Philip Nobel wrote in 2011 that with the opening of an official memorial the attacks will be contemplated subject to prejudices connected to the political and real-estate resistance that turned September 11 into ‘9/11’ (2011). Now that there is a built memorial, meaningful thought about September 11 will

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1. Ex Machina and be more difficult; the events have been made concrete, localized, fixed (cf. The Boys have no pagination. Because Frost 2014: 215). of this, only issue By contrast, the chosen comics asked questions, about what the Twin numbers will be Towers had represented before the attacks and what rebuilding could and referenced here. would mean for the United States; about whether the United States was as innocent as it had been made to seem; about the nationalism that had blos- somed after 9/11; and about what Ground Zero meant (cf. Frost 2014: 203). For their duration, they resisted closure (Frost 2014: 205–06), and in contrast to the comics discussed above, ‘ruminate[d] rather than rush[ed] to repair’ (Frost 2014: 200), if only for a while.

EX MACHINA: GROUND ZERO AND THE PRICE OF PLAYING POLITICS Writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Tony Harris’ Ex Machina, is half post- modern meta-comic about the superhero genre, half political procedural. It follows Mitchell Hundred, a civil engineer working for the City of New York who, after encountering an alien artefact, gains a superhuman abil- ity to speak to and command machines. Prodded by a long-standing superhero fandom and by Kremlin, a friend obsessed with superheroism, Hundred begins ineptly patrolling the streets of NYC as a superhero, calling himself ‘The Great Machine’. After numerous failures, Hundred decides to retire and run for mayor, thinking that he can do more good in office. The campaign goes poorly until Hundred dons his gear again on September 11, the day of the mayoral election, to prevent the second plane from strik- ing (Vaughan and Harris 2005–10: 6:#29).1 He later wins the replacement election. The plot revolves around Hundred’s mayoralty, his superhero life coming back to haunt him and a convoluted story about the origins of his powers. Ex Machina is dense with political symbolism and is permeated by a sense of idealism that is expressed, for example, when the Mayor reminds Dave Wylie, his Deputy Mayor, that he had answered a journalist’s question truthfully, ‘like we agreed public servants always should’ (5:#21), or when he affirms that ‘[w]ithout transparency at every level, a city collapses’ (3:#16). This is tempered by an equally strong sense of realism, expressed for example in the need to compromise and not give in too much to others’ demands, lest doing so jeopardize future potential goods (5:#24). Ultimately, however, the desire to work for the benefit of all, for the greater good rather than the party line, lies at the centre of the series. This is clearly expressed in a flashback, when Hundred tells his two helpers, Kremlin and Bradbury (later Hundred’s head of security), that he is running for office. Kremlin dismisses the choice offhand as idiotic, while Bradbury is skepti- cal: ‘The government’s supposed to be there for people when nobody else is, right? But it never works like that. Why the fuck would you want to be part of that machine when it’s broken so bad?’ In response, Hundred simply holds up a wrench and flashes a wry smile; Bradbury smiles back, and the rest is history (5:#25). Although the series is often political to a near-activist degree, Vaughan denies using the series’ characters as mouthpieces for his own beliefs (Young 2010). When Vaughan and Harris appear as themselves within the story, the writer tells Hundred that he likes to keep his beliefs private to avoid ‘color[ing] the perception of the work’ (9:#40). Moreover, several arcs are only tangentially connected with politics, focusing instead on the origin of Hundred’s powers

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and the consequences of an alien presence in NYC (vols. 2, 3, 6, 7, 10). This plot need not concern us. Rather, I want to focus on how the series addresses local and national politics and their failures during the first years of the twenty- first century, and how this is framed around rebuilding and recovery. NYC and the nation turned to architects to help heal the city’s wounds after the attacks, and many architects offered a heroic image of architecture and rebuilding. Many submitted design proposals were full of bluster and belligerence (Frost 2014; Greenspan 2013; Nobel 2005). Other architects, scholars and public intellectuals offered hopeful images and progressive plans for the site and for the city as a whole, trying ‘to speak up for the task of history, the responsibility of architecture, and the needs of the living city, the whole city’ (Sorkin and Zukin 2002: xi). Historian Mike Wallace even presented a call for a ‘New Deal’ for New York (2002). Vaughan presented a similar, if belated, programme in Ex Machina, through the character of Mitchell Hundred, a civil engineer who favours such progressive projects. Ex Machina takes place around the Bush, Giuliani and Bloomberg adminis- trations. Neither Bush nor Giuliani comes in for particular blame and Hundred characterizes both as fundamentally good men (3:#15; 4:Ex Machina Special #1; 8:#36). Bloomberg is only mentioned in passing, because in Ex Machina he was never elected. Nonetheless, all three are criticized for their words and deeds. In the fourth arc, ‘March to War’, a terrorist wanting to ‘finish what was started’ on 9/11 attacks a protest against the Iraq invasion on 15 February 2003, which in Ex Machina has been allowed to proceed towards the United Nations, rather than being denied a permit and corralled and abused at a stationary rally on First Avenue, as actually happened (Vitullo-Martin 2003). Indeed, Hundred says, in echo of critiques of the real change, that ‘I realize these are dangerous times, but that doesn’t give us magical justification to deny people their first amendment rights’ (4:#17). Similarly, a story arc that revolves around the 2004 NYC Republican National Convention indirectly criticizes the city and White House’s actions. Hundred wants the Convention to come to town, to show the world that the city ‘is back’ (8:#36–37). There are also critiques of the GOP’s choice to come to town: a troublemaker protesting the convention and President says that ‘Washington could give two shits about this town […] until they need us for some kind of friggin’ morbid photo op’ (8:#37), while Deputy Mayor Wylie, a character the reader is supposed to be more sympathetic towards, asserts that ‘9/11 doesn’t belong to the Republicans, no matter what the out-of-towners they’re busing into Madison Square Garden think’ (8:#38). At the actual Convention, protests were denied permissions to use Central Park’s Great Lawn (Wald 2004). Hundreds were arrested in the protests that followed and detained protesters were held in deplorable conditions (cf. Scahill 2004; Levine 2004). Although arguably somewhat dismissive of the violence with which the NYPD policed the protests that took place and of the protesters themselves, a Secret Serviceman in Ex Machina remarks to the police commissioner how ‘your people have even managed to keep the protesters in line. And without a single arrest, knock on wood’. The commissioner replies that ‘the Mayor was smart to cede it [the Great Lawn] to the peaceniks for their little drum circle’ (8:#38). Here, as in ‘March to War’, the age-old debate about safety vs liberty is waged on the comics page, and the series leans in favour of the latter. There are also multiple instances where concerns about terrorism and security take centre stage, as they often have in post-attack political discourse.

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In Ex Machina, when someone is killing snow plough drivers, and later, when someone attacks an anti-Iraq invasion protest, people close to Hundred are quick to blame Muslim terrorist for the acts. Hundred’s scepticism is proven right in both cases: the first killer is a bullied teenager and the second a politically motivated atheist. In another understated critique of political discourse, in which a complex geopolitical and postcolonial background to the attacks was (and remains) widely ignored, the second attacker says that the United States will lose the War on Terror if people keep thinking that the attacks were about religion (4:#20). As such, the series critiques the official conduct of the city and nation in the aftermath of the attacks. While much of the series reframes and critiques recent historical events, Ex Machina also ties into a larger suspicion of US military and patriotic triumphalism that Vaughan had by this time already introduced in earlier works like Y: The Last Man (September 2002–March 2008) and Pride of Baghdad (2006), and would later pursue in Saga (begun in March 2012). At its heart, Ex Machina cautions against looking for heroes to save us. 9/11 made heroes out of political figures in new and bigger ways: Bush, who had been unpopular before the attacks, soon enjoyed the highest approval ratings then ever recorded (Brands 2011: 352), while Giuliani became ‘America’s mayor’ (Silberstein 2002: 91–105). Caution is spelled out in Ex Machina’s first issue:

People blame me for Bush in his flight suit and Arnold getting elected governor, but truth is… Those things would have happened with or without me. Everyone was scared back then, and when folks are scared, they want to be surrounded by heroes. But real heroes are just a fiction we create. They don’t exist outside of comic books. (1:#1)

Bringing the point home, Vaughan spends 50 issues dismantling Hundred. At series’ end, it is strongly suggested that he rigged the election (9:#44), and Hundred bribes the police commissioner (10:#45); reveals he has been lying to his closest friends about his powers (10:#49); abandons Bradbury in a time of need to preserve his own image; and kills Kremlin to protect himself from scandal (#10:50). In short, Hundred becomes a less likeable and less idealistic character as the series progresses and his ambitions grow, embodying in the end the old adage that power corrupts. This development is paralleled in the series’ politics and their treatment of rebuilding. In a panel dated 14 August 2003, shortly after the proposal process was closed, Hundred leans over a futuristic design for a rebuilt WTC. In his view, which echoes that of many critics of both the lack of action at Ground Zero and of some proposed designs for its future, it is ‘absolute horseshit’ that ‘[i]t’s been two years, and all we have to show the world is a hole in the ground and a cheap model that looks like a rejected Blade Runner backdrop’ (6:#26, n.pag.). Asked if he really thought they would be breaking ground already, Hundred responds that he did and that he was expecting something ‘magnificent’. Although these quotes and much else in the scene echoes the debate about Ground Zero to a certain extent, Hundred’s imagination is limited. His own idea is to ‘[m]ake them stronger and make them bigger… but the towers should look exactly like they used to. […] Anything we build is going to be a risk, but I’d rather it be a testament to our resilience than a giant tombstone looming over Manhattan’.

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Towards the end of the series, Hundred says he will parlay his fame and clout, and the GOP’s desire to see him as UN Ambassador, into a speeding- up of reconstruction; when we last see him, he is John McCain’s vice president, finally belonging to a party. In the final issue, Hundred stands in front of the United Nations, unveiling the ‘memorial’ his compromise has bought, saying that ‘it wasn’t just New Yorkers who cowardly extremists killed on 9/11, in the gas attack, and during last year’s horrors. It was innocent men and women from more than one hundred countries, of every race, creed and political persuasion’. He adds that with the new monument, the administra- tion wants to honour not just the fallen, but everyone who chose to stay in NYC: ‘Though we can never guarantee our people complete safety, we can send a message to those who seek to harm the free and the brave. You might knock us to the ground… but you sure as hell won’t keep us there’ (10:#50). When this last line is uttered, Hundred is depicted with arms crossed, in front of a picture of the Twin Towers, with a US flag in the background and the UN insignia above him, lending national and international support to his bravado. With this, Hundred embodies a nationalist message sent to the attackers that bypasses any consideration of the larger needs of the city (cf. Wallace 2002) or of what the Twin Towers had represented before September 11, 2001 (cf. Frost 2014: 203). Further, by placing the unveiling at the United Nations, Hundred seemingly legitimizes the US’ ongoing wars in the Middle East, the second of which had been entered into with blatant disregard of the international community, in what one historian describes as ‘the most arrogant and inept diplomatic performances’ in US history (Herring 2008: 950). Any sense of triumph connected with rebuilding in Ex Machina is under- cut by the first and final panels of the last issue. Speaking with visible sadness, Hundred opens the issue by saying that ‘[h]appy endings are bullshit. There are only happy pauses. If you follow any story to its real conclusion, you always get the same thing. Regret. Pain. Loss’ (9:#50). The issue and the series end with Hundred picking up a picture of himself, Kremlin and Bradbury, smiling briefly before putting it down and telling the lights to ‘fade to black’. Thus, however one reads the unveiling of the hard-won rebuilt second tower, it is impossible to ignore that it is framed in a way that challenges the subli- mation of democracy and democratic action under adherence to a party line. As such, Hundred’s trajectory ruptures the often easy patriotism of the post- 9/11 era by challenging the notion of what a hero is in such a way that his acceptance of a place on a Republican ticket could be regarded as cause for alarm; he accomplishes his goal, but only at the cost of his friends, his idealism and his independence, and by cashing in on his disavowed and disproved hero-identity and finally buying into the political theatre that he and many of his cohorts have come out against over the course of the series. As a whole, then, Ex Machina questions some common post-9/11 assump- tions about governance, politics, nationalism and what rebuilding should mean in social terms, in ways similar to the work of progressives like Mike Wallace, sociologist Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin (above). While the series finale might have been designed to avoid a satisfying ending, once the diegetic Ground Zero is rebuilt, the series loses its edge, as if to confirm Philip Nobel and Frost’s assertions that rebuilding and official memorialization at Ground Zero would effectively end critical thinking. Ex Machina’s criticism could only last as long as the wound at Ground Zero remained, and the only way to heal it was seemingly, if uneasily, a return to the status quo ante even more blatant than the real One World Trade Center, through an

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2. Unlike Ex Machina and embrace of business-as-usual party politicking that rhetorically disarms hope The Boys, DMZ has pagination. References for a progressive turn. with an # still refer to whole issues. DMZ: GROUND ZERO AND THE STATE OF THE UNION If Ex Machina was a cautionary tale about putting nationalistic bluster and party lines before the work of democracy, DMZ was an almost dystopian look at the post-9/11 direction of the United States as well as a critique of the nation’s international conduct that placed Ground Zero at the centre of a growing national divide. Writer Brian Wood, who self-describes as a ‘lefty’, has called DMZ his way of taking a ‘blowtorch’ to the ‘ugly side of American culture’ that 9/11 and the War on Terror brought to the fore (Wood et al. 2016: 248). The series is a political action-adventure series by Wood and artist Riccardo Burchielli. It starts five years into a second US civil war, fought between the United States and the secessionist Free States. It follows Matty Roth, a news photo intern accidentally stuck in the demilitarized zone of Manhattan when a helicopter he is in is shot down. Days after 9/11, journalist Denis Johnson wrote that, after years of expe- riencing war abroad, he had now ‘seen two days of war in the biggest city in America’. Imagine those days stretching into years, he continued, ‘years in which explosions bring down all the great buildings, until the last one goes, or until bothering to bring the last one down is just a waste of ammunition’ (Anon. 2001). Johnson was writing in the hope that readers would empathize with the victims of war and of US interventions abroad. In DMZ, Wood and Burchielli extend a similar imagination to US society. The series’ first page begins with a map of NYC on which Ground Zero is specifically singled out (2006: 1:7).2 Next, the reader is introduction to Matty in four panels. The first panel shows his full body, seated in a hallway. The second panel zooms in on safety instructions for missile or mortar attack or airstrikes, surrounded by scribbled graffiti. The third panel shows Matty’s face. The fourth panel focuses on one particular scribble, already seen in panel two: ‘Every day is 9/11!’ (Burchielli 2006: 1:9). Wood has credited Burchielli with this flourish, claiming that it was not initially important, ‘just a little bit of wall-scrawl that helped place the events of DMZ in the context of our own world’ (Giampaoli n.d.a). But it nonetheless comes to express a main theme of the series. The ‘slogan’, along with recurrent visual evocations of Ground Zero, helps keep 9/11 ‘alive’, and with that, comments on how the disaster was made permanent and ‘normal’, through increasing securitization and curtailment of civil liberties (Rozario 2007: 175–218; cf. Sorkin 2013a: e.g. 42–45, 110–12). The first story arc contains a double splash-page depicting a rubble- strewn and smouldering area of NYC’s Lower East Side, which bears a strik- ing resemblance to Ground Zero (in 1:34–35). Additional images evocative of either Ground Zero or of the smoke that emanated from it appear throughout DMZ, often in relation to new attacks on the city (e.g. 3:73; 4:54, 90; 5:22, 62, 123; 7:96; 8:23; 9:97; 10:80, 91, 121). Some of these images show NYC landmarks, such as the Empire State Building (2:120; 10:124), while others are drawn as satellite pictures, where a trail of smoke can be seen moving south- ward, echoing NASA’s famous aerial shot from September 11 (4:118). Returning to Johnson’s comment about imagining all ‘the great buildings’ coming down, Wood, Burchielli and DMZ’s other artists do the same: the Brooklyn Bridge is bombed (2:131), the Woolworth Building blown up

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(11:77), and the Statue of Liberty attacked (11:108), all by US forces. Towards the end of the series, the outskirts of the city are scorched by a nuclear deto- nation (8:190; 11:141) and the city has suffered massive missile attacks (e.g. 10:103, 112). At this point, NYC is a smouldering husk of its former self (10:124; 11:55). Ground Zero ‘spills over’ into the rest of NYC, the void and ruins expanding to encompass the entire city. NYC, in turn, as the repeated target of US bombs, missiles and, explicitly, the Bush Doctrine (9:63), has its own borders blurred with those of the nation’s military targets in Afghanistan and Iraq. All of this can be seen as an extension of Johnson’s observation above: DMZ suggests that, although the post-9/11 US is not physically a battlefield, the War on Terror affects the nation as if it were. This is reflected both in the series’ storylines, which critique US international conduct, moral fail- ings and compromises, and in the civil war that plays out throughout. The Free States, one storyline shows, arose in response to financial hardship, US military adventurism and neglect of a clear domestic platform on the government’s behalf (11:7–50). I have elsewhere pointed out that DMZ’s Manhattan is marked by asymmetric warfare between a wounded nation state and an idea, simultaneously evoking the realities of the War on Terror and the divi- sive potential of America’s continued political polarization and ‘culture wars’. DMZ’s USA causes havoc internationally while cultural and national identity is fracturing at home (Lund 2015a: 20). As such, DMZ serves as a prediction of what could happen if the polarization of the US political landscape continues apace. DMZ addresses a wide range of contemporary political and cultural issues. One of its primary concerns is with the media. Matty stays in the DMZ after his crash and becomes an embedded reporter of sorts. Early on, he is found by US troops who drag him along on their mission, one of them telling him what to report and how (1:64). Liberty News, the network Matty works for, further skews events in their reporting (e.g. 1:73–75). Liberty’s lies grow even more in the second arc, when they cover up an important death for the military and falsely report Matty’s death (2:69–70, 77–78, 83, 115–16). DMZ thus drama- tizes the US armed forces’ growing use of and training in public relations and propaganda since the first Iraq war, and particularly the process of embed- ding reporters that was an innovation of the 2003 Iraqi invasion (Hiebert 2003: 243–44, 249–50). One of the biggest public relations gains from embed- ding is that it humanizes the troops (Hiebert 2003: 249), which DMZ also does at times (most notably in 7:#35–36), and helps win hearts and minds, not least those of the journalists themselves, while giving the impression that there is no censorship. As a counterpoint to the official narrative, both within the story-world and outside it, Matty and his friend Zee repeatedly discuss what should be reported instead – the everyday lives of people forced to live in warzones – as does the series overall (1:#2; 2:67, #12; Volume 5; 9:#52; Volume 10). DMZ also brings foreign policy and geopolitical issues to US soil. For example, it critiques corruption and brutality in public–private warzone reconstruction and security partnerships, recalling the scandals involving the private military corporation Blackwater and the construction company Halliburton (Volume 3; Singer 2007). It also takes critical aim at US influence on and vested interests in post-war elections and nation-building (vols. 7–8; Mann 2005: 235–45). In DMZ, the radical Parco Delgado wins NYC’s election, despite the US’ best efforts. Knowing how precarious his situation is, that he

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‘need[s] undeniable power, tangible assets, and loyal people’ to ‘back up [his] words with power’ (7:68), Parco buys a nuclear weapon to use as ‘a capital-D deterrent’ (7:119, 128). The task of announcing newly sovereign NYC’s nuclear status falls to Matty, who has become Parco’s press secretary and who adds that NYC will defend itself at all costs (8:80–81). Here, Wood unintentionally embellishes sociologist Michael Mann’s claim that the US’ bluster is a significant contributing factor to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, especially in the global south. WMDs provide significant deterrence at relatively low cost and seem to protect the state against American imperialism since, the reason- ing goes, the United States will think twice about attacking a nuclear nation (Mann 2005: 30). In response to NYC’s newly nuclear status, however, the United States demands that Parco surrender himself and his weapon uncon- ditionally (8:127–28). US forces begin searching for the weapon and set it off while trying to destroy it. They blame the explosion on Parco and use it as a pretext for invading NYC (8:185–90, 9:52, 11:82–83, 90–94, 126–34). Exaggerating for effect, DMZ here reconfigures the events that led up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Like other archifictions, then, DMZ interlaces local and global events in a critical way, drawing ‘connections between the Twin Towers to American intervention and wars abroad, to global capitalism, to the offshore torture of suspicious foreigners, to human rights violations’ that were largely missing from the rebuilding and memorialization process (Frost 2014: 215). Initially, Ground Zero is presented as a protected space in DMZ. After the series’ first mission by US troops in Lower Manhattan, Liberty stresses in its report that ‘American troops did not violate Ground Zero at any point in this operation’ (1:73). When Trustwell, the series’ Halliburton stand-in, pulls into NYC to rebuild, the only identifiable ‘select and symbolic’ site they go to is Ground Zero (3:7–9). But the twelfth issue, which is a sort of ‘guidebook’ to the DMZ and includes a section about Ground Zero, presents a radically different view of the site:

The area around the site is actually controlled by U.S. troops. Feels political to me, like they need to have it in hand so the President can try and whip us up about the horrible tragedy of it all and justify their policies […] But what if it was just a field of grass and wildflowers behind those walls? I guess that wouldn’t make people think about getting revenge. (2:163)

The final arc sees Matty and Zee tour Manhattan, talking to representatives of its many factions, who are all getting ready for the end of the war. This tour begins at Ground Zero. As they arrive, Zee remarks about how creepy she finds the place: ‘[t]he symbolism. It’s like a blanket pressing down on the back of my shoulders. How many wars, how many deaths… how many political bonus points have been scored using these couple square blocks as a wedge?’ (12:38, original emphasis). Contrary to common discourse, for Wood, Ground Zero is not sacred space but a place sacralized and instrumentalized for political purposes. By taking this stance, and doing it in such an explicit way (esp. 2:163), Wood blasphemes against American civil religion and adds further depth to his critique of the War on Terror, the nationalistic assump- tions that underlie it and the narrative of national innocence that had allowed

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the United States to rain death on the innocent citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq (cf. Kilde 2011; Johnson 2005). Rebuilding or memorialization are presented as almost irrelevant as anything but political theatre throughout DMZ, because the aftermath of the attacks is still playing out. A perspective like this, that promotes empathy to the point of identity with the victims of US militarism, however interesting and critical it might be, can be disarmed when serialization ceases; an ending signifies closure. In the case of DMZ, Wood presents his final word on the matter of rebuilding in the last issue, an epilogue set fifteen years after the war’s end. The epilogue follows a young girl as she walks through the city, narrated by an ‘excerpt’ from Matty’s book about his experiences. This tour begins at ‘Ground Zero Fields’, an area where the grass is only interrupted by the famous ‘footprints’ of the Twin Towers:

For all the years of development battles, name changes, and aborted building projects… to the site [Ground Zero] being razed to dirt at the start of the war, reduced to a hotly symbolic no man’s land… all sides refusing to relinquish control, ownership, entitlement, or sorrow, take your pick. This is what we’ll leave future generations: a few square acres of America where the war will never end. (12:121)

Here, Wood echoes others, such as Mike Wallace’s idea that Ground Zero should be left as ‘a grassy civic space cum pilgrimage site, nestled within a streetscape teeming with bustling life’ (2002: 11). Wallace’s suggestion was coupled with a progressive vision for a rebuilding of the city at large. In this, he had allies. Michael Sorkin, for example, while saying that he was uncertain about what should be done to heal the site, ventured that

[p]erhaps this is an opportunity to reimagine architecture, not from a position of either power or paranoia but from one of compassion. Maybe this site shouldn’t even be rebuilt. […] Perhaps this is a scar that should simply be left. Perhaps the billions should be spent improv- ing transportation and building in neglected parts of the city, neglected parts of the world. (2013a: 16–17)

Wood echoes Sorkin here when he writes about a memorial for a diegetic massacre that ‘when something so offensive, so vulgar, and so criminal goes down on American soil […] [i]t’s the kind of pain you should feel daily, like an open wound’ (12:132). Wood is a prolific comics writer whose work spans genres and who has an inclination towards political work. DMZ is wedged in his bibliography between the activist comic Channel Zero (1997, 2003, 2009; Wood and Cloonan 2012) that made Wood an industry name and the climate fiction The Massive (Wood et al. 2013). In some important ways, DMZ is a thematic continuation of Channel Zero, in that it is a dystopian take on US politics made manifest on the NYC landscape (cf. Lund 2015a: 2–8), as well as a ‘spiritual’ successor of Spiegelman’s Towers in that it figures NYC as a place significantly harmed by US post-9/11 policy. But while Wood is somewhat aligned with Wallace and Sorkin and their progressive ilk, his vision of rebuilding ultimately differs significantly from

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theirs. DMZ’s NYC of the future is a mass of gleaming glass and steel towers, symbols of capital and corporate power, which has the effect of re-establish- ing the broken system DMZ critiqued for years (Lund 2015a: 20). DMZ does not vindicate disaster capitalism in particular or US capitalism in general, but it does frame a return to the old system as either desirable or, more cynically perhaps, inevitable; without providing any insight into the debate or rebuilding process, Wood’s new NYC with its ‘Ground Zero Fields’ has absorbed 9/11 along with the War on Terror and the polarization of the nation, and buried it all under a new skyline that figures as proof positive of US capitalism’s inde- structibility (Broder 2014: 149; cf. Lentricchia and McAuliffe 2002: 359).

THE BOYS: GROUND ZERO AND WAR ECONOMIES The preceding sections have discussed how Vaughan and Wood used Ground Zero to tell stories that challenged the easy patriotism of the post-9/11 years: Vaughan by undercutting the notion of the hero and Wood by showing the United States as a deeply divided and conflicted nation whose actions are not as easy to celebrate as other post-9/11 narratives suggest. Garth Ennis’s The Boys also centres on Ground Zero, but it does something else entirely; it focuses on war for fun and profit rather than narrating doubt about American patriotism and nationalism. Boys is a superhero meta-comic by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson. Its main point is to comment on superhero genre conventions and on familiar characters. Such meta-criticism was familiar for Ennis, who had already written two superhero meta-comics: Hitman (April 1996–April 2001), in which a superpowered assassin begins targeting superhumans after gain- ing powers, and The Pro (2002), about a sex worker who gets tangled in the world of superheroes after an alien attack grants her superpowers. Hitman, set within DC Comics’ fictional universe, pokes somewhat gentle fun at the genre, while The Pro, which is unconnected to any similar concern for intel- lectual property or brand integrity, goes further. Both pale in comparison to Boys’ genre critique, however, and neither has a similarly strong vein of social or political criticism. In this regard, and in its liberal use of sex, violence and strong language, if Boys resembles anything Ennis had done before, it is Preacher (April 1995–October 2000), in which priest Jesse Custer goes searching for God to confront him for abandoning his creation. Even so, Preacher’s critique is more philosophical than political, making Boys somewhat unique in Ennis’ body of work. It is Boys’ secondary, social-political and arguably superficially archifictional narrative that is interesting here. The story follows The Boys, a group of CIA-sanctioned, superpowered humans. The team’s job is, through black- mail, violence and other means, to police and control their world’s superheroes, who are almost all oversexed, hedonistic and amoral. The protagonist is Hughie Campbell, a Scotsman whose lover is killed by a careless and uncaring superhero. Hughie is recruited by Billy Butcher, who, as leader of The Boys, has been policing superheroes for years with his compatriots, Mother’s Milk, the Frenchman and the Female. Throughout Boys, the group squares off against numerous characters that are either parodies of existing superheroes or amalgamations of several characters, including Batman, Iron Man and the Avengers (Ennis and Robertson 2007 Volume 2), the X-Men and its many related teams (Volume 4) and the Justice League of America (throughout). I will not go into detail about these

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storylines here, but rather will focus on Boys’ origins of superheroes and their role in 9/11, which directly implicates superheroes in this story-world’s WTC attacks. In the series, superheroes are created by a chemical known as Compound V, developed by a Nazi scientist who fled to the United States and continued his work with the Vought-American Corporation (1:#4). Vought’s history is a recurring theme in Boys, tied intimately and explicitly to a critique of the military-industrial complex and war economies. Vought plays the defence contracting system well and knows how to work the business side, but consist- ently fails to deliver a working product, producing throughout the twentieth century vehicles and armaments that have cost countless US military lives. Still Vought is plotting to introduce superheroes into national defence. They first attempted to introduce superheroes on the battlefields of Second World War, where a Vought representative and Prescott Bush, the company’s champion in Washington and a figure with well-known historical ties to war economies (Phillips 2004), brought a group of superheroes who messed up spectacularly and caused massive US casualties through their incompetence (Volume 9). It is no coincidence that this is when and where superpowered humans first show up in Boys: historically, the superhero genre’s first peak of popularity came during WWII and it was then that ‘the permanent armaments industry of vast proportion’ – the so-called ‘military-industrial complex’ – that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address came into being (1961). Thus, Ennis and Robertson tie superheroes and the military- industrial complex together almost at their respective births. Vought plays a long game in Boys. Because their competitors have actively tried to keep them down, they have been manoeuvring loyal people into the White House. As the series begins, the immensely thick-headed Vic the Veep, a Vought scion, is Vice President under a decidedly anti-Vought president who is friendly with other defence contractors (e.g. 1:#6; 5:#3, #5). Vought plans to assassinate the president to get their own candidate in the Oval Office (#59) and ensure their superheroes’ deployment. This desire is, in Boys’ world, directly tied to the attacks of September 11. In the comics, the sitting president listened to reports and was ready when the attacks came. He had one of the planes shot down before Vic disabled him and cleared the skies for the world’s premier superteam, The Seven, to intervene. The Seven proved incompetent and caused the plane to crash into and destroy the Brooklyn Bridge (1:#3; 3:#19, 21; 5:#4). The Seven’s involvement, as well as their bravado, cowardice and lack of training, is covered up. This is possible because superheroes in Boys have their exploits publicized and sanitized on a regular basis in comic books. Comics present Vought’s ‘official version’ of events, Butcher tells Hughie: ‘Public gets to read about thrillin’ heroics an’ crusaders for justice, an’ in the meantime the supes get to go on with the horrible shit they’re really doin’’ (2:#7). As products of an arms manufacturer, the comics and the superheroes they represent tie Vought to what political scientist James der Derian has termed the ‘military-industrial- media-entertainment network (MIME-net)’ (2005: 330). Ennis and Robertson are playing the two sides against each other here: on the one hand, post- 9/11 superhero comics have become increasingly militaristic (Lewis 2012), as if voluntarily offering their services to the nation; on the other hand, the perceived moral certainty and virtue of superheroes is a good metaphor for the perception of the War on Terror as a virtuous one that MIME-net has been trying to sell since its beginning (der Derian 2005; cf. Entman 2003),

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while the moral viciousness and corruption of Boys’ ‘real’ superheroes serves as a passable stand-in for the unsavoury ways the war was actually ‘sold’ to the public (cf. Lule 2004; Mann 2005; Herring 2008: 938–61). This is not to say that Ennis blames the United States for the WTC attacks when his script ties the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge to Vought’s dealings (3:#19). But the indictment of the military-industrial complex as a contributing factor to 9/11 is clear enough. Furthermore, although Ground Zero as we know it does not exist in Boys, the Twin Towers and the ersatz Ground Zero of the Brooklyn Bridge are used repeatedly to add moral weight. Most important, multiple confrontational but non-violent meetings between The Boys and The Seven take place either on top of the WTC or on the Bridge (e.g. 3:#20–21; 9:#49). In other cases, Ground Zero or 9/11 are discussed in earnest, historical ways, as when Hughie responds to a reference to ‘that shot they love showin’, but no New Yorker ever wants to see again’:

I remember seein’ it […] I remember thinkin’ – nothin’s ever gonna be good anymore. It wasn’t even what was comin’ next [the PATRIOT Act and the War on Terror]. It was just the thought… That there was stuff like this loose in the world. (3:#21)

This quoted issue also includes Boys’ first recognition that the attacks might have been used to motivate plans that had already been made (cf. Herring 2008: 938; Mann 2005: 1–4), which returns at a later date as well (9:#49). As such, the series questions the validity of the War on Terror. Added to this is a critique of the overreach that US forces perpetrate(d), in references to black sites, prisoner torture and other misdeeds (e.g. 2:#8; 3:#15; 9:#51). But just as with DMZ and Ex Machina, the critique offered in Boys is entirely dependent on the existence of a post-9/11 Ground Zero. Just like the WTC, the Brooklyn Bridge had its origin in commer- cial considerations. It was built to connect the cities of Brooklyn and New York, to ‘make Brooklyn important’ so that ‘Brooklyn [might] prosper’ (McCullough 1972: 25), and in order to ‘help farmers and brewers get their wares to market, perhaps even attract customers to Fulton Street shops, and, above all, allow Manhattanites to live in Brooklyn and work in New York’ (Burrows and Wallace 1999: 934). It also provided a means of escape from the expanding ‘underclass’ that ‘horrified’ the merchants and bankers who dominated NYC’s economy (Lankevich 1998: 119). But its use in Boys is not connected to this facet of its history; rather, its story is told as a tale of ingenuity and persistence (6:#36). Similarly, despite the series’ strong and persistent critique of the military-industrial complex, the attackers are given little attention. After telling Hughie about his experience on the bridge when it was attacked, Mother’s Milk’s take-away is that ‘[w]e gotta stop ‘em, Hughie. […] We gotta stop Vought ‘cause they don’t give a shit about people’ (6:#36, n.pag.). Rather than considering any connection between the attacks and US military adventurism in the Middle East-North African region, Boys turns the attackers into something passive. Hughie asks Mother’s Milk if he blames Vought for the attacks: ‘Them an’ the supes, no’ the terrorists?’ In response, Mother’s Milk tells Hughie the aforementioned tale of ingenuity and persistence, and concludes that

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[t]errorist… they like a force a’ nature, Hughie. Long as the world the way it is, they gonna be there. You got someone with a dream. An’ they build somethin’. Something’ makes people say my god, somethin’ wonderful. An’ then along comes someone with a cause, an’ they smash it to the ground. An’ whatever you put up instead, things ain’t never quite the same again. (6:#36, original emphasis)

To ensure that nobody misses what Mother’s Milk and, through him, Ennis is talking about, the last sentence is spoken over a shot of the WTC and the top of one of the Bridge’s towers, complete with wind-blown Stars and Stripes. Like Ex Machina and DMZ before it, Boys’ critique falters in its conclusion. Foregrounded by one of the bridge’s towers in mid-reconstruction, Mother’s Milk tells Hughie that, now that rebuilding has finally begun, it is

[g]ood they rebuildin’ it like it was, too. New designs I saw were bullshit [cf. Ex Machina]. An’ that idea ‘bout just leavin’ the ruins be [cf. DMZ], goddamn, like two chained-up corpses kneelin’ in the river… ‘Why I hate all that shit ‘bout which name goes first on what memorial, first responders or whoever needs a voice, we suffered more’n you did… S’posed to be an answer, you know? Answer to the muthafuckin’ terrorists. You hit us? Fuck you. We are New York City. You hit us, we gonna get right back up an’ keep goin’ [cf. Ex Machina]. (6:#35, n.pag., original emphasis)

Like so many others, then, Boys’ creators fall under the spell of bluster and architectural messaging, not commemoration or reflection. Further, it is worth noting that Boys does not address patriotism in ways similar to Ex Machina or DMZ. For all his manifest love of the United States, Ennis does not narrate doubt about American patriotism with equal depth. To be sure, Boys contains explicit criticisms of flag-waving (even though it engages in some flag-waving of its own), but it does not construct a character or plot that serves as a vehicle for such a critique in a sustained way. (Indeed, only one of The Boys is even American.) This might owe to Ennis’ own national outsider status as an Irish man working almost exclusively in the American comics industry, who perhaps could not see the critical vein emerg- ing in the United States as clearly or who did not want engage it. Whatever the reason, however, Boys opts to ‘keep goin’’ more explicitly than the two earlier series, and does not offer any call for change or much deconstruction of post-9/11 US nationalism. Rather, at its end, Boys promotes a particularly explicit return to the status quo ante, which is again surprising since it, too, has so often singled this drive out for criticism in its jabs at the superhero genre (e.g. 1:#16; 3:#19; 9:#55, #57). But that is how Boys ends: after Vought’s plans are foiled, after The Seven are killed following a failed coup-attempt, after all The Boys except Hughie are dead because of Butcher’s insanity and when the Bridge is almost rebuilt, Hughie walks across it. In the cement, right below the plaque that commemo- rates the Bridge’s construction on one of the towers, he etches the initials ‘M.M./F+F’, in honour of his fallen comrades. With that, through Hughie, Ennis inscribes heroism and sacrifice into architecture in a more literal way than Vaughan or Wood. Hughie then meets with a Vought representative in Brooklyn Bridge Park. He shows the rep that he can kill everyone on Earth

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3. Outraged policing with even a little Compound V in them, and makes some demands about what of these boundaries was registered, for Vought is to do next. But since there are plenty of superheroes still around, example, in relation to and since Vought will doubtless try to make a profit off them, ‘it’s business as the so-called ‘Ground usual. Fun an’ games an’ pretty colors’. But the first time Vought takes ‘those Zero Mosque’ (cf. Mohibullah, this issue) flyin’ fuckin’ arseholes anywhere near any country’s defence industry’, Hughie or the proposal for will be there to stop them (12:#72, original emphasis). Although it is shown a contextually and that Vought’s new product will not be as saleable as their earlier superheroes, historically sensitive ‘Freedom Center’ they will keep doing what they do. And, unspoken in this conclusion, the (Greenspan 2013: traditional military-industrial complex at large is left to its own devices, almost 131–44). completely untouched by the critical storm.

GROUND ZERO, SPATIAL FORMATION AND CLOSURE: CONCLUDING REMARKS When comics creators claim ‘real’ space, they cannot escape expressing themselves politically (cf. Lund 2015b: 51). Speech about the 9/11 attacks and Ground Zero is also always political. When Vaughan and Harris, Wood and Burchielli and Ennis and Robertson made comics rooted in Ground Zero, they did so in order to re-create their chosen space in ways deeply and inescap- ably informed by politics and ideology. They could have done nothing else. However, although they could never reproduce Ground Zero as it is – the medium of comics itself makes this impossible – they could also not escape extant discursive formations of and about the space: whatever they said about Ground Zero, they said in relation to things already said and in relation to implicit boundaries about what was sayable.3 Their comics, in short, were necessarily part of a contentious discursive and spatial formation of Ground Zero that had been ongoing almost since the moment the Twin Towers collapsed. Ex Machina, DMZ and Boys all testify to the conception of Ground Zero as a ‘memory site’, ready to be filled with meaning: each series begins with the same space and then diverges widely in style and content. Laura Frost writes that after the attacks, ‘[a]rchitects and urban planners were mostly for advancement, while many artists and writers rallied for the void and a temporal pause to try and understand the experience’ (2014: 203). There should be no doubt that the creators of the comics discussed in this article did the same, but in the final analysis the way they did so, and the lengths to which they went, differed significantly from Frost’s archifictions. ‘[A]rchifictions have suggested that literature’s […] response to 9/11 is not primarily one of healing or closure’, notes Frost. Rather, they ‘enmesh built structures in convoluted, recursive, nonlinear, or arrested arrange- ments of time as a means of resisting the forward and upward trajectory of recuperative architecture’ (Frost 2014: 210). Up to their very ends, Ex Machina, DMZ and Boys all fit this description fairly well. They all then take an abrupt turn and end by re-asserting the recuperative power of architecture. The exact reason for this is impossible to know. The shift might owe to romantic narrative conventions. It might stem from their serialization or editorial demands, where the publishers ultimately wanted to play it ‘safe’ so as to not risk upsetting their consumer base too much. It might even have come about because of fatalism or resignation on the creators’ part, which, at least in Wood’s case, there is some evidence to suggest (Giampaoli n.d.b). But for whatever reason, the three stories all end the same way: with rebuilding comes the end of critique. Thus, for all their various assessments

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of post-9/11 American culture and politics, they all reaffirm the status quo which they have seemingly pushed against for half a decade each. Thus, it would seem that US comics is still waiting for its first true archifictional work. Rather, what they offered was alternative discursive formations of Ground Zero. Like all fictional media, the comics operated at a temporal remove from other, factual and immediate, representations of daily life. ‘What they gain in return’, to quote sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, ‘is a much greater cathartic impact on the self-understanding of civil society, on the structures and feelings that define its identity as a civil place’ (2008: 75). Each series took up the debate about what should replace the fallen WTC that had been cut so miser- ably short, stressing in their own ways the importance of Ground Zero, of the (theoretical) presence in the vacant space of a new built structure and the (actual) absence of the Twin Towers or any form of replacement, in a time of silence and emptiness; after all, ground was only broken on the site in 2006 and the first structure was only opened to tenants in 2014 and to the public in 2015. However belatedly, the creators claimed their right to the city and to democratic input in the public formation and expression of opinion (cf. Alexander 2008: 71–75) about Ground Zero’s future. In doing so, the comics all imag- ined something other than what was being planned at the time and, although they ultimately failed to move beyond what had already been suggested or to challenge dominant paradigms, they simultaneously questioned the official narrative and celebrated architecture’s healing power on their own terms. In this way, when Mitchell Hundred fades his world to black, when Matty Roth offers the city to one and all and when Hughie Campbell and his new love dance in sight of the Brooklyn Bridge, they offer closure not only to their individual stories but, for good and ill, to the controversy over Ground Zero with the hope that the journey there not be forgotten.

REFERENCES Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2008), The Civil Sphere, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Anon. (2001), ‘Tuesday, and after’, The New Yorker, 24 September, http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/24/tuesday-and-after-talk-of- the-town. Accessed 14 October 2015. —— (2002a), 9-11 – The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember, New York: DC Comics. —— (2002b), 9/11: Artists Respond, Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics. —— (2002c), A Moment of Silence: Saluting the Heroes of September 11th, New York: Marvel Comics. —— (2002d), Heroes: The World’s Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes 9-11-2001, New York: Marvel Comics. Bainbridge, Jason (2010), ‘“I Am New York”: Spider-Man, New York City and the Marvel Universe’, in Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling (eds), Comics and the City, New York: Continuum, pp. 163–79. Brands, H. W. (2011), American Dreams: The United States Since 1945, New York: Penguin Books. Broder, Lesley (2014), ‘9/11 Theater: The story of New York or the nation?’, in Katherine Miller (ed.), Transatlantic Literature and Culture after 9/11: The Wrong Side of Paradise, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 141–58.

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Burrows, Edwin G. and Wallace, Mike (1999), Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Costello, Matthew J. (2009), Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America, New York: Continuum. der Derian, James (2005), ‘9/11: Before, after, and in between’, in J. David Slocum (ed.), Terrorism, Media, Liberation, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 321–35. Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1961), ‘Farewell address’, Miller Center of Public Affairs, http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3361. Accessed 27 December 2012. Ennis, Garth and Robertson, Darick (2007–12), The Boys, vols 1–12, Mt. Laurel: Dynamite Entertainment. Entman, Robert E. (2003), ‘Cascading activation: Contesting the White House’s frame after 9/11’, Political Communication, 20:4, pp. 415–32. Frost, Laura (2014), ‘Archifictions: Constructing September 11’, in Katherine Miller (ed.), Transatlantic Literature and Culture after 9/11: The Wrong Side of Paradise, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 198–220. Giampaoli, Justin (n.d.a), ‘Volume 01: “On the Ground” Interview’, Live from The DMZ – by Justin Giampaoli, http://dmzthecomic.com/post/4709128434/ volume-01-on-the-ground-interview. Accessed 18 March 2015. —— (n.d.b), ‘Volume 12: “The five nations of New York” Interview’, Live from The DMZ – by Justin Giampaoli, http://dmzthecomic.com/ post/25930779836/volume-12-the-five-nations-of-new-york. Accessed 25 March 2015. Greenspan, Elizabeth (2013), Battle for Ground Zero: Inside the Political Struggle to Rebuild the World Trade Center, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herring, George C. (2008), From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hiebert, Ray Eldon (2003), ‘Public relations and propaganda in framing the Iraq war: A preliminary review’, Public Relations Review, 29:3, pp. 243–55. Jacobson, Sid and Colón, Ernie (2006), The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, New York: Hill and Wang. Johnson, Paul Christopher (2005), ‘Savage civil religion’, Numen, 52:3, pp. 289–324. Kilde, Jeanne Halgren (2011), ‘The Park 51/Ground Zero controversy and sacred sites as contested space’, Religions, 2:4, pp. 297–311. Lankevich, George J. (1998), American Metropolis: A History of New York City, New York: New York University Press. Lentricchia, Frank and McAuliffe, Jody (2002), ‘Groundzeroland’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101:2, pp. 349–59. Levine, Simon (2004), ‘Guantanamo On the Hudson: Detained RNC protesters describe prison conditions’, Democracy Now!, http://www.demo- cracynow.org/2004/9/2/guantanamo_on_the_hudson_detained_rnc. Accessed 11 August 2016. Lewis, A. David (2012), ‘The militarism of American superheroes after 9/11’, in Matthew J. Pustz (ed.), Comic Books and American Cultural History, New York: Continuum, pp. 223–36. Linsner, Michael (2002), I Love New York, Kenilworth: self-published. Lule, Jack (2004), ‘War and its metaphors: News language and the prelude to war in Iraq, 2003’, Journalism Studies, 5:2, pp. 179–90. Lund, Martin (2015a), ‘“NY 101”: New York City according to Brian Wood’, International Journal of Comic Art, 17:2, pp. 1–33.

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SUGGESTED CITATION Lund, M. (2017), ‘“Every day is 9/11!”: Re-constructing Ground Zero in three US comics’, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 4:1&2, pp. 241–61, doi: 10.1386/jucs.4.1-2.241_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Martin Lund is a Swedish Research Council International Postdoc (dnr. 437-2014-192) at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, and a Visiting Research Scholar at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His current research focuses on representations of New York City in US comic books and graphic novels. His work has appeared in comics studies, American studies and urban studies journals. Upcoming publications include the monograph Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish–Comics Connection (Palgrave, 2016) and the collection, co-edited with A. David Lewis, Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation (2017, ILEX Foundation/Harvard University Press).

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Contact: School of Cultural Sciences, Linnéuniversitetet, Box 452, 351 06 Växjö, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]

Martin Lund has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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Horror Studies

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