I was impressed when Marvel rushed a black cover Spider-man issue out immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001 disaster. I know a lot of people bought a copy then, and it doesn't fit in any continuity.
The individual artwork pages by artists trying to capture the pain and shock of the day were stunning.
But almost without fanfare, those same and simliar pages have been appended to many books that came out this last week. Spectacular full page images of Marvel Heroes and the World Trade Center
caught me a little off guard.
But it worked.
A nice tribute on the tenth anniversary.
If you weren't around then, this is a nice way to remember the event.
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The Marvel book was nice and I remember Peter David's But I Digress column that ran shortly afterwards about how various heroes would have dealt with it, like Superman stopping the plane before it crashed into the first tower or Wolverine being one of the passengers just as the hijackers attempted to take control.
But with the media blitz that's been going on since the first of the month, am I wrong to have had my fill of 9-11?
I think, out of all the things I've seen and read in the last few days, the September 11th installment of The New Adventures of Queen Victoria by Pab Sungenis sums up my feelings best.
You can read it here: http://www.gocomics.com/thenewadventuresofqueenvictoria and judge for yourself although you may have to backtrack a bit to get the one in question. Just use the calendar feature in the upper right hand corner of whatever installment appears.
Nah. The Washington Post TV critic, Hank Steuver, did a piece about a week ago in which he pointed out that he had watched a month's worth of 9/11 TV specials, documentaries, and news shows.
I heard a New Yorker writer interviewed on NPR a day or two ago, pointing out the uncomfortable truth that 9/11 really didn't change America much. The nation's story continues to be one of decline, he said. The political polarization that started in the '90s has continued and gotten worse. The redistribution of wealth to the already-wealthy, which started in the '80s, has continued and gotten worse.
9/11 did not affect the nation the way Pearl Harbor did. Unless you were a victim of the attacks or served in the armed forces (or had a relative or close friend who was a victim or a soldier), life continued as usual.
Last night, I watched 9/11: Ten Years Later, a documentary hosted by Robert deNiro, filmed by Jules Naudet and Gideon Naudet, and narrated by James Hanlon, a New York City firefighter. It's aired three times before -- six months after the attack, one year later, and five years later -- and I've watched it two of those times, but each later version has some updates from the previous one.
The original concept of this movie was to follow a rookie firefighter on his first year on the job; said rookie firefighter was assigned to a station house seven blocks from the World Trade Center. And for the first two months and a half months, nothing happened. The brothers got lots of footage of station house camaraderie, but no action; at one point, Gideon says, "We had a great cooking show." But, as they say, be careful what you wish for ...
It so happened that the Naudet brothers really, truly, videotaped history in the making: On a call to check out a gas leak, Jules got footage of the first plane hitting the first tower. Think back -- most of the footage you've seen was of that gaping hole in the first tower with flames and smoke and dust billowing from it. All of us have seen footage of the second plane hitting after that hole was there, but hardly any footage has been shown of how the first hole got there.
Anyway, Jules stayed with the crew as they went to the World Trade Center and set up a command post in the lobby while other firefighters arrived; Gideon, at the firehouse, tried to follow their rookie but lost him in the crowd, so he just went to the site. So, between the two of them -- one outside the building trying to get in, and one inside the building trying to get out -- they got some amazing footage. Gideon got a shot of the second plane hitting the south tower, and Jules gets the reactions of the firefighters inside the north tower when it happens. And nobody knew, at that point, that both buildings were going to collapse within the hour. The footage of the desperate escape from the buildings, from within and without, is harrowing.
This movie is, of course, overwhelmingly New York centric, and sympathetic to firefighters. But what really blows me away about it was this: The first firefighters are met by the Port Authority building manager, who tells them that the damage is up on the 78th floor. Of course, the elevators are out, but, for various reasons, you wouldn't want to take the elevators in that circumstance anyway. The narrator tells us that a firefighter, wearing 65 pounds of gear and carrying hoses, takes about a minute and a half to climb a flight of stairs ...
... which means these guys were looking at spending an hour and a half climbing the stairs before they could even get started.
Wow.
An that minutee and a half doesn't take into account stops every ten minutes or ten floors or so for a rest period.
This was also covered in the Mircale of Stairwell B, when Capt. Jonas talks about how Ladder 6 only got half way up when they felt the south tower drop
. So he decided to evacuate down once again... but they paused to pick up an injuried woman and they all got down to floors 2--4 when their North tower came down. Any faster, and they would have been too low, and under the rain of debris. Any slower, and they wouldn't have been sheilded at all.
So, by stopping to help a stranger, she in effect saved them. But the pacing of the climb also helped to determine where they were at the critical moment.
wow
A number of cartoonists did 9/11 themed Sunday strips. For the list, look here. To see them all one page, look here.
...Thank you , Clark .
My excuse for singling out ARCHIE was , at least in part , that it was a new strip , a ( probable ) last new daily-or-Sunday strip of the Riverdale redhead , after it had been in repeats for some months , with 1990 dailies with some retouching to make phones and TVs more petite , or so I am told .
Looking at these -- and there were many I hadn't seen before -- I find the best ones are the most subtle, like Tank McNamara and Sally Forth. Watch Your Head is a little too subtle, though. I like Candorville's contrarian take on all this jingoism. And I appreciate Shoe, Zits and Pros and Cons for daring to attempt to be funny.
I like Big Nate and Doonesbury for striking exactly the right balance between being respectful but also telling us something about the characters that's true to them.
Far too many of them are written as though 9/11 happened only in New York. Barney & Clyde, written by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post, doesn't make that mistake.
And maybe my eyes are deceiving me, but I'm certain the Funky Winkerbean entry was ghost drawn by John Byrne.
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