Towering figure: UK's Sunday Herald talks with Art Spiegelman about his new book, In The Shadow Of No Towers. The best part of the article, though, is novelist Philip Pullman's take on Spiegelman and his work:

“Maus is a work that should be firmly in any canon of great narratives. It is at once familiar and deeply, permanently strange. If this world were run properly, there would be international awards for ‘Artistic Treasure Of The Human Race’ or ‘International Living Supreme Master,’ and among the first winners would be Art S.

“Also, he is a smoker of Olympic class. I was talking to him on the stage of the ICA in London, and his cigarettes actually set off the fire alarm.”

The Aug. 30 edition of Newsweek also previews In The Shadow of No Towers:

"In the Shadow is the strangest book you'll pick up this year. It's a 32-page board book, like the ones babies teethe on — only bigger. The idea, Spiegelman says, was to get pages almost as big as the ones that held the Sunday funnies. Then he filled them with scenes from his own life cross-pollinated with comics characters — Happy Hooligan and Little Nemo, right alongside Osama bin Laden and George Bush. It's a crazy quilt of cartoons, real-life headlines, humor and horror. There go the Katzenjammer Kids wearing hats in the shape of burning towers. Here comes Spiegelman as Ignatz toting a brick (in the shape of a tower) to toss at Krazy Kat. You don't have to be a comics aficionado to see that Spiegelman has done a superb job of capturing the tragic absurdity of life in New York City on 9/11 and for months thereafter."