JUCS 4 (1+2) pp. 241–261 Intellect Limited 2017 Journal of Urban Cultural Studies Volume 4 Numbers 1 & 2 © 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jucs.4.1-2.241_1 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 engage- ment 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. 241 15_JUCS 4.1&2_Lund_241-261.indd 241 09/08/17 10:33 AM Martin Lund 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 relation- ship 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 mean- ing 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 antholo- gies that ranged from the aggressive and the racist to the pacifistic and the 242 Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 15_JUCS 4.1&2_Lund_241-261.indd 242 09/08/17 10:33 AM ‘Every day is 9/11!’ 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 signi- fies 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 archi- tecture – and architects – to think through the spatial and temporal bounda- ries 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 www.intellectbooks.com 243 15_JUCS 4.1&2_Lund_241-261.indd 243 09/08/17 10:33 AM Martin Lund 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.