The treatment of 9/11 in superhero books was particularly important then because the industry was in a self-aware/ self-referential phase that often pondered two interrelated questions: 1) What if superheroes were real? 2) In the very real instances of people acting heroically doing their jobs around 9/11 what exactly is meant by 'hero' and 'superhero'? Thus, Heroes collected 64 full-page illustrations paying tribute to firefighters, law enforcement, emergency medical personnel, and other first responders. Marvel Comics offered Heroes (December 2001) and A Moment of Silence (February 2002) as special releases and The Amazing Spider-Man #36 (November 2001) as part of an ongoing series. Since New York City is a hub for comic book companies, the attacks on the World Trade Center resonated within the industry, prompting a number of benefit comic books for 9/11-related charities. And the webcomic Shooting War launched in May 2006 by writer Anthony Lappe and illustrator Dan Goldman, followed hipster video blogger Jimmy Burns after he films a terrorist attack in Brooklyn. 9, 2001, contrasted recycled images of office employees expressiing cynicism about daily life continuing in the aftermath of 9/11 with similarly appropriated shots reflecting their workaday lives. Meanwhile, David Rees' Get Your War On, debuting on Oct. was recalled for military duty and lost a leg in Iraq, and the everyman titular character attended a memorial service for a former employee.

In Garry Trudeau's daily satirical epic Dooneshury around for decades, the hippie Zonker delivered fruitcakes to rescue workers at Ground Zero, the reservist B. Tom Tomorrow's long-running weekly political cartoon This Modern World lampooned the federal government post-9/11 in a story line subsequently collected in March 2006 as Hell in a Handbaskef. Putting 9/11 to ink served as a creative conduit to document and process what had happened.Ĭartoon strips and comic books began exploring the terrorist attacks almost immediately through newspapers and the Internet because of the quick dissemination. Because 9/11 could barely seem to be part of anything but a fantastic realm, those working in cartoon strips, comic books and other sequential art took to the subject as a way to make sense of something that strained comprehension.

After 9/11 by Sid Jacobson